Art in Review; Mike Bouchet

Art in Review; Mike Bouchet
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LinkedinDiggFacebookMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalinkBy HOLLAND COTTER
Published: May 20, 2005
Photo: Mike Bouchet's installation of soil and compost at Maccarone gallery. (Photo by Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times)


'The New York Dirty Room, 2005'
Maccarone Inc.
45 Canal Street, Lower East Side
Through August


The story of American art in the 1960's and 70's was one of unfinished business, of movements or trends -- Photo-Realism, Pattern and Decoration, Earth Art -- that got rolling only to be sidelined by the shifting enthusiasms of a restless market. This is one reason we now exist in a post-and-neo art world of revivals and comebacks.

Figurative painting has recently been resuscitated in a thousand ingenious ways, but with mostly wan results. Pattern and Decoration seems to be a lost movement, its influence on multiculturalism little examined, its practitioners little seen. Earth Art is still around. A Robert Smithson show is on its way to the Whitney. Walter De Maria's ''New York Earth Room,'' which opened in SoHo in 1977, remains there in an installation overseen by the Dia Art Foundation. And it has just been updated -- freshened and funkified -- as ''The New York Dirty Room'' by the New York artist Mike Bouchet.

In a reduced, though not small, version of Mr. De Maria's original, Mr. Bouchet has filled the street-level space of the three-story Maccarone gallery with a wall-to-wall, three-foot-deep blend of 50,000 pounds of topsoil and 25,000 pounds of compost. The soil is from Home Depot, and ''clean'' the way store-bought stuff is. The compost, however, was produced by the prison on Rikers Island, and so, at least by implication, comes with an unpure human component that Earth Art didn't have, or at least didn't call attention to. All the associations attached to prisons -- drugs and disease, not to mention crime and race -- are symbolically stirred into the rank-smelling ocean of dirt that seems to be pushing the gallery into the street.

It was possible in the 1970's to see Mr. De Maria's installation as the critical yin to the conservative yang of market-approved New York painting at the time: Frank Stella's ''Exotic Birds,'' for example, or Jennifer Bartlett's wrap-around ''Rhapsody. In a similar way, the ''Dirty Room'' offers a Conceptualist alternative to the painterly confections of Chelsea. And as if to underscore the contrast, Mr. Bouchet offers his own line of retail product as part of the show.

The gallery's second floor is set up as a kind of sculpture department with 100 clay portrait heads of Tom Cruise in ''Top Gun'' scattered around the floor. They are based on an original by Mr. Bouchet, who out-sourced the reproduction job to Mexico, where the examples in the gallery were cast and hand-painted. And the third floor has paintings, stacks of them. All are graphically crisp Pop-ish depictions of fictional soft drink labels, painted with diet cola, Mr. Bouchet's personal recipe.

Realist painting has, of course, a great tradition.. To some people, Earth Art, and the American aesthetic of heroism to which it belongs, is sublime. But some people might say that those traditions and trends have long been problematic, and that they are now just on permanent spin cycle.

Mr. Bouchet may not be saying any of this, exactly. But at a time when the New York art world is distinguished chiefly by hard sell and soft art, he and some of his colleagues are at least continuing to ask questions, instill doubts, raise a usefully confusing stink. Take a whiff of ''New York Dirty Room.'' Nobody would want this in their museum, never mind in their home, and that's a healthy thing for art. HOLLAND COTTER