In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Even in Consumer Glut
  • John Massier (bio)

Consumer culture, in all its hobbled glory, is well-targeted fodder for contemporary artists. They, like the rest of us, revel in the wonders of the newest gleaming widget while remaining cognizant of the pitfalls within the systemic mechanisms that give us the widget. It remains persistently ambiguous, whether the work of Barbara Weissberger is critiquing or relishing garish overabundance. Weissberger's work slyly occupies a space between these two possibilities. While icons of consumerism are often acutely and brashly depicted in her works—not only displayed but splayed before us—they mingle effortlessly with icons of the natural world, perpetually collapsing into new, beautiful hybrids.

Part of the intrigue in Weissberger's work is how it blatantly eschews subtlety yet nonetheless ends up being immensely subtle. Among the broad panoply of images she uses, no effort is made to veil or disguise them. They are configured and reconfigured endlessly, but Weissberger makes use of these images directly and bluntly, aiming to transform them without alterations so radical as to make them unrecognizable. It's a tricky maneuver, to be obvious and subtle, but it's a duality that Weissberger smoothly navigates.

In the large wall piece that anchors the exhibition and gives it its title, Are we just going to stand and watch this?, she uses a blatant Rorschach vibe—rendered in super-sized proportion—to underscore that meaning here is mutable and not reliant on any single perspective. (See cover and some of the inside color images.) It has no more singular meaning than an inkblot. Weissberger's imagery is unapologetically manipulated by the cheapest of cheap tricks—collage in all the works and mirrored imagery in the wall piece. With all the parts remaining essentially recognizable, the effect of the work comes through its cumulative whomp.

What is immediately obvious is that a concise application of cheap trick methodology can create an enormous effect and concoct a transformation [End Page 57] that cannot be anticipated. Are we just going to stand and watch this?, the wall piece that dominates the exhibition, reflects itself along horizontal and vertical planes, reminiscent of a verdant landscape reflected in a body of water. Except for the middle of the work—where the imagery is elongated into an unrecognizable expanse—all the images are equally front and center and obvious. Meat appears as meat, flowers as flowers, trucks and tires as trucks and tires, and buff bods as buff bods. The cumulative effect of the work collapses all this direct imagery into a baroque abstraction. Lush and decorative at a distance, the work reveals itself to be of equal visual allure—and increasing comic zing—in detail, as separate sections define their own abstracted island within the whole.

The modular commingling of parts suggests a connection between all the things represented. There are accomplishments of consumerism, end products of a technological and material-based culture, as well as representing the dross and effluvia of that culture. They also point to an amalgam of the natural and the man-made world, and Weissberger does not give one more weight than the other (though Weissberger's use of flowers also directs us to the commodification of the natural world). Both become equally resilient components of an expansive and alluring whole. Slabs of raw meat—red, happy, and full of blood, excitement, and life—are no less seductive than a line of flowers. Both have an emphatic and irresistible punch to them.

Weissberger is continually playing with notions of attraction and revulsion in very complex ways. Her endless cuts of meat are undeniably beautiful—both by the cumulative effect of their new arrangement and in and of themselves. It is a peculiar, and peculiarly funny, aspect to the work—it's not that the meat ever looks like anything else, but it's as bright and attractive as big gobs of candy. When the work was shown to a class of grade school children, one little girl asked, "Can we taste it?"

Weissberger is fairly specific about the sets of images she is drawing from, and, apart from the organic emblems of flowers and mushrooms and the occasional...

pdf