Leslie Raymond
Graham Gallery/South Raw Space
524 Central Avenue NW at 6th, Suite G, Albuquerque A few years ago, back before I knew or cared much about the world of contemporary art, I read a story about Joseph Beuys which, in a small way, changed my life-- it was like getting the joke for the first time. The story involved one of Beuys' fat pieces (Beuys often worked in gat as a medium) and what happened to it after his death. Apparently, agter his death, Beuys left his stydio and its contents to his favorite student. The student, preparing to move in, had hired a cleaning company for a couple of days before anyone noticed that a triangular lump of fat, which had been wedged into a corner of the studio, was missing. Ordinarily, this wouldn't have been a problem: usually, cleaning implies that you should remove the lump of rancid fat in the corner. In this particular instance, though, the lump of fat was the twinn of another lump of fat which had somld for $50,000 two years before. A much-publlicized lawsuit ensued; after about a year of court battles, the new owner of Beuys' studio was awarded a dollar (the judge, although apparently convinced that the lump was, in fact, art,wasn't too impressed with it). The point of this story is to illustrate that, although it happens infrequently, household chores and art do occasionally mix. The two mix with somewhat greater effect in the case of Leslie Raymond's current installation Mastication Zone II

The installation is composed primarily of pancakes-- hundreds of poison, strychnine-laced pancakes. They hang from the walls on pushpins, laid out in oppressively tidy array; they float, glued in grid patterns on the windows; they lie in a heap, a mound, almost covering, spilling over a video monitor. The monitor shows a tape-loop of a mouth endlessly chewing bite after bite of pancakes. The overall effect is one of almost unbearable repetition-- day after day of housework, of endless breakfasts, stretching out in tidy array. But all this tidiness is undercut by two things. One is the pancakes themselves: they refuse to look regulated, insisting on being bumpy and irregularly shaped, each one retaining something of the character of a discrete event. Plus, they refuse to stay neatly on the walls, drying up and crumbling to the floor in untidy little heaps. Housework and life are both like this: entropy rules. Order, try as we might, never really wins, and the truth of this always comes out-- sometimes to horrific effect. Which is what the second element (and underlying theme of the installation) is about. There's a sign at the entrance to the installation, recounting the (her)story of a woman who could no longer stomach her abusive husband, could no longer tolerate a life poinlessly devoted to losing a fighting battle against entropy, all at someone else's behest. So she killed him: strychnine in the pancakes. Chaos rules.

by Mark Van de Walle
THE Magazine, September 1993

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1993

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