Danny McDonald at 80WSE
One hundred plus years after Duchamp issued his original aesthetic/anti-aesthetic fiat and sanctioned an entire tradition of art making, Danny McDonald’s readymade sculptures have continued to expand this method’s theoretically boundless reach to a distinct and seemingly unrelated cultural universe: “fandom.” Between the two, in the intervening century, science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, like Duchamp, pushed the aesthetic preconditions upon which sci-fi, fantasy, superhero sagas, and related genres rest to the forefront by offering the (real) world his concept of the “World as Myth.” Later dubbed “Pantheistic Solipsism,” his theory formed an attempt to emphatically assert the fiction-writing subject, in their nerdy will to power, as the putative supreme creator of a little, proprietary cosmos. As the argument goes, if the universe is an inherently unknowable totality, then you can’t prove that something like the Star Wars saga didn’t take place… a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… So, let’s assume it did. Here on Earth, there is no distinction between the existence of narrative—and even myth—as such, and the existence of sculptures or objects as such—humble as those objects might evidently be.
Though they each seem to tell a certain kind of—abridged and self-contained—story, all of McDonald’s little arrangements of kitschy, culturally charged knickknacks culled from his fifteen years of sculptural practice and featured at NYU’s 80 Washington Square East, trade in, and build upon, the surplus currency of their many, matter-of-fact cultural quotations. Pumpkin in a Mask in a Mask (2017) rejects fandom’s notion of “a canon” by embracing precisely what Heinlein had used to advance the Pantheistic Solipsism theory in the first place1: the narrative intermingling of different “universes.” While adherence to a “canon” is one of the strictest commandments collectively upheld by fans and their various communities (i.e., “Thou shalt not mix ‘DC’ with ‘Marvel,’ nor ‘Trek’ with ‘Wars’”), it should be noted that, at a basic level, “fans”—or rather, consumers—here, are ultimately just respecting the proprietary interests of the for-profit enterprises (Adorno and Horkheimer's "Culture Industry”) that produce their cherished narrative material. McDonald’s multiverse-cum-mash-up of mass-produced articles seems straight out of a Spirit Halloween Stores®: in the above-mentioned work, a generic “long-nose” Venetian carnival mask made of cast black plastic (think Eyes Wide Shut, but crappier) is strapped around and obscures the ocular ports of another mask—a “life”-size Darth Vader mask, also plastic—which in turn partially conceals a life-size foam pumpkin. It’s a succinct, sculptural literalization of the kind of unsanctioned promiscuity that is only proprietarily possible within yet another sub-genre of fandom’s sub-genres: “fan fiction.”
If McDonald has a narrative form of choice, one in which he really excels, it is the one-liner. His headliner bit, here, is actually in the backroom, where seven well-stacked examples of such succinct sculptural humor all work the room on roughly waist-high pedestals. Made Up Men (2014) stacks a G.I. Joe in full facial camouflage and—with a “wink”—a Ronald McDonald figurine atop the life-size latex and foam head of Gene Simmons (a one-time TV prop, the checklist informs us). The (Heath Ledger) Joker, Sting (the Wrestler) and co., all in action figure form, also gather round. To the same degree that such formal funny business might roil modernism’s purists—ditto, certainly, any remaining high-but-not-low autocrats—post-structuralism’s functionaries will be made to look like humorless fools if they dare prattle on too long about language: that “Simmons” and “Sting” are “signs” is obvious enough, and “reading” them as “texts” is simply tortuous.
McDonald’s shelved-and-pedestaled knickknackery most closely resembles that of one specific predecessor in the saga of the readymade—Haim Steinbach. Steinbach, and fellow ’80s readymade jokester, Jeff Koons, are lined-up as targets in Hal Foster’s “The Art of Cynical Reason,” a critical attack (but also a sort of critical refresher) on certain perhaps decadent, but also quasi- or pseudo-critical, artistic practices of the 1980s.2 Beyond these two figures, Foster hurls his critique at the culturally and commercially dominant art of the eighties—if not at the decade itself—decrying the operations by which commercial and cultural reciprocity was first rendered intractable and intangible. His charge: engaging in a “conventionalist aesthetic,” “whereby complex historical practices were reduced to static signs that then stood as if out of time.”3
The artists surveyed in his plaint are mostly found guilty of affecting or extending a historically extant critique of their chosen media while binding that critique to an equally affected critique of contemporary capitalism—what Jean Baudrillard had then recently called the, or rather for Foster, “our political economy of the commodity-sign.”4 These artists are found to “delight” in their “reductions and reversals” of the production of more assiduously critical predecessors, while merely making “strategic moves in an apparent endgame of art.”5 At the same time, they are deemed materially complacent in the (general) economy’s excesses of the time. In other words, they have their cake and ate it too, churning out product for the artworld during the go-go Reagan years. According to Foster (cf. Baudrillard), both Steinbach and Koons twisted and turned the readymade’s many, already well elaborated volte-faces vis-à-vis value—both aesthetic and economic (and oh so much “equivalence”)—into a showcase of consumer goods doing double-duty as both physical contents and, ostensibly, mental object. The result was a redeployment of these once critical moves toward fundamentally vacuous (and putatively “totemic”) “fetish”6 items of the paleo-trickle-down epoch. The display of these objects, then, became mere theatrical presentation of their underlying substrate: “the factitious, differential, encoded, systematized aspect of the object.”7 Something we (can) all take passion in, our “passion for the code.”8 In his critique, Foster takes Shelton vacuum cleaners—repurposed in Koons’s New Shelton Wet/Dry Double Decker (1981)—and Air Jordan sneakers—used in Steinbach’s related and different (1985)—as exhibits A and B, respectively, of how, as Koons and Steinbach built an audience, their work, and the artists themselves—or rather, the names “Koons” and “Steinbach”—became top sumptuary commodities.9
As far as the artist-as-commodity aspect is concerned, and with all due respect, the name “McDonald” lacks the social standing (based on current market value) of a “Steinbach,” and to an even greater degree, of a “Koons.”10 Ironically enough, this lack in relative and material status offers McDonald a “site” for his only overtly “critical” work. Bohemia, home to the struggling or otherwise “starving” artist, is thematized in McDonald’s more dioramatic works, which date mostly from the mid-Aughts. These pun on issues facing artists of lower- or fraught financial standing, particularly in terms of the “habitat loss” they have long been facing in evermore expensive urban locales the culture class itself has helped gentrify.
Low Light and Lack of Cross-Ventilation (The Wolfman) (2008), showcases a minute werewolf—the 1941 sub-titular character—doggedly hunched in a meager scale-model rendition of the archetypical barebones and rundown “shoebox” apartment. PUNCHLINE: it’s literally smaller than a shoebox. Our poor, angry-looking little Wolfster has nothing but a perched acoustic guitar, one as forlorn-looking as its surroundings, and a window view of a brick wall to keep him company. At the end of the day, the artistically idealistic and/or underfunded Bohemian dude is usually condemned to live the sad, frustrated life of the unkempt social outcast, right? And what about the ladies? Available Space (Various Figures) (2008) has plenty of them. They huddle “streetside” on an L-shaped diorama. The various vixens, vamps, and tramps here are all cramped to the left of a chained and padlocked door, the nightclub-style entrance to an “Alternate Space,” now “For Rent” (according to a very miniature sign). If Foster’s argument breaks down to complicity-at-the-expense-of-criticality, where the commodity-sign and its economy (or the economy at large) is concerned, is it possible that an artist might gain some genuine criticality by remaining in the bohème? And would such a condition be due only to a lack of commercial success? If Foster’s pervasive anxiety11 about the waning of criticality, formal or otherwise, holds, then “commercial” success is really the only “space available” for artists today.
McDonald’s work does not seem cynical in any of the (double-edged) ways Foster attributes to his group of ’80s art stars—even in spite of McDonald’s prior involvement in ARTCLUB2000, the (also, and in their own way, quasi- or pseudo-) critical, self-destructing group of young artists who found slightly different, but sometimes novel, or maybe just uniquely generational, ways to twist and turn in this persistent predicament—i.e, Cynical Reason12—in New York in the 1990s. McDonald’s sculptural ditties give earnest voice to both “fandom” and “critical art.” They make visible a schoolboy’s enthusiasm for the readymade’s potentialities as they have developed to date, even as they feed back into the genre’s own history, but they just as easily also attest to his gusto for fantasy/horror hogwash and sci-fi/superhero shit.
Take his thoroughly hilarious plastic pun in The Viewing (2022). McDonald has collected what must be every proprietarily distinct iteration of “the monster” in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in figurine form—from Boris Karloff to Peter Boyle’s depictions and beyond. These are arranged such that all the little Franks stand about, staging a wake for the largest of the ashen-faced little monstrosities who lies face-up, as if to suggest he alone had passed (but aren’t they all already dead?). Not only does the joke at the heart of McDonald’s piece rest on the Frankenstein story now in the public domain—he’s both dead and alive, or dead and then alive, and in part dead again now, apparently—it also relies on the “factitious,” “differential,” and “encoded” aspects of all the various monsters as they have, by commercial necessity, had to endlessly configure and reconfigure themselves through successive re-stagings over the years. It's the “virtual economy of the commodity sign”—“fandom”—or whatever, that forms the inextricable, immovable mental stage or pedestal well beyond any fourth wall upon which these works are jolted to life.
McDonald has gleefully and playfully done Steinbach-according-to-Foster: “Set in clever juxtapositions of form and color, [Steinbach’s] objects are precisely ‘related and different,’ related as commodities, different as signs.” And further:
[I]t is this relation-in-difference that we read, consume, fetishize, and Steinbach made us aware of it…. [H]e gave us little pieces of a great puzzle: an economic system based on a principle of equivalence that no longer eradicates difference so much as recodes it, exploits it, puts it into play in a calculus of sign exchange. At the level of the art work this system appears as design, and in the Steinbach version its code seemed total.13
In McDonald's work the "code" is certainly “total” but—as in Heinlein's Pantheistic Solipsism or the act of reading Heinlein even, and as we do while whiling our time away with Marvel movies and such—we tend to get passionately lost in the details. The code is the world, McDonald's world, our world, a “world-as-myth” with as many worlds within; whether we’re aware of it or not, there are consumers with cash in their pockets.
See Robert A. Heinlein, The Number of the Beast: A Parallel Novel About Parallel Universes (Rockville, MD: CAEZIK SF & Fantasy, 2022). Originally published in 1980, according to the book’s most recent publisher, Shahid Mahmud, this is one of two “parallel [universe] books” Heinlein wrote in the late 1970s (see Publisher's Note, 1). The other remained an unpublished manuscript until its retrieval—by Mahmud, who, himself, also attached the above subtitle to both books—and debuted with this volume. Together, they are two fictional examples of Heinlein's mixing of distinct narrative “universes” (i.e., cultural references).
Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 98–124.
Foster, The Return of the Real, 99.
Ibid., 104-105. See also, Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (London: Verso, 2019), passim. Emphasis mine.
Ibid., 107.
In Baudrillard’s novel and productive contestation, the concept of the fetish (“fetishism,” as he puts it) is something of a metaphysical error that occurs across the board—not only by “the whole repertoire of occidental Christian and humanist ideologies” (i.e., “colonists, ethnologists and missionaries”) but also, and this is where he really throws down the gauntlet, by Marxists in their discussions of “commodity fetishism.” See Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 75-82. Instead, Baudrillard offers the object-as-code, or the coded object (see note below).
Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 80. Quoted in Foster, The Return of the Real, 108.
Baudrillard, 80.
Foster, The Return of the Real, 108-109, 112. Also, Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 105-118. Foster invites us to consider Jasper Johns, as an earlier Midas, turning his Ballantine “cans” into bronze, while also establishing a visual cypher for the artist’s multidirectional power to commodify.
Although, according to the exhibition’s checklist, McDonald does log a few notable names as collectors.
That is, through his entire book. And though it was written in the ’90s, what’s really changed since then anyway? Foster’s nerves certainly haven't settled.
See Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), for Foster’s point of reference with respect to his titular “cynical reason,” and cynicism in general, in his essay.
Foster, 114. First emphasis mine.