Clint Neufeld’s All hat No cattle at Art Mûr contains pieces of glassware, serving plates and furniture in various vague period styles that roughly suggest the late 18th and early 19th centuries. On them, whether resting on pillows or seemingly growing from or embracing them, are various industrial implements.
The ways his work has been talked about have been rather boring and predictable, seeing in it some sort of statement about gender or defamiliarization. An almost identical set of strategies were employed with Cal Lane in the same space just a month ago. Neufeld falls into this sometimes but usually seems to just tell anecdotes about his life. In a way, this is the far better way to approach the works.
Not really unfamiliar, work like this has been common for decades if not the better part of a century from the surrealists to Murray Favro, each of which demanded a fairly different conceptual framing and relationship to the object in space. Unlike those, Neufeld’s works have a gewgaw quality to them that’s amusingly displayed on a comforting, almost cuddly scale. What else could adequately describe Thank you Ram Jam (2018)? The works just seem like something you happen on, like a mildly eccentric teapot on a doily in your grandparent’s kitchen.
In this respect, they pair quite well with Aralia Maxwell’s Evolving Palate exhibition in the adjoining space. Her hybrid sculpture-paintings present “the extravagant ornamental of kitsch cakes,” much like the ornate, and very old-school cake decorating of Neufeld’s Mélange with heads (2022).
They are both in the shadow of the neo-baroque craze of a few years ago, filtered through a bit of TV’s Cake Wars (and many similar programs), only inverted to be as unambitiously illusionistic as possible. It’s polished up with all the eroticism and vulgarity that the neo-baroquists tended to possess excised. Instead, things are more spare, almost minimal; the allure and glamour are severely dissipated because there is so much less to take in and so little involvement demanded.
In all its shiny clunkiness, Neufeld’s work is more an exercise in the useless and inorganic, in a kind of pastel-hued gesture that takes great pleasure in translating the surfaces of industrial production into craft but is awkward enough not to be entirely reducible to decoration.
As a cute form of industrial waste turned into luxury item, its basically stupid quality as a physical presence makes attempts to hem it into being particularly meaningful seem asinine to an extent that Maxwell’s do not, refusing their basic tea cozy quality by being stretched out in serial formation as though the artist was ashamed of their curvy materiality and needed to flatten them out.
“Much of the inspiration for her earlier practice is drawn from retro aesthetic movements and the deep capitalist values associated with them - a way for Maxwell to confront the different modes of hierarchy and discrimination associated with this period,” claims a vague framing text, although nothing remotely like this is conveyed by the works themselves or how they are displayed. If anything, they read as almost cruel satirizations of traditional craft.
This is not to dismiss all the framing that is farmed out to art bureaucrats because it is an essential part of Contemporary Art’s tweeness, like the family histories or talk of the environment on gourmet mustard jars. But in these instances, it’s fairly clumsy and humourless and doesn’t add as much to the works as such supplements potentially could.