reviews GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT
Good MorninG, MidniGht
Casey K aplaN, New yORK
22 JuNe – 31 July
Celebrated author and sometime curator Bruce Hainley has declared would maintain standards, invasion or no); and there is an installation by Lisa
that he wants his summer show for Casey Kaplan to bottle the mood of Lapinski which conjures the herding and slaughter of the Jews. Titled, with
Jean Rhys’s 1939 novel Good Morning, Midnight. He says he wants it to cod-academic comedy, Christmas Tea=Meeting, presented by Dialogue and
reproduce the novel’s ‘staunch mood and mode, its indifference and bleak Humanism, formerly Dialectics and Humanism (2007), it’s an environment
humor in an uncertain moment’. That’s obviously an endeavour with room like a fenced corral, the Star of David and the Nazi swastika mingling in
for manoeuvre, yet one gets the impression that he also wants to evoke the patternwork of the fence’s slats, a stylised silhouette showing a family
the eclectic offerings that were hanging in the Paris galleries when Rhys crowded together and a podium, decorated with geometric patterns,
published her book – and more importantly, when Hitler was readying for standing empty in front.
war – and that’s a task of a high order. The smell of Old Europe is often real, yet this being a Hainley
Rhys’s book concerns a Paris woman’s memories and their mingling endeavour, the overall impression is perhaps less of fascist Europe than of
of nightmare and reality, so in many respects it licenses this recuperation. bad-taste Nazis in Beverley Hills. George Kuchar is a prominent presence
It’s an exacting job nonetheless, but Hainley has chosen wisely. There are in the show, with not only a film (Ascension of the Demonoids, 1986 – a
tattered echoes of hard-edged abstraction: Lecia Dole-Recio presents conventional tale of idol worship, sacrifice, hallucination and office jobs),
bargain geometries constructed from collaged stuff like shiny paper and but also some shrill watercolours depicting sci-fi invasions. Is this off-
packing boxes. There are memories of Realism: the woman portrayed in colour in the context? No, it’s just a minority report, an image, perhaps, of
Brian Calvin’s Thing 2 (2007) might be a Paris mademoiselle with too much what Hainley thinks America is currently warring to preserve. Hainley has
decoration in her hat. Vincent Fecteau’s table sculpture, Untitled (2006), is recognised the need to figure the war(s) – even in something as frivolous as
a seamless pastiche of welded-metal Cubism (albeit in papier mâché). And a summer show – and yet he’s side-stepped moral grandstanding. Instead
there are tributes to Balthus: two photographs by Jeff Burton revive the we have something fresh and impertinent, and after seeing it one can be
old man’s erotic interiors with butch porn stars. Other works, meanwhile, sure that if Hainley had been in Paris in 1939, he would have skipped the
prefigure the coming horror: there is Roger Hiorns’s Joy (2003), a sheet of fleeing trains, put on a dandy jacket, poured a Martini and said, “Que sera,
grey metal sprayed with Jean Patou’s Joy perfume (some Parisian ladies sera.” Morgan Falconer
Good Morning, Midnight, 2007 (installation view). photo: adam Reich. Courtesy Casey Kaplan, New york
Artreview 130
NEW Sept_REVIEWS.indd 16 7/8/07 15:54:00
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