Scott Roberts and Jose Lerma
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Lerma was born in Spain in 1971 and grew up in Puerto Rico, where he lives today. He writes that his Sock With Cum Stain refers to “Aktionist art from Vienna and plenty of 60s body-fluid art, but it is really about being 14.” It’s also obnoxiously confrontational, though I enjoyed the apparent macho joke in the checklist that identifies it as one of an “edition of 5.” (Lerma described an earlier piece, documented in a book at the gallery, as “a sock that can stand erect using my own sperm as a binder.”) If Sock With Cum Stain were characteristic of this show of six works by Lerma and five by Roberts, it might justify a rant against narcissistic art students. Fortunately, most of Lerma’s other pieces are engaging (though an outdoor installation of snow dyed yellow has melted), and two of Roberts’s three video installations are superb.
Lerma’s D Minor Chord is a good example of how the alternative-gallery antiaesthetic can prove interesting. Six keys on the keyboard against the wall have been fastened down with duct tape, so that two D-minor triads are playing continuously. You can hear the single pulsating chord only on the headphones. This piece flirts with a Cagean boundary between art and nonart: the assertive drone references trance music, while the casual look of the piece suggests that art can be found in everyday objects. Lerma’s wall drawing, Wanted to Be Ace but They Made Me Be Paul Stanley, consists of a dark gray star with an eyelike white shape in the middle, drawn using mud found in a gutter across the street; beneath it, near the floor, is a single curvy line of red lipstick. Using “nonartistic” materials, the artist nevertheless creates a dynamic composition.
The best of the three is Lucky, a stunning replica of a Lucky Charms cereal box created through video projection on a blank cardboard form. The projector sits on one pedestal and the box on another; Roberts used 3-D software to create undistorted pictures and texts on the three sides of the box facing the projector. (Like Liza Lou, who constructs consumer objects–even an entire kitchen–out of colored beads, Roberts redeems the ordinary through the luminosity of his materials.) The image on Roberts’s box also moves: a spoon repeatedly scoops cereal out of a bowl, and a leprechaun eats right out of a box. Roberts shot both sequences (playing the leprechaun himself), while the product information comes from scans of an actual box.
