| Ziploc Casket
Michelle Bellemare’s frigid-blue Ziploc Casket—the
centerpiece of her exhibition, Muffle, now at Toronto’s
Peak Gallery, is empty and cold, at least in hue, and, scaled-up
from the snap-shut vessels people fill with leftovers and put
in the refrigerator, or take to work the next day as a little
lightweight plastic coffin reverently preserving lunch.
Scaled to the human form and mordantly sarcophagus-shaped, the
artist’s virtuoso hunk of vacuum-formed plastic is pretty
clearly designated as an air-tight vessel for The Human Leftover,
the body which had always been historically and therefore conventionally
cosmeticized for the long voyage to the hereafter (see, in this
regard, the ultimate novel of embalming, Evelyn Waugh’s
The Loved One), but which has now been reduced to the proposing
of a simple problem in tactical preservation—an Armageddon
gesture of convenience and efficiency.
Bellemare’s kwick-lock coffin can never be simply an object
submitted to our gaze. It is fated to be a source of
ubi sunt rumination—albeit of a rueful and darkly comic
kind.
The following is an excerpt from her gallery statement:
“Muffle is a new body of work by Michelle Bellemare that
explores notions of anxiety and desire emerging from the pressures
of contemporary life. In particular, it examines the power these
can exert over our psyches, and observes that suppression can
make anxiety all the more powerful. ?Reflection and human connection
have increasingly been replaced by efficiency, consumption and
conformity – often leaving us disconnected, and unable to
reflect. Bellemare has subverted common objects and technologies
– usually associated with efficiency and communication –
to evoke senses of doubt, loss and anxiety”.
“Efficiency, consumption and conformity”, yes, the
givens of contemporary culture. But a six-foot Tupperware
coffin is really a coldly incendiary gloss on that deadly triumvirate
of leaden ideals. How are the conditions of life quickened
by the impress of fear in the form of a giant all-consuming container?
We look into it. And we look through it. And we overlook
it. But there’s no getting around it.
In her introductory essay to the book she co-edited, Cold War
Hothouses: Inventing Postwar Culture, from cockpit to Playboy
(New York: Princeton University Press, 2004), architectural historian
Beatriz Colomina, discussing American life in the 1950s, notes
that “If public space was privatized, domestic space was
publicized, not just on view (TV was already advertising during
World War II as ‘the biggest window in the world’)
but on the move, mobilized: the TV set was placed on wheels, the
walls became partitions, and the housewife seemed always to be
in a hurry with a barrage of conveniences, push button device,
and appliances, designed to save her time: quick mixes, fast food,
Tupperware, blenders, dishwashers, washing machines…This
new kind of mobility and efficiency had to do with the war. Not
only was her “push button” equipment coming from the
same factories that made guided missiles, but the house itself
was defending the nation….” (p.14). See also Stephen
J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1991).
Tupperware was began as post-war-ware. What are we
defending now? Our right to six feet of privacy? We
use the stuff these days (Tupperware or Ziploc, what’s the
diff?) as a little momentary song to recycling, to ecological
efficiency and—in Michele Bellemare’s creepy, heroically-scaled
valourization of it—to the sanitization of death. Tupperware
will help the body last longer, will “preserve its freshness.”
Death, as poet e e cummings once noted, may be “legal”,
but that doesn’t make it real. So, too. may it
be efficient—but only as a counterpoint to feeling (which
is highly inefficient). Bellemare’s Ziploc casket
is both funny and frightening. She deserves some sort
of citation for generating one of the most apocalyptically ironic
objects of our time. And she ought to consider having
them produced commercially.
Michelle Bellemare’s Muffle continues at the Peak Gallery,
at 23 Morrow Avenue in Toronto, until March 24.
about the exhibition
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