2009 Lauren Rosenblum:
"In his Toronto exhibition “Dollar Menu: A Fast Food Aesthetic,” the Pittsburgh-based glass artist Matthew Eskuche elevates glasswork—a medium traditionally considered as craft—to a form of high art and, while he is at it, also raises the vestiges of consumerism into prized, highly coveted objects. The series is a collection of fast food facsimiles—some of the detritus is intact, some is crushed or shattered, some spills out of garbage cans and some is clustered on and around antique tables and vanities. Comparisons to pop art are inevitable; the work is reminiscent of Claes Oldenburg’s The Store, for both in that work and in this one, the celebration and criticism of commercial culture is given new weight by grim contemporary consequences of rampant capitalism, globalization, consumption, waste, pollution and climate change.
In 99 Billion Served, a Baroque table is cluttered with what appears at first glance to be simple garbage. The colourful objects, whether pizza boxes, soda bottles, cardboard containers, stem glasses or ashtrays, however, are all handmade. They are nearly identical replicas of their referents, right down to their familiar logos: McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Marlboro. The distinctions between high and low culture, permanence and impermanence, collapse; disposable objects, normally produced in plastic, are recreated in the same glass as those that are meant to be reusable.
Let Them Eat Tastykakes 2008 / photo David Smith" style="border: medium none ; clear: both;"> Matthew Eskuche Let Them Eat Tastykakes 2008 / photo David Smith
In The Whitewashing of Corporate Greed, trash overflows from an overturned garbage can. The objects are painted an anonymous, opaque white, removing all sense of corporate identity through an erasure of commercial logos and recognizable colour schemes. In Aristicrap II, the objects arranged on and under an ornate table are also anonymous but have been painted silver, connoting preciousness and expensiveness.
Warhol created his Brillo Boxes through commercial silkscreening to parallel methods of mass production involved in creating consumer items. In contrast, Eskuche’s objects are meticulously handmade from glass, paper, ink and paint along with some found elements. His painstaking attention to detail and slow and deliberate process of creation are diametrically opposed to the convenience of fast food and the rapid churning out of countless identical items.
The stillness of these three-dimensional works is incompatible with assembly-line haste, and the sales value of these artworks also diverges considerably from the cheap “dollar store” menu of items parodied. Through this recontextualization of familiar everyday objects, Eskuche offers simulacra that emphasize the dialectics at play in his work. They range from costs and consequences to transience and intransience, use and disuse, function and non-function, playfulness and criticism, humour and gravity. (55 Mill St Bldg 32, Toronto ON)"
Rosenblum, L. "Matthew Eschuke in review: fast food aesthetics." February 26, 2009. Canadian Art online review of show @ the Sandra Ainsley Gallery, Toronto Feb 8 to Mar 8 2009. website accessed June 23, 2009. http://www.canadianart.ca/online/reviews/2009/02/26/matthew-eskuche/
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Let Them Eat Tastykakes
Standing between a projector and his small, rapt audience at the Sandra Ainsley Gallery, artist Matthew Eskuche sells his newest glasswork the way a jeweller sells diamonds. It's all about four big C's: corporations, capitalism, and class consciousness (that's two in one, if you're counting.)
The exhibit is "Dollar Menu: a Fast Food Aesthetic," and it looks something like Morgan Spurlock trashing Marie Antoinette's private quarters. One work, a restored vanity heaped with glass facsimiles of goblets, wine bottles, and crushed beer cans, is called Let Them Eat Tastykakes, which confirms our assessment. Another is 99 Billion Served, heaped with fast food refuse, a perfect post-modern take on those old Dutch still-lifes. Or there's a shoved-over can, spilling out whitewashed trash.
The Whitewashing of Corporate Greed
But this isn't just more garbage made up as art (ahem, Justin Gignac); it's art meticulously handmade to look like garbage. To wit: that empty beer box? Look again. It took fifty hours (yes, five-oh) to create its perfect facsimile. "Beer bottles" are made of sandblasted, painstakingly repainted glass. Suddenly, the prices—$10,000 to $30,000 for the installations; closer to $2000 for small pieces—seem not just quantified, but justified.
Eskuche is refreshing, a rare type of artist who admits to his his artwork as work, not art. And not work for money in that hyper-commercial, Hirstian way, either, but work almost for the sake of work. Doesn't that make it craftwork, then? So queried a friend-in-the-know, when we Twittered post-exhibit, and the question gave pause.
Our answer is: sort of. While Eskuche says he works in "the mode of craftsman," he also talks about exploring concepts of over-consumption and convenience (those Cs again). In his talk, he is logical, plain-spoken, and entirely unartsy; his madness is all in the method. The processes he shows-and-tells, slide by slide, are craftsmanship. But applying such a painfully slow process to the facsimile-making of fast food, using that contradiction to deepen the divide between our consumption and our consciousness, that's an idea worth buying into; that's bang for your buck; that's real art.
Matthew Eskuche's "Dollar Menu" exhibit is on at the Sandra Ainsley Gallery (55 Mill Street, in the Distillery District, where there will never be a McDonalds) from now through March 7.
Photos courtesy of the Sandra Ainsley Gallery."
Prickett, S.N. "Matthew Eskuche's Dollar Menu." The Torontoist. post February 12, 2009. website accessed June 23, 2009.http://torontoist.com/2009/02/matthew_eskuches_dollar_menu.php
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