Civil War (Who Gorged Themselves on a Plate of Promises), 2011 (inkjet prints, tape, 153 x 88 inches)
Civil War, LA-based artist Mario Cutajar’s first show at JB JURVE, takes its name from a slogan spray-painted on a wall above a burning car set alight by Italian protestors enraged by the financial shenanigans that precipitated the current global economic crisis. The image of the burning car, montaged with a publicity shot of a face-to-face couple from the cable TV show The Real Housewives of New York, is presented as a photomural-size enlargement assembled from 142 inkjet prints. This montage and two similarly sized others on display at JB Jurve originated as part of a suite of 22 that Cutajar created as an accompaniment to Bertolt Brecht’s 1943 poem, “The Active Discontented.”
A fourth, floor-placed piece rearticulates the text of another Brecht poem, “Of Sprinkling in the Garden,” which Brecht wrote while living in Santa Monica as a refugee from Nazi-ruled Germany. Cutajar has enlarged the text, sliced it into letter- size sections, and invited gallery visitors to reshuffle it with their feet as they move about the gallery. “Of Sprinkling in the Garden” records the joy of showering water on all the thirsty trees and plants in the poet’s garden, including the weeds and “even the naked soil.” The floor piece reenacts this egalitarian distribution as a dispersion of the text itself.
Cutajar notes that “Of Sprinkling in the Garden” resonates with the Maoist slogan of “Letting a hundred flowers blossom,” to which the Occupy movement and the mass mobilizations associated with the Arab Spring have given new pertinence. “The gallery can also be conceived of as a site of pleasure and cultivation linked to Brecht’s allegorical garden, where the sprinkling of water has erotic as well as political connotations. Brecht’s poetry fuses politics and art into a single metabolic process of taking in and intensifying the reality at hand.”
Cutajar use of montage conjures that of John Heartfield, whose work he has in the past directly referenced. “But it is Heartfield as he appears through the intervening filters of Situationist graphics, what I think of as the Franciscan aesthetics of Arte Povera, and the DIY improvisations of hacking. Capitalism derealizes the world by repressing connections, by compartmentalizing. It separates destitution from accumulation, war from business, military aggression from the way propaganda constructs the enemies that justify its application. Montage is a way to piece things back together but without hiding that this reconstruction is provisional, of the order of a psychoanalytical interpretation, which Freud was the first to recognize, is always a myth.”
In addition to the wall-mounted works, the gallery will also make two related, limited edition artist’s books (Civil War and Dispersion) available for perusal.
JB JURVE is located at 742 North Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90012-2820.