| Libby McInnis
by Chris Habib
The evolution of the most current incarnation of the work
of Libby McInnis began in 1997 as a clear break in focus from painting to sculpture
abruptly manifested. It was at this time that McInnis began exploring mold-making,
casting, animation, puzzle-boxes and spatial exploitation via the design of visually
penetrating, reality smothering environments.
McInnis' early installation efforts established her
signature graphic addiction to excess and began alluding to the theories of spectacle
posited by DeBord, Barthes and Artaud -- all of which she was unaware of at the time. To
McInnis, the object of inclusive, non-linear, spontaneous, visceral spectacle was not to
satisfy a heady, academic, populist manifesto or to radicalize creative output. The object
was to put viewers at ease with art by creating something with which they could identify
by simply passing through, eating or looking at it with the bemusement and slow spark of a
Ritalin-tethered ADHD child with a Harry Potter pop-up book planted firmly in hand. Her
goal was to take a lifetime of Mardi Gras and freeze-frame a colloid of fun in a carrier
solution of color, texture, flavor, sex, familiarity and space. Her first installations
consisted of massive webs of yarn into which had fallen the detritus of the giant
plaster-bakers and feather stomached child-makers of the insane. They were painted in the
krylon colors every rainbow envies and were synthetic to the ridiculously logical
conclusion of the possibilities presented by everything toxic. They stimulated the Ids of
all who encountered them with full sensory heavy petting and invoked the urge to consume
the plaster/wax/latex cakes and icing while dancing with the plastic-wrapped, yarn
stitched plastic girls who always showed just enough leg extending from their
marker-drawn, cotton panties. The scenes were completely serene chakra-balancing mania.
In 2000, McInnis realized that she could actually satiate
the Ids she had been teasing for years. She began to create works with edible components
and turned the destruction of her work at the masticating jaws of hedonistic onlookers
into performance. She sliced it, served it and slopped it while they sucked it down. Red
dye #4, yellow #6 -- the tainted hipster tongues and lips of all who left the galleries
were a testament to the success of her goal of including the viewer in the work. All who
left her pop-up, icing, carbohydrate orgies walked away with the sweet-tooth clap. She
subverted their cool with the virus of pleasure and left her mark on each of them.
Simultaneously, McInnis began to exploit the parasite of curiosity to give life to her
work. A natural engineer, she learned quickly that human interest coupled with primitive
cardboard mechanics could add a spark of consciousness to her wall-ridden golem. All of a
sudden, mothers could laugh. Girls could strip, spank, shoot milk from their nipples and
trim their pubic hedges. Boys could drop trou and taste scat. Women could foxy-box topless
and couples could engage in aggressive acts of codependence. The adult world of vice,
anger and consequence could be reduced to life-sized pages of a pop-up book borne of the
closets of Jean Tinguely and Jan Svankmajer.
As the distance between the proverbial "box" and
McInnis' thinking widens, the next evolution will likely take the form of theater without
performers. Two-dimensional marionette theater controlled by the untrained jerking,
pushing and prodding of an active audience. Cardboard actors will be designed as the
script -- every scene unfolding with the flipping of a page. Improvisation will be both
impossible to achieve and impossible to avoid. We will all be invited to engage in social
ills and make visible the taboos we try so hard to repress. |
