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June/July 2007 P202
Portia Munson P.P.O.W. 555 West 25th Street, Chelsea
Portia Munson made a name for herself in 1994 with her Pink Project, an astounding display of 2,000 pink things that included hairbrushes, curlers, dolls and very imaginable fluffy feminine tchotchke. Part of the “Bad Girls” exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary art, Pink Project was keyed to 1990s consumerism. Updating strategies employed by Judy Chicago et al. in “Womanhouse” (1972), Munson drew attention to the gendered routines of vanity, hygiene, and play. But there was also a humorous irony at work: don’t we all love pink? The retrograde Pink Project referred to essentialist and constructionist feminist camp of the 1970s, but as part of a younger generation, Munson could pay homage to both from a safe distance.
Her most successful strategy remains the selection and organization of consumer goods, and her recent exhibition, “Green,” featured the punning Green Piece: Lawn (2000-07), a delirious, color-coordinated garbage heap of man-made materials in a range of verdant hues. It was, by and large, a monument to suburbanites’ recreational activities and obsession with lawn care, though childhood and Christmas were also themes. The plastic greenery, culled by Munson in upstate New York, included watering cans, garden clogs, garden hoses, artificial Christmas trees, Frisbees, sleds, Astroturf, the Grinch, Oscar the Grouch, baby dinosaurs, ginger-ale bottles (with real live ants crawling inside) and much, much more.
This chaotic heap of green things, worn and age-encrusted, filled the center of the gallery’s first room, leaving a perimeter for viewers to circumambulate- perhaps like Buddhists at a stupa. This rite would be thematically consistent with the flower mandala photographs on the walls, for which Munson arranged blossoms against a black backdrop in patterns that replicate tantric Buddhist diagrams. The flowers, in saturated colors, are gorgeous, and have been photographed to look as contrived as their ritualistic organization. Though they contain some of the toxic tension between artifice and nature that animates Green Piece, the photographs express no political awareness and veer toward new-age spiritualism, compromising the comic critique at which Munson otherwise succeeds. Still-life paintings in the second gallery resumed the deadpan, bewildered scrutiny of our cluttered lives that is Munson’s strength. A blue plastic skull and a doll’s slip are among the absurd subjects of these intimate paintings. Why do we own such things? What do they say about us? Isolated from their domestic contexts, these kitschy items hover in Munson’s paintings like inexplicable archeological finds. Everyone will see a bit of their lives reflected in “Green”- some toy, bauble, or soda bottle once was yours.
-Kirsten Swenson
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