model living

Went by Postmasters Gallery last week (http://www.postmastersart.com ) -- one of Chelsea's best for video/new media/conceptual work -- to see Guy Ben-Ner's fun 18 minute video "Stealing Beauty" (the show closed on the 16th).  In the video, which is shot guerilla-style in IKEA model rooms around the world without IKEA permission (you've got to love his chutzpah), the Israeli-born Ben-Ner presents a family sitcom (himself, two kids and wife) with domestic troubles and commodity angst.  IKEA shoppers occasionally wander in or gaze on the action, scenes shift between the different IKEA shoots (they get kicked out repeatedly), and all those Ivar bookcases and Svalka glasses have their price-tags on (I was reminded of the virtual price-tagging of the model apartment in the movie Fight Club).  When I got home, I noticed that the art critic Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine (my neighbor passes me all sorts of magazines when he's done with them) gave the show a great write-up (http://nymag.com/arts/art/reviews/43567), and his comments on the video's queer clash with sleek and clean Euro environments/families and on the issues of displacement/exile seem right on.

IKEA is, of course, an easy target on both economic (a massive, global, large box retailer of cheaply produced furniture), aesthetic (the clean anonymity of IKEA interiors) and related ideological grounds, although in the hierarchy of evil operators in the home decoration/lifestyle commodity-as-happiness industry that runs the gamut from ABC's Disney-fication of domestic space and penchant for uplifting narratives (Extreme Makeover - Home Edition) to Martha Stewart's unrealizable goal of perfect comfort and spiritual satisfaction, to the gazillion hours of home/food/dress programming currently on cable television, IKEA actually seems to be one of the least evil, if only for the fact that their sleek model home iconography doesn't seem to actively promote (1) elitism, (2) myths of nostalgia (unlike, say, the "mission style" stores Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware) or (3) a traditional vision of "family" (I can no longer watch Lidia Bastianich's cooking show without feeling attacked by the word "familia" at every fork-full of pasta).  While the mega-companies are the most egregious purveyors of life/style-as-commodity, I am personally just as suspicious of small-town furniture dealers, with their exaggerated claims of authenticity for rustic/country nostalgia and their hocking of quant but pointless bric-a-brac.  Would Ben-Ner's family drama become "natural" in some other retailer?, say a (imaginary) Baghdad Sears?  Why should it?

I admit, when I watch YouTube vlogs (or look at online porn), I often become absorbed by people's surroundings.  In the current state of the online world (dominated, of course, by relatively affluent western (particularly caucasian) youth who can afford video cameras and who have hours of free time to watch and produce videos), the most frequent loci of media production are (1) the student dorm room and (2) the comfortable suburban house.  Is there any place more alike than a student dorm: messy beds, IKEA style (here, modular and cheap has won the battle) laminated particle-board desks, movie and music posters... ?  (It is to hope that the ultimate self-expression and creativity that the internet is supposed to one day produce can surmount the ultimate degree of uniformity that our society has imposed upon its youth.)  

On the other hand, I am strangely affected by the off-putting or disconnected interiors that one sometimes glimpses behind everyday non-metropolitan people under 35: grandmotherly doilies or lace curtains, flowery and yellowed wallpaper, spindly wooden chairs with tie-on seat-cushions, and (my favorite) the wood-paneled carpeted basement media/computer room with beat-up couch and harsh lighting.  In their lack of homogeneous stylization, their accumulation of objects from various generations and places, their dust, angst, occasional squalor and furtive eroticism, these places conjure up remarkable complexities of being where issues of self and history and ideology are yet to be worked out in a clean and neat IKEA/Disney/Crate&Barrel way.  It would be interesting to see Ben-Ner invade these homes, and take on those (far more complicated) dynamics.