Liz Magor

When a friend was emptying the family house after her mother died, she mused, half to herself, “In the end, it’s all just stuff.” Something of this endgame disenchantment with the efficacy of material possessions hung over Liz Magor’s recent exhibition, “BLOWOUT,” 2019. The artist builds contradictions into her work, however, and they stir up feelings to the contrary—say, that cast-offs might have another, more vivid life. Co-organized by Dan Byers at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University and Solveig Øvstebø at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, “BLOWOUT” was commissioned and shown by both institutions. In Chicago, it spread out under The Renaissance Society’s lofty neo-gothic vaulted ceiling. There, instead of second lives, Magor’s found and handmade objects spoke to an uncanny afterlife. What could be considered “just stuff” woke up.

James Baldwin saw the artist as “a sort of emotional and spiritual historian,” whose role it is “to make you realize the glory and doom of who you are.” The American writer’s observation rings so true of Magor. She transfigures everyday things that can be seen as parallels of the poet’s objective correlative. Coined by a painter-poet, the “objective correlative” refers to “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events” that has the evocative power to provoke emotion. Magor invests objects with feelings. Like Sylvia Plath, she professes love for the thingness of things. Physical, material correlatives are deep sources for her work’s complexities and, especially in this exhibition, which functioned almost like an installation, the ways in which they relate to one another and to us.

Entering the real space of Magor’s sculpture, viewers were suddenly turned into real-time participants who found themselves in a world full of familiar but strange things that had slipped out of the commonplace world into the extraordinary territory of art. The psychic terrain was unutterably sad at the same time that it verged on blackcomedy absurdities. A thought arose that looking at exhibitions in art galleries can be like browsing while shopping. Almost everything among “BLOWOUT”’s 11 works, all except one made in 2018, was “on display” in boxes. The boxes were like coffins or tombs or cages. Afterlife occurs after death. Shopping won’t get us there; you can’t take it with you. Being a participant observer felt as though I was cast in the role of shopper and mourner. The works’ shopping metaphors called out a strategy of modern life, as Sheila Hetti writes in her catalogue essay, of “buying things to feel things.” The installation set a stage for theatre, the interaction between participants and objects and what that might mean.

“‘Blowout’ is a word for that last moment in the cycle, when there’s no point in saving anything and you let go,” Magor explains in the exhibition checklist. “The promise in that means, okay, no more hanging on, I’ll blow it all, like, I’ll put all my stuff out on the street.” Things in the installation are boxed up. Containment is a primary formal theme. Stuffed animals and toys are held in the 26 luminous polyester film boxes of Pet Co. and in the singular Seasonal. The 33 pairs of men’s, women’s and children’s shoes of Shoe World are cosseted in handmade boxes with sheets of gift wrap and decorative cellophane. Valet (pink) and Valet (violet), two of Magor’s erotic oozing purses, appeared respectively as if casually set down by a buyer on top of stacked, unopened IKEA boxes, which contained 19 Billy bookshelves and 19 Lack coffee tables. The purses themselves were containers. So were the garment bags in the three Delivery works, in which Oz-like animal figures cast in rubber descended from the ceiling on ropes of tangled yarn, carrying garment bags from which blankets spilled to the floor. The title of the one work without a box, Toolshed (Wood Stain), a blanket piece from 2017, referred to a container.

The installation’s overarching framework was the ancient human activity that provides both necessities and excess: retail. “Blowout” as a heavily discounted sale designed to lure new customers applied here, too. Pet Co. and Shoe World echo the names of huge online retailers, while IKEA furnishes rooms worldwide. With its curved, fabric-draped platform, Shoe World said thrift-shop display and marked the anterior place of outmoded goods in the drift of time. The IKEA boxes were real “packaging” devised to deliver goods, while the translucent polyester film boxes recalled packaging that shows off attractive products like toys, textiles, gift cards, flowers and candies to prospective buyers. At the centre of the exhibition, Pet Co., 2018, an installation work in which boxes were stacked and arranged so they could be walked among, took the business of packaging to urban real estate by creating a shimmering microcosmic city.

The “city” was hardly an idyllic site. It offered instead a dystopic nightmare scenario. Inside the see-through rectangles, forlorn stuffed animals looked out as if through cages or the windows of condos, and rat skins lay on the exterior ledges created by stacking. A little dog hugged a piece of dismembered toy whose stuffing had been torn out. Another small soft animal clung to the arm of a supine fake-fur coat, like a child beside a dead mother. A large stuffed monkey lay alone and semi-prone, head on outstretched arm. Sleeping or dead? Several boxes held bits and pieces of mixed bodies; others were filled with stuffing. Had the stuffies turned on each other?

Their cuteness and sentimental attachments subverted, the toys in “BLOWOUT” inhabited an afterlife that resembled a purgatory. Their anthropomorphic postures recalled photographs of human beings beset by poverty, famine, disaster and war. Wrenchingly contradictory, the images of Pet Co. were haunting; the mood, bleak. Peering through the translucent boxes, a participant observer morphed into a horrified bystander. For, as easy as it is to turn away from disturbing photographs of real events, Magor’s transfigured toys locked the gaze.

Pet Co. widened Magor’s lens on the society her work has responded to and critiqued in her appropriation and transfigurations of the things it has produced. The multiple pairs of shoes and stuffed animals in “BLOWOUT” point to the relationship of the individual and the group, one of Magor’s frequent themes. The group can be seen, through synecdoche, a part that stands for a whole, as a segment of society or society itself. In turn, society has its ways of boxing us in with social mores, economic strictures and political constructs. “BLOWOUT” raised many questions. One of them was: Could our current cycle be headed for a blowout? Magor cannot predict the future. She can make profound and affecting art that speaks to glory and the doom of our present condition. ❚

“Liz Magor: BLOWOUT” was co-organized at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, where it was exhibited from January 31 to March 24, 2019; and at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, where it was exhibited from April 27 to June 23, 2019.

Nancy Tousley, recipient of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2011, is an art critic, writer and independent curator based in Calgary.

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