The Carnegie International: Richard Hughes

At first glance, it is a discarded, moldy, soggy, disgusting mattress. It looks like it's been in the weeds for a while: Grass seems to be growing where water has pooled in the middle. Mushrooms are pushing up too. Only a musty stench would make the scene more complete.

The 'mattress' one of three Richard Hugheses in one of the most dour galleries in the Carnegie International. Last week I said that curator Douglas Fogle's CI was one of the bleakest shows in recent memory. Hughes' gallery is especially grim. Everything here points toward when societal disintegration has progressed to abandonment. There is The Big Sleep (2007, above), Chandlerian in both title and allusion to the inevitable fatalism of noir. (But Robert Gober-ian in construction: The Big Sleep is made of jesmonite, pigment, acrylic paint, modeling putty and plastic.) In the middle of the gallery are two shoes with their laces tied together, as they might be if someone had tossed them over a power line. (Trip Over, 2007, below.) Except here the laces are on the floor, under a 'brick' and the shoes are sticking straight up in the air. Are we underwater? Is that why paint is peeling off the walls, revealing layer after layer after layer of prior care? (That would be untitled, 2008.) Did climate change cause sea levels to rise that much? Or did something else cause all this?

Along the same line as Hughes' work is Doug Aitken's Migration: 365 Hotel Rooms (stills here), in which animals have re-taken land (and hotels) apparently given up by humans. Ditto in Bruce Conner's photograms in the Carnegie's Hall of Sculpture: There are no people in them, only vapors left behind. In all of these works, humans seem to have vanished.

None of these artists offer any looks at what might have gone wrong, why the people just got up and left. In fact, that's one of the most fascinating things about the 2008 CI: There is little -- if any -- artistic musing about problems, difficulty, specific issues, or anything of that sort. There is no art explicitly about global warming, or Iraq or globalization or anything else. (Thomas Hirschhorn's Cavemanman comes closest to being about something specific -- terrorism --  but it's so cartoonish, such a shallow, Baroque scattertrash one-liner, that it doesn't earn much consideration.)

Instead the exhibition is full of a dry acceptance that we live in a time of decline. Nevermind what's causing it, Fogle seems to be arguing, accept it.

Related: The bleakness of the 2008 CI. Vija Celmins and Mark Bradford.