Aspects of life normally annexed from shopping – one’s private thoughts and health data, for example – are rapidly being subsumed into the marketplace. Not to mention that the experience of some commercial art galleries is increasingly difficult to distinguish from that of the department store. For her exhibition at Cabinet, Lucy McKenzie adopts anachronistic styles – propaganda murals and trompe l’oeil paintings – to foreground the similarities between consumerism and totalitarianism.
The show takes the form of an uncanny, sparsely stocked showroom, with realist paintings of erotic photobooks and bespoke vases and chairs replacing mass-produced commodities. Here, however, the array of consumables are mostly flattened, as trompe l’oeil images in the painted tabletop surfaces that display them, suggesting, perhaps, how standardised goods are more a superficial manifestation of an immaterial desire than meaningful physical possessions. The glazed surface of Quodlibet LXVII (Dressmaking) (2017–19) – a modernist dining table bookended by two similarly styled chairs – displays images of dressmaking patterns and tools for women’s clothing. The implication is that fashion, particularly for women (the show includes the female form from multiple angles), constructs and enforces a flattened ideal onto three-dimensional people: bodies regimented to suit a capitalist production line.
McKenzie takes outmoded, decorative and commercial artforms and pits them against the contemporary fetish for novelty and uniqueness. At the centre of the gallery stand two reconstructions of Soviet-era window displays (Arcade 1 and Arcade 2, both 2019). Their usual function, as the first point of visual contact with the shopper, is to promote an orthodoxy of aesthetic aspirations amidst crowds passing by on the street, and to make generic commodities appear unique. But here, on closer inspection, all their marble surfaces – based on those found in the fascist-classical architecture of Benito Mussolini’s EUR district of Rome – have been handpainted, and the plastic mannequin, which bears a passing resemblance to the artist, is a one-off. The fantasy of originality and uniqueness in shopfronts here becomes a reality.
Continuing the theme of bodily discipline, within the opposite wall, and seen only through apertures cut into it, is a reproduction in oil paint of the mural on display in the central reading room of the Russian State Library in Moscow (Giving Up The Shadows On My Face, 2019). In the same way that mass-produced items attempt to homogenise desire for products and clothes, the original mural, in showing the idealised body and its relationship to others, is evidence of Soviet Russia’s predilection for eradicating the individual in favour of the collective. In McKenzie’s version of the mural, however, she has depicted the repressed sexuality of characters who caress each other and explore the flesh under their clothes, and by extension their private lives away from the Soviet regime (and perhaps even consumerism’s impersonal ideals). Although the characters appear to have been in some sense liberated, the frame through which they are viewed is a mechanism of control, cutting and ordering the scene. The body is objectified, sold and exploited through the frame that can be seen in the shopfront and most explicitly in the pornographic books painted into Quodlibet LXVI (2019).
In contemporary capitalist society, individuals are both consumers and consumed, the difference effaced through the sale and micro-management of private information. Even if we are identikit in this respect, at least we are yet to give up, counter to the show’s title, the shadows on our faces.
Lucy McKenzie: Giving Up The Shadows On My Face at Cabinet, London, 10 October – 7 December
From the December 2019 issue of ArtReview
