Crude politics run amok

Volume Number 1 Issue Number 7 / November 10 - 16, 2006

Gallery Seen

Ranard’s Picture Show for Chelsea Now

Andrei Molodkin’s “Empire at War,” part of his exhibit of the same name at Daneyal Mahmood Gallery on W. 25th St.

Crude politics run amok

By John Ranard

Andrei Molodkin, a Russian expatriate artist living in Paris, has gained acclaim for his “Sweet Crude” oil sculptures — plastic, fabricated body parts filled with what President Bush II calls our “national addiction.” Molodkin’s work returns to Chelsea at the Daneyal Mahmood Gallery with a series of huge, blue-ink drawings executed with disposable ballpoint pens on gesso-coated linen.

In keeping with his political protest theme, Molodkin draws a charismatic George W. Bush holding a Bible, a backlit cross behind him. On the floor, enclosed in plexiglas, are the 2,764 ballpoint pens it took to draw the image. That number, we are told, equals the United States troop casualties in Iraq as of Sept. 21, 2006, the day the drawing was completed. In case we don’t get it, the title of the piece, “Empire at War,” appears in huge 3-foot letters across its bottom.

The work is ambitious, the drawing confrontational and the analogy of the ink pens to death, provocative. The plastic container of ballpoint pens is the most interesting part of the installation. One laments that the life and death of a soldier in an ill-conceived war may serve no better purpose than a simple means to an end — once expired, to be cast off and replaced with an identical substitute. One doesn’t walk away feeling very good.

But the iconography of the rest of the work is too easy: Bush, a cross, a Bible and the words “Empire at War.” Nothing is left for the viewer to complete. Everything is there.

Andrei Molodkin’s “Empire at War” exhibit at Daneyal Mahmood Gallery, 511 W. 25th St., runs through Dec. 23.