Useless
It is unclear if Norma Jean is a woman or a man, or if he/she really exists, and is not just the nom de plume of an artists’ collective. The booklet accompanying the exhibit gave no biographical information. However, it did give a great deal of background for Norma Jean’s work. Much of Norma Jean’s art centers around the concept of Potlatch.
Potlatch, as NJ conceives it, is the tradition of competing for honor through destroying one’s most valuable possession. Norma Jean’s potlatch series highlights the self-destructive aspects of this ritual, with a mechanical gadget in the stead of a competing human champion. NJ created a freezer so overfilled with water that the built up ice eventually burst the hinges and locks. NJ also sealed the ends of vacuum cleaners with duct tape and turned them on full power until they overheated. Two UV lamps were intertwined, focused on each other and turned on, resulting in twin molten pools.
The subtext of Norma Jean’s series of mechanical breakdowns is that as technologies compete to make each other obsolete, there is inevitable breakdown and chaos. Each appliance attempts to make life more convenient and simple than the next. The resulting mess makes things ultimately more difficult. In a way, Norma Jean’s work is about the inevitability of entropy.
Her most recent addition to this series, Useless, re-introduces the human element.
“Useless”, on display at the open studio tour at PS.1, incorporated all these elements into a beautifully seamless and subtle interactive display. “Useless” was a small room with speakers blaring loud techno music, a refrigerator stocked with free beer, and a wall split into red and white sections. On the red side “use” was written in white, and on the white side, “less” in red.
The music pulled people in from all over the building, and many started drinking the free beer. Teenagers quickly found the beer, and is their wont, sat in a corner and drank as much as their little adolescent stomachs could hold. As I’ve said previously, contemporary art is not childproof.
The room was filled with cigarette smoke, the smell of cheap beer, and the pounding beat of the music. It was a slowly disintegrating Dionysian mess. It was a beautiful example of Norma Jean’s philosophy interpreted through a human medium. Her earlier work is of machines so efficient that, when their power is turned on themselves, they self destruct. This piece is about how “the party” when scrutinized under the artistic lens, is a ritual in self-destruction for people. Men and women go to parties to socialize and be with people, but the very things meant to make that togetherness easier, music and alcohol, end up separating people, insulating them, and make them less able to interact. Someone scrawled a note and pinned it to a speaker, “Drink more beer, become useless.” “Useless” was a simple but brilliant commentary on the self-destructive potential of common social gatherings.
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