Windchimes and Prayers

If you’re not paying for the product, then you’re the product being sold. Self-optimization ensures a martyr’s death: we’re groomed to be actualized as the ideal entrepreneurial body, or actualized as perfect warm organic matter for the drone’s crosshairs. Concerning the infantilization of the American consumer, the ends justify the means. One must first take a morally fluid perspective on tradition: emblems that resonate dubiously with the populus—Halloweens that never happened, imaginary tailgate parties, lawn ornaments that never saw fresh sod. Conjure this torrent of false memories into a continent-enveloping gyre that bleeds disposables off shores and into unseen depths of psychic oceans. This heap of injection-molded signs is briefly whipped up by fleeting consumer desire, only to sink back down into the wastes and spandrels of cities and towns.

Why is a doll’s gaze so frightening?

Every vector of a human life follows the contours of achievement—turning something into something more. A marriage cannot merely embody the lifelong encounter with the mysterious other but must generate a steady stream of added-value: sex, excitement and fun. Child-rearing must continue and exponentialize the caregiver’s unrealized goals. Leisure time must produce its own dividends, and be executed in form-fitting attire to maximize mobility. A career must somehow become an exponent of the identity, with the corollary being that the identity must be the exponent of a career. Self-actualization, the cruel promise and portent developed during these artists’ mutual lifetimes—the exuberant 1980s is reaching its logical terminus. Stripped to bare commodified life, the distance between the consumer object and consumer subject has narrowed dangerously: formerly hallowed ground like the home (now a workplace) and religion (now another tool for personal achievement) have become matrices for capital creation. The movies have covered the ground of toys-to-life but are perhaps avoiding the far more chilling genre of life-to-toys. The irony is that these briefly-lovable objects and signs (like those on view in this show) are far more permanent than we are. Their expectations are surprisingly similar to those of their custodians: make the right amount of money, and stick around for as long as you can. Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the commodification of the achievement-subjects is not only their disposability, but their biodegradability.

Todd von Ammon