P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents a mid-career survey of work by New York artist John Miller from July 5 through August 30, 1998. The exhibit will feature three new paintings and an assortment of sculpture from the past nine years.
Imagery for the paintings—titled Ritual Dissociation, Allegory, and Oedipus—is taken from television game shows. Literally depicting stages, the pictures allude to the “double staging” inherent in all representational images: just as the subject matter is configured within the picture’s illusionistic space, so too is the viewing subject configured in the real space on the opposite side of the picture plane. Miller also says the pictures are about the game show as a commercial ritual that attempts to reconstruct the familial bond around the commodity form. The proposed family is, of course, a pseudo family: the contestants, the audience, and the avuncular host.
The sculptures all revolve around that which is viewed by many as Miller’s trademark: a trope of thick brown impasto, suggesting excrement. Although Bread and Pure Bred is the only sculpture that actually includes the brown impasto, each sculpture suggests, through such means as the color of Brown Paint or the inevitable rotting of Glad Hand, an eruption of excrement that threatens to destabilize the normative aesthetic experience. Through the use of representations of fecal matter in his work, Miller induces his viewers to question the cultural value of art and its role as a material commodity.