Art Review | 'Black Acid Co-op'
Down a Rabbit Hole to Meth and Its Dysfunction
Greg Kessler
A replica of a dilapidated home lab used to manufacture meth in the show "Black Acid Co-op." More Photos >

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Published: July 17, 2009
Deitch Projects, the SoHo art gallery that often behaves like an alternative space, is at it again. That is, it has suspended normal market-driven operations to stage a messy, experimental show that few other New York institutions have the space, money or mindset to try.

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More Arts NewsPast efforts have included a skateboard bowl, “Free Basin,” designed by the artists’ collective Simparch, that talented boarders turned into a perpetual-motion performance space; environments by the street artists Barry McGee, Claire Rojas and Swoon; and “Nest,” a graffiti-and-shredded-telephone-book installation by Dan Colen and Dash Snow, a New York artist who died this week.

Deitch’s latest foray into the noncommercial is “Black Acid Co-op,” an immense, labor-intensive, maniacally contrived walk-through environment. A warren of some dozen rooms, interiors and passageways, it includes a burned-out home methamphetamine lab, a red-carpeted gallery of pseudo-artworks and a hippie haven.

All told, visitors snake their way through evocations of some of the darker sides of American life, especially its always evolving drug culture. In its own low-down, downtown, art-now way, this show approaches the impact of the museum-quality Piero Manzoni retrospective and the Picasso extravaganza, both orchestrated by the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea this spring. If the art is not ultimately as memorable, its sampling of dysfunction is.

“Black Acid Co-op” is part of the tradition of transformative environmental artworks that fill or otherwise obliterate the spaces containing them. Among its points of origin are “Plein” (“Full Up”),” from 1960, in which the French artist Arman filled the Galerie Iris Clert in Paris with carefully sifted (nonorganic) trash; the eerie environments redolent of communal Moscow apartments with which the Russian artist Ilya Kabakov first made his name in the West in the 1980s; Jason Rhodes’s idiosyncratic massings of objects and material goods; and Gregor Schneider’s labyrinthine reconstruction of the interior of his parents’ home, near Cologne, Germany, inside the German Pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennale.

“Black Acid Co-op” is the work of the New York artists Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe. It is the third incarnation of “Hello Meth Lab in the Sun,” which opened last spring at Ballroom Marfa, a certified alternative space in Marfa, Tex. The Marfa version, which I happened to see, was made by Mr. Freeman, Mr. Lowe and Alexandre Singh, another New York artist.

The piece traveled to Miami Basel in December, where it was seen by many people, including Jeffrey Deitch, the owner of Deitch Projects, who decided to bring it north. Along the way the title changed, some rooms were lost and others added, and Mr. Singh moved on to other projects. He is acknowledged in the show’s news release, which seems more than appropriate, since several of the best rooms in the piece are largely as they were in Marfa.

Like Alice’s rabbit hole, “Black Acid Co-op” will take you as deep as you want to go, especially once you recognize the careful attention to detail throughout this mammoth effort. Nothing is accidental. Its disparate spaces sustain ever-closer readings and parsings, like a series of archaeological sites in perpetual excavation, and there are frequent cross-references.

The room-by-room shifts in reality have been aptly compared to jump-cut scenes in a film, with each door or — more likely — each hole in the wall introducing a different form of delusional retreat from the larger world. The varieties of societal detachment wending through the piece are echoed in recurring meditations on voyeurism, display and the remove of art and the museum.

The tour begins with an eye-blanching vision: a small, glaring white-on-white room where disheveled wigs are displayed on white mannequin heads carelessly decorated with glitter and colored pebbles. It’s a disco-trophy-room-museum. Various other rooms and passageways are punctuated with wall vitrines. Some are terrariums of mostly dead plants; one has a sequence of white forms resembling icebergs or skyscrapers (one of Mr. Freeman’s favorite themes).

Despite the change of title, the heart of the piece here, as in Marfa, is the meth kitchen, crawling with plastic tubes, jammed with glass jugs and beakers and littered with full and empty boxes of the over-the-counter cold medicines that are chief among the ingredients of the drug’s simple but dangerous recipe. In a grim before and after, this kitchen is reached through a ghost of itself: the charred remains of another lab in conjoined trailers destroyed by a meth-making explosion. (My favorite part is the melted toilet.)

This section of the piece amounts to a museum diorama about the meth scourge. As such, it resonates with the recent documentary “Food, Inc.” and the just published “Methland” by Nick Reding, one of the saddest books about this country’s recent travails. The movie and book connect the dots among America’s agribusinesses, drug companies and global trade and problems like unhealthy diets, the destruction of small farms and farming communities, and the meth epidemic that started in Southern California and spread from there, especially devastating the Midwest.

On the far side of the meth kitchen is a library that might be the sanctuary of the Unabomber. The covers have been torn off its hundreds of books, and new titles have been scrawled on their spines, each seemingly a volume of one vast, downwardly spiraling treatise: “Society Never Advances” (Volume 544), “Here Is Punishment” (Volume 64), “Life Is Absent” (Volume 494).

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More Arts NewsThe wood-hewn hippie domicile — part attic, part treehouse, part geodesic dome — conjures up a more innocent form of detachment and a more benign drug. Yet here you’ll find shelf upon shelf of large jars filled with turgid liquids and strange manmade specimens; pages torn from books and magazines; a telephone cord; chunks of pink insulation; a smiley face. They are presented as rare relics of another time. A Chinatown shop where traditional herbal remedies are sold alongside illegal drugs offers glimpses of another alternative economy.

The red-carpeted art gallery suggests the diversions of a higher-income bracket, whose jaded, upper-class denizens are seen in black-and-white staged photographs that dot the walls, often holding cactuses or crystals in front of their faces. The mood is very “Eyes Wide Shut.”

In a sense the different realities of “Black Acid Co-op” seem on the verge of collapsing in upon themselves, as the cross-references here imply. A stuffed coyote previously seen in a corner of the hippie domicile reappears in one of the staged photographs in the pseudo-gallery, curled up on a divan between two bored partygoers. The display also includes color photographs of meth paraphernalia.

The final and largest room of “Black Acid Co-Op” is nearly empty and semi-dark. There are a few strips of filthy red carpet on the dusty floor. The walls, once enameled dark blue, are peeling so actively that they suggest a thousand cuts, especially since the color beneath is red. Is the party over? Have all gone home, or have they been massacred? Or has the whimpering world ended with a Big Bang of its own devising? What we see, or can’t quite see, is the vastness of space, a world where there is no world, where life, having given up on itself, is absent.