Christian Holstad at Victoria Miro

Christian Holstad at Victoria Miro

09 February, 2009
by: Katuschka

With the coming of pop-president saviour Obama and the rotten core of the most powerful nation in the world more exposed than Miley Cyrus' spine, America-bashing has become a little passé. Their public façade of the domesticised utopia has been chipped away since the '50s and we have grown to embrace the trash, the junk food, the religious zeal, the contradictions and the dark societal undercurrent, without which we would have no cheesecake on a stick, no snide Channel 4 documentaries on abstinence programmes, no trucker caps and no kickass Batman films. Can you envision anything more horrifying and apocalyptic? The answer is no.  

However there are still those who wish to indulge in a little status-quo worrying in the most effective way known to man… through the medium of ART. Yes, Christian Holstad is sticking it to the man with new show American Standard, named after a toilet company; a pretty clear indicator which side of the America-hatin' fence he is on. Holstad, like a crazed craft anarchist, uses embroidery, de-weaving and soft sculpture to create iconography of privilege and deceit. He chooses as his weapon the self-congratulatory nature of America, what Thomas Pynchon aptly describes as 'the absolute fundamental belief in their voices that what they (Americans) are doing is right'.

Refreshingly, however, instead of heading straight for the political jugular with a paintbrush shiv, Holstad contemplates the props of power. This includes the flotsam and jetsam of cocktail parties, the ultimate illusory event of enforced importance and showcase of wealth, placing trashed and pristine platters of embroidered shrimp (some with debauched details such as condom wrappers and cigarette butts stubbed out in salad leaves) alongside plush snake partygoers. With snakes present in many of Holstad's pieces – thanks to their religious, phallic and altogether slithery connotations (and perhaps their easy to make sausage shapes) – the exhibition seems a bit like an avant-garde toy store.

The velvet rope, the equator of societal status between us mere mortals and A-Z grade celebs, crops up as a Klaus Oldenburg-esque soft sculpture, lying in a flaccid useless ring on the gallery floor. A red velvet noose also swings menacingly from the gallery rafters, a cunning visual metaphor for the extravagant uselessness of celebrity in a recession. Urinals made from towels, crushed shopping trolleys, sewn Nazi helmets and a confluence of gungy and partially shit-smeared objects (I checked, definitely not real…) round off the theme with an almighty middle finger to American values. It seems as though any minute American Idiot will play and Bruce Springsteen will stage a benefit.

Holstad has also created some of his 'eraserhead' drawings for the show, sadly not drawings of monstrous babies which look like diseased cocks, and radiator ladies, but newspaper which has been rubbed out and drawn over to recontextualise the original story. American Idol logos and heads of congress appear in Wedgewood china gravy boats alongside stories of student riots and racial murders. Details such as this, offer some fresh paint to an old canvas and overall this exhibition hovers in the middle ground of relevance. However, old habits die hard, and it's somewhat comforting to know that, like Jerry Springer or reruns of Friends, some slightly annoying things never change, and we can still get our bitch on for America's nightmare side.

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