Meaningful Detritus
“On the Edge of the Desert” with Matthew J Mahoney
You can follow the strings of any art piece to a place you could have never imagined.
—Matthew J Mahoney in Studio: April 29, 2014
Matthew J Mahoney’s latest work On the Edge of the Desert (2014) displaces and reconfigures a flamboyant, yet quiet history — a history that weaves opposing interests, joining the artist’s own experiential and allegorical influences.
A title taken from the opening monologue of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, “On the Edge of the Desert” exposes the degrading by-products of modern habits. Described to me as “meaningful detritus of the Southwest,” Mahoney’s materials produce scrupulous deconstructions of both form and possibility.
At the foot of this procession—beneath large, non-gendered and intersexed figures—a placard presents the artist’s only written disclosure: piñata parts, feathers, chewed gum, fun noodles, assorted toys, desert sage smoke, fur, tassels, and assorted trash (to name a few). “These materials add their own little voice,” Mahoney says, “broadening the vocabulary for what the stuff can stand for.” He continues:
A big part of this work, on the broad scheme, is just obsession with ideas and having to work through them.
These obsessions are investigated through a rotating practice of drawing, fly-tying, and cardboard folding. Each practice informs a sculpture that is hopeful of something beyond what the physical image creates. A sculpture that becomes “recognizable and imagistic… that has this sublime, unknown, and sort of rich material language all colliding within it.”
Each of these collisions contributes its own poetry: lizards slinking atop egg crate mattresses, small skeleton frames clutching Bullet Bourbon, and a pair of Morgan’s Sphinx Moths fluttering above Ghost Orchids. Reminiscent of a Greek chorus, I imagine the skeleton figures littered throughout the scene cackling at me: “HAHAHAHA, fucking moron.” At the fore, one of them proudly raises its slender middle finger gesturing a loud collegiate, “WooooHoo.”
Amidst this all, a soft energy emerges in the form of scorpion lollipops, fruit flies, and endosymbionts that quell the boisterous and irreverent. There is a queer balance in this madness, a calming dissonance.
Mahoney’s early stride into his multi-coordinated art practice began at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California. In his first exhibition Western Taphonomy (2009), Mahoney reexamines his observations as a kid growing up in Palm Springs, California; namely, of many western-themed artworks spinning the heroic cowboy narrative.
Directed toward primary works in cinema and literature by artist and instructor Jim Skalman, Mahoney followed the genre’s canon to author Cormac McCarthy. Titles such as All the Pretty Horses and Blood Meridian initialized a critique that could not tolerate the vitality of these heroes. “I couldn’t make a cowboy figure and have it looking proud,” he explains. “It wouldn’t make sense. So, obviously everybody had to die.”
Western Taphonomy was a first attempt at art in order to understand his world, synthesizing new experiences and shifting paradigms—his particular history: white, male, desert child. Between this work and his first year in the MFA sculpture program at Rhode Island School of Design, these ideas derailed into other, perhaps less interesting objects. Specifically referencing pieces such as School Desk (2009) and Coonskin Cap (2011), Mahoney identifies a three-year gap in his portfolio as being lethargic and forced: “It was just so task oriented. It wasn’t any different than I understood—to realize the thing I was going to make.”
Mahoney’s disciplined studio practice, particularly seen in his drawing series In the Wake of John Joel Glanton (2009-2014), became crucial for the next, more nuanced source of production. With over a thousand iterations on paper, a devotion to the work’s inherent psychology, in turn, became a placeholder for other maturing studio practices.
In hindsight, Mahoney’s drawing practice sustained an interest that now bleeds a more contemporary look at the Southwest. The hero—admired and absolved, central within a narrative of self-appointment—is instead humiliated in death. Limbs flail, torsos erased, and nameless faces made to ribbons; the hero is repositioned.
In many ways, atop Mahoney’s sculptural landscape, our contemporary bodies are not far removed: we similarly become absorbed by our own heroism and self-indulgence; we adopt the arch of a journey that is not ours; and we act with certain retribution toward the amenities we feel inherent to our existence.
There’s a real palpable disregard for anything except leisure; all of our daily things are brought to us through violence.
On the Edge of the Desert draws direct parallel between these detritus materials, the fiction of Cormac McCarthy and the truth in our invasion of the West. “It’s confused me,” he thinks aloud while fiddling with the materials at his desk, “it feels like streamers left over at a party in the park have a similar tone and it’s from all the damning factors of waste and disregard.”
From the weight of colonization to the concerns of displaced water in desert swimming pools, the who and the what of this work implicates a larger sequence of digressions. Seen from afar, this dance of life and death—a slight nod to “The Ozymandias Parade” by Kienholz and working analogies of Empire—meshes the vibrant and the brutal. These energies counteract and give rise to one another, obscured by tinges of cynicism and authentic intrigue, asking the viewer: “What do you hear?”
And yet, the relationship between scalped flesh and a nine year-olds Dora the Explorer themed birthday party remains lost on us. To which one skeleton burps, “Fucking morons.”
