Exhibition

Text by Fayen d’Evie

BLACKOUT 

In late 2001, posters advertising a Britney Spears ‘Live from Las Vegas’ TV Special appeared throughout New York City’s subway stations.  Dressed in a sequinned, Elvis-inspired jumpsuit unzipped to the waist, her glistening lips softly pouting, Brit stared out (somewhat blankly) from her airbrushed throne. Above ground, the smouldering rubble of the twin towers wafted its toxic plume across lower Manhattan’s skyline.  Down in the subway system, waiting passengers took to the Britney posters with felt tips and biro pens, scribbling in the customary moustaches and blackened teeth.  Then things began to turn nasty.

In what seemed to be a coordinated hate campaign, Brit’s posters became the focus of a vitriolic outpouring against the great American capitalist machine and its exploitation of plastic sex.  Britney’s eyes were systematically blacked out, reinventing her as a gaping skull-mask.  Crude muzzles were plastered across her lips.  As her face was attacked by dripping phalluses, captions across Britney’s body berated: “America’s Whore – Its Over!”, “I Did It, Not Osama, Blame Me”, “Hello My Name is Media Fabrication”, “Self-Righteous Taliban!”, “Liberate Me!”  These were the days when abject fear smothered New York in stars and stripes.  My neighbours had draped a flag from their roof that covered the entire front of their four-story Brownstone.  The anxiety and fervent patriotism above ground lent a vicious intensity to the subway vandalism of Britney and the American dream.  Protest as treason.

I thought back to poor Britney as I surveyed recent work in the studio of Tony Garifalakis.  Like Britney’s aggressors, Garifalakis preys on ubiquitous commercial imagery via aesthetic sabotage, lifting graffiti techniques out of the realm of adolescent sniggers.  His usual quarries are the kinds of posters blutacked en masse to the walls of student dorms: decorative markers of a pedestrian coming-of-age rite.  Wielding a black spraycan, Garifalakis expunges faces, bodies and scenery from the hackneyed base images.  The spare fragments that are preserved reassemble into narratives of fear and nihilism.  In the case of blockbuster movie posters, the effect is often one of camp horror, as if the characters have been coopted into an apocalyptic parody.  As Garifalakis reduces his actors to generic eyeballs, and the odd disembodied hair-do, they are deprived of the props needed to sustain their synthetic celebrity.  Garifalakis defiles corporate America’s hold over its merchandising sweethearts, recasting them as bit parts overshadowed by comically sinister plotlines.

If the target is a known victim (Sharon Tate) or suggestive of a plausible victim (an intimate portrait of what appears to be a young girl), the camp theatrics fall away.  A hint of real-world depravity intervenes.  The deliberate eradication of identifying facial features looms as personal and vindictive, as if we have stumbled across an anticipatory or posthumous simulation of dehumanising assault.  The world of commercial advertisements usually spurns the aesthetics of transgressors.  By debasing flagship images of that world, Garifalakis lures us into an encounter with the predatory aesthetics of stalkers, paedophiles, serial killers.  Post September 11, the U.S. government’s enthusiastic redaction of documents – the censoring of texts by blackening out sensitive information – was justified as necessary to protect the homeland.  In the wake of Abu Ghraib, it seemed more likely that redaction was being used to disguise indiscretion, sanitise indefensible acts and uphold an illusion of decency.  Garifalakis corrupts this process: his erasures de-sanitise and reclaim the dirty underbelly.  With spraycan in hand, Garifalakis asserts the supremacy of concealed, darker storylines.