The Great American Experience (TAE) is an unbridled extension of Mideo Cruz’exhibits mounted in the earlier part of 2009 in New York and Miami, now reworked and staged at the Lunduyan Art Gallery along Kamuning Road, Quezon City. As Fredrich Engels once described the industrial and commercial crisis of Europe, it starts with the “ditch of a crisis” and so does this show. Politically patent and conceptually engaged, this art project tackles the theme of the crass commercialism and fallacy of consumerism and the shameful excessiveness of American life.
BY PHILIP PARAAN
Contributor
Bulatlat
CULTURE
“I know now what I don’t need” – Plato, in the marketplace
The Great American Experience (TAE) is an unbridled extension of Mideo Cruz’exhibits mounted in the earlier part of 2009 in New York and Miami, now reworked and staged at the Lunduyan Art Gallery along Kamuning Road, Quezon City.
As Fredrich Engels once described the industrial and commercial crisis of Europe, it starts with the “ditch of a crisis” and so does this show. Politically patent and conceptually engaged, this art project tackles the theme of the crass commercialism and fallacy of consumerism and the shameful excessiveness of American life.
It somewhat sums up the artist’s first-hand observations of how Americans live while he was on an art residency program in the United States. With this conceptual complex, these works succinctly frame the ongoing guiltless barrage of cheap thrills and sheer hucksterism which plays on desire for concrete needs.
Stacked boxes aptly marked by one of the most relentless consumer lexicons, “Sale”, mimic the ubiquity of mall sales and similar events. Cruz employs the overused marketing ploy/pitch to contrast how they paradoxically emerge (extraordinarily more than usual) at a time of imminently declining consumption among Americans caused by the economic recession and to underscore it as a crisis borne out of a natural turn from overproduction. A monitor is tucked within the stack flickering with images of obscured act of fornication.
Another punchy configuration of boxes appears to be a plethora of desire as products for sale arranged to form a pyramid and festooned with white balloons as necessary sartorial elements to dramatize the festering “bubble economy”.
For all its semiotic value “Sale” is savvy and a crafty way to dodge the economic backlash of overproduction. Again as hyped by rapacious conglomerated behemoths in capitalist societies, in staging a “sale” there seems to be a “democracy of goods” or finally a perceived accessibility of products enticing a freewheeling culture of spending out of created needs.
Another installation is an image of US President Washington formed out of boxes, appropriately scaled to a giant portraiture as it appears in a dollar bill to dramatize the magnitude of the ongoing fiscal crisis, which is immensely unstable.
A panel of maps/subway guides of New York provides the background in weaving this experience.
