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rEviEws garDar eIDe eInarsson
Gardar EidE
Einarsson:
all My FriEnds
arE dEad
Honor Fr aser, Los angeLes
1 Decem ber – 17 January
Around 1966, in response to the Black Panther Party’s call for black power, the
American Nazi Party introduced the term white power into the political lexicon.
Since then, the phrase has become the menacing slogan of white supremacist
groups like the Aryan Brotherhood, neo-Nazis, proponents of Nordicism and the
Christian Identity movement. While it’s doubtful that Gardar Eide Einarsson’s
signature palette of black and white is intended as a didactic for racial divides, his
minimally rendered images, puns and references, which surface in All My Friends
Are Dead (the inaugural show at Honor Fraser’s striking new space), toy with the
structures of racial privilege, hegemonic organisations and social indoctrination to
call out the subtler strains of ‘white power’ within Western culture.
The most transparent of these moves is the series Baton Exercises 1-9 (all
works 2007), nine large sheets of plywood propped in a line against the gallery
wall, each silk-screened with the image of a Caucasian cop wielding a nightstick
in a different manner. The repetitive lineup of figures, taken from a 1960s police
training manual, seem mechanical but nonthreatening, demonstrating a schema
for institutionalised violence in innocuous gestures. Such works reveal Einarsson’s
efficient ability to take certain authoritarian ideologies and dilute them into
palatable signs. This is quite literally achieved in White Tower, an electric sign
that, plugging into the wall it hangs on, illuminates the words ‘white tower’ in an
overdesigned typeface redolent of hipster branding. While the writing on the wall
could speak to the elitism (or ‘ivory tower’) of the gallery space or to boutique
marketing impulses, the piece, in proximity to Einarsson’s cops, could also function
like a seductive catchphrase for a nationalist seat of authority. For another series,
Untitled (Hood 1–4), the artist fashions four head coverings, with hastily cut eye
and mouth holes, from the legs of tracksuit bottoms. Preserved in thick black
frames, the objects look like the relics of a frat-boy hazing ritual or a do-it-yourself
KKK meeting.
While the subtexts of these works are not immediately apparent, as a whole,
Einarsson’s citations and source material – from the Turbonegro song from which
his show takes its title to his use of political slogans from Weimar Germany or the
Waspy biography of American cult novelist Frederick Exley – build a composite
sketch of whiteness in the popular psyche. Yet it’s questionable if the artist is being
at all critical of these belief systems or simply highlighting a collection of obscure
and oblique references within which xenophobic thought is concealed. Perhaps
my own bias begs the question; on the day I visited All My Friends Are Dead, I also
spent time at MOCA Pacific Design Center’s remarkable exhibition of political
posters by Emory Douglas, the artist who served as the Black Panther Party’s
Minister of Culture in the radical group’s heyday. While the differences between
civil-rights era agitprop and slickly fabricated art objects are too obvious to name,
contrasting these depictions of power, militarism and social control (Douglas’s
capitalist pigs vs. Einarsson’s effectual cops) was all too edifying; whereas one
displays the sophisticated and utilitarian use of images, the other runs the risk of
Baton Exercise 8, 2007, inkjet on wooden
panel, 244 x 122 cm. courtesy the artist
empty simulation. Catherine Taft and Honor Fraser, Los angeles
artrEviEw 122
FEB_REVIEWS.indd 122 7/1/08 09:19:22
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