The generic flat-screen monitors that loop Martina Onyemaechi Crouch-Anyarogbu’s Discommercial 1 (2016), Discommercial 2 (2016), and Discommerical 3 (2016) do little justice to the complex conceptual counterpoint they offer to much of Juried Exhibition 2018, a show which takes seriously its mission to present a flavorful array of recent MFA graduates—all youngish artists who we hope (or secretly do not hope) go on to be, say, Senga Nengudi, or even John Baldessari, both veteran LAMAGers. Such is the weighty and important history of this knock-off Frank Lloyd Wright temple situated on yet another scorched but glorious Los Angeles hilltop, complete with views of the Hollywood sign. Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery is a classic, and I would be lying if I said showing an artwork there wasn’t, as Missy Elliott once said, super duper fly.
What makes Martina’s Discommercials super duper fly is that they are a classic bait-and-switch—not an epicly scaled artwork, or one with many impressive or unusual materials; not an artwork that has the potential to be permanently installed at a subway stop, or stakes its relevance in the temporal—no, there is nothing penis-like in this artwork, or shiny, just a drab display of three small flat-screen tvs, depicting something recognizable yet uncanny, and three sets of headphones, which, from a distance, insinuate a time commitment many gallery-goers are not willing to make, especially in a show with so many artworks.
I am stuck on this point of presentation—as in, the way the artworks appeared from a distance, versus what you get when you actually watch and listen to them. It’s possible that this is a redundant observation about videos in galleries, but there was something about the plainness of the monitors, the conventionality of the way the screens hung there, the limp headphones on their little hooks, everything so neat and precise—that discovering this monster-mask purple thing talk about color-coded keys while eating candy and saying “food products”—that just frankly shocked me. (You can find the transcripts of the Discommercials here, which I’ve added per Martina’s request). It’s a fact that video is further complicated by its apparatus; and these videos, whose presentations incorporate neither a projector or an iPad or a retro TV monitor, or some kind of sculptural stand or other non-video physical addition to the artwork—defy what I think of as the zany, installation-heavy tropes so common to contemporary video work. And in that defiance, the Discommercials stay eerily close to the typical viewing experience of the thing they satirize—the commercial. I’m not sure what all this means, other than that I felt somehow I was instantly at the bare bones of the Discommercial, the weirdness of it, the scariness, the un-prettiness, the dis-composed-ness of it.
Each Discommerical features the same purply-blue character wearing a Phantom of the Opera-esque mask that reveals only their eyes and mouth. However, this mask serves an opposite purpose to the original Phantom’s mask, since the mask itself is disfigured and lumpy—an unconvincing appendage. The masked character’s lips are pasty yellow, and they wear a yellow shirt; their skin replicates the electric mauve color of their mask, and their fingernails are painted in yellow or red. The whole image looks electric and artificial, as if the character came to life straight out of MS paint; their hair, twisted into pinky-size dreadlocks, appears almost drawn-on, aside from sometimes sporting a yellow or red hair elastic, or even a yellow headband. The background of the scenes jumps between green (green screen, we know from the wall text) and black; and all the dialogue is captioned. The narrative in Discommercial 1 and Discommerical 2 is something about color-coded key nutrients, and something about food packaging. The cuts jump around, and the dialogue is a bit choppy; there are times when the character laughs, as if to a director off-screen. I would say the videos are reminiscent of an old thing called “bloopers.” Still, it is hard to describe the Discommercials; the look of them is so specific, the fuzziness, the glitching, the alliteration of the words, the cadence of the actor, the music from like, a horror leprechaun movie or a children’s show with talking pigs—this is the stuff of nightmares, people.
Oh, and there is an almost imperceptible image that pops up at the end (or is it the beginning?) of each video—a geometric configuration of blue/yellow/red that is reminiscent of a NFPA fire compliance sign (google it), which I have seen at least one other time in Martina’s work, circa 2016.
So you’ve got the feeling of the artwork, and you’ve got the picture, perhaps as best I can without narrating each Discommerical shot-by-shot. This brings me to the apex of all art-writing: what could this succession of colors and words mean? (I forgot to mention the M&M-like candies the character eats in Discommercial 1, also with a red, yellow, and blue candy coating). And could this meaning, in turn, mean something to me? I wrote extensively about legibility in my last text, because it was something that the artist was interested in; in this case I haven’t spoken to the artist about the work at all, but I would argue that Martina uses the form of the commercial (or discommercial, as its called) to plant a legible foot in the soft, wet garden of idiosyncrasy and weirdness she is walking barefoot through. Yes, I too get to do my own weird thing.
Let’s say the character, we’ll call them Phantom, represents a painting. I don’t think Phantom is actually meant to represent a painting, but they are certainly painted. This is one of the many satirical layers that Discommerical 1 and Disommercial 2 are operating on; as opposed to Martina actually making a painting, her character, and perhaps even the screen itself, is “painted”; so Phantom becomes a kind of intermediary object between a painting and a video and a person. Before abstraction, and certainly before minimalism, colors represented things. For example, the Virgin Mary was always depicted in blue. And then we get Phantom, who is also colored, as in, a color (in this case a purply-blue), in the visual sense. But lest we forget, our Phantom is a speaking subject, spitting out alliterative lines about “color-coded,” so we have both visual and linguistic ways that the work draws attention to both colors and codes, or, being both colored or coded. The more times I watched 1 and 2, which are less than a minute each, the more my brain conflated the words with the images, which have the almost unconscious effect of jumbling into a flash of colors, sounds, and shapes that seems destined to be a commentary on codes and colors, especially body colors, which is another way of saying skin colors, which is another way of saying: race. So in a way it seems obvious that the Discommericals should be about the subjectivity of color, but they are also about symbols, and the meaning of the colors themselves, which is a concept that reaches far beyond what painting usually wants from us—it reaches through most modes of contemporary art practice, wraps its iridescent purple fist around a loose piece of modern painting, and pulls it right through into the future, ending up as an artwork that to my amazement manages to transcend its medium, even as it remains quietly mounted to the wall—and at an appropriate height, too.
But back to red/yellow/blue, the specific and decidedly loaded palette that Martina chose to structure this work around. There are a few things to grab hold of—that they are primary colors, of course, which to me insinuates a kind of primary relationship between the subject (or in this case, the character) and its manifestation as a character. Is that clear? I guess I’m saying that primary is a tricky word that means both of first order of importance, but also basic, primitive, direct. It seems a character cast in such colors is being washed over, somehow neutralized, certainly obscured, by their primary coloring. In many artworks, color is used as a tool of aesthetic expression—here it amounts to a kind of technological obfuscation that is as silly as it is alarming. Sarah pointed out that primary colors are also “unmixed,” in terms of paint or painting; she immediately thought of them as a symbol of something “pure” and “original.” I assume others, especially painters, would have similar associations.
The red/yellow/blue image that flashes at the end of each discommercial is likely, as I have established earlier, a reference to the similarly composed fire compliance sign, a symbol with its own specific set of codes and meanings, which in the context of the video, casts a big-brother-esque vibe on the whole artwork. The thing about this compliance symbol is that it exists independently of Martina’s work—it is a symbol out in the world, so to speak, appearing in, I believe, any and all institutional spaces. The recurrence of this outside symbol serves to link Martina’s Discommercials with an image that frequently enters our visual field but is communicated in a symbology unknown to most people—which sounds a lot like how an artwork can be constructed. This is a subtle, unnerving way of insinuating the possibility that her artwork may be inserted everywhere, or is perhaps not an artwork at all—or worse, that we are surrounded by codes that could be broken, if only we had the skills, or the intellect, or more information.
As I read through what I’ve written so far, it occurred to me that I’m missing something really fundamental. The character is talking about food products. And Discommercial 1 is essentially a spoof on commercials (I literally just saw one) that advertise food products that have, say, “no artificial colors.” Of course in Discommercial land, there is no specific food brand, just “food packaging”; and while many conventional commercials will advertise that they are decidedly non-artificial (“natural,” if you will), the Discommerical is utterly unnatural; the character has a weird digitized skin and lumpy purple mask face. There is, I believe, a tension between that unnaturalness of what we see, and the rhetoric that the commercial satirizes; not only are we being sold products that claim to be artificial-free, but we are so clearly being suckered—Phantom’s decidedly unnatural (but perhaps still neutral, or primary, or un-mixed) appearance lays bare the culture of fallacy we continually expose ourselves to, and, quite literally, eat up.
Thinking about Discommercial 1, 2, and 3 has been a difficult task. There are artworks that function on a gut level, and no matter how you try to explicate or describe them, to academicize them or strike out into some kind of expressive, revelatory territory, it doesn’t help. They do their own thing. For me, this work is like that. There were a few other ideas I had about the Discommericals I couldn’t quite work into a narrative—perhaps because they’re not really there, or because they’re more like subliminal messages. For example, the combination of red/yellow/blue is reminiscent of the so-called “forbidden” colors, which scientists and color theorists have argued that the human eye cannot comprehend (yellow-blue, red-green). This took me down a path toward Ellsworth Kelly (Blue Yellow Red IV, 1972), and Sol LeWitt (Wall Drawing 880, Loopy Doopy (orange and green) 1998), but these thoughts brought me back to the satirical, biting nature of Martina’s color choices, only emphasizing that she is poking fun at such artists, whilst reminding us that their ideas of color neutrality are only available to some artists, in some contexts.
I must also admit that while Martina did send me the video files for each Discommercial, at my request, I found them difficult to refer to as a tool for thinking—the videos really do shine “in-situ,” so to speak—the importance of the loop, which is at first not discernible (it looped several times before I realized it was the same thing over and over), is critical to the incessant quality of a commercial—and that they play over and over with nearly nothing to distinguish the beginning and end is also reminiscent of our streaming-centric video experience, in which tv just tends to play and play, as if it has a will of its own to be seen. My point is that I had the files but I didn’t really use them—I have a feeling Martina will approve of this caveat.
I think lastly I’ll call myself out for focusing on Discommercial 1 and Discommerical 2; Discommerical 3 had a different thing going on, there was no mention of food, and I was put-off by the affectation the character took on in this iteration, which to me sounded like a stereotyped gay affectation, something I don’t feel I can take on in the scope of this writing.
Lastly lastly, when you write about art, you have to be careful not to write instead about yourself—something I’ve always failed at. I think Martina’s work spoke to me perhaps because I’m her intended audience—someone who makes a hobby out of a kind of judgment—who searches for codes, keys, colors, whatever—and is occasionally, if not frequently, deaf to the biases which color their own thinking, their own experiences—who need something wacky to shake them up or slap them around—to make an artwork beyond logic, which treads into the territory of magic, and cannot be exposed within a series of sentences, unless those sentences give way to the artwork’s own spells. I don’t know. Who can say what things are? The Discommericals mesmerized me with their freakiness, their indiscernibility, hell, their colors; and I’m not sure I came out the other end articulating much more than they articulate for themselves. But I do have an understanding that I ought to be more thoughtful about just what kind of crap I’m eating up, and especially, to unpack the way I project my own primary colors. I’ll do it.
Discommercial 1, Discommerical 2, and Discommercial 3 are on view at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, as part of “Juried Exhibition 2018,” from July 26-September 16, 2018.
The featured image at the top of this post is a still from Discommercial 2.
Thank you to Sarah for editing this text!
Georgia is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles. For more information on her projects, please visit www.georgialikethestate.net