"Booze and Bacon"
An aroma wafts through Slow: This show’s title is no metaphor. Pork and alcohol didn’t just inspire the quirky projects on view; they’re incorporated into much of the art.
Visiting “Booze and Bacon” feels like stumbling on the aftermath of a great party. Captions are scrawled on the walls in pencil. Mican Morgan’s home-brewed dandelion wine was consumed at the opening, but she leaves behind a bottle adorned with her lively illustration of a police raid on moonshiners. Michael Hunter got wasted to create Untitled on a Private Beach (2010), and headed to the beach with some self-hardening clay, which he rolled along the sand. The resulting ugly monolith reflects the impossibility of conveying one’s personal hedonistic experience.
Most of the artists made their works in response to the show’s wacky theme, and many experiment with materials they otherwise never use. Unlike on Bravo’s Work of Art, these strategies yield lighthearted, innovative projects. I could have watched Brad Johns’s untitled readymade (pictured) for hours: As a fan oscillates, it tips over a bourbon bottle until it almost touches the floor, but Johns has calibrated the distance between bottle and fan—and the amount of bourbon—so carefully that the bottle never flops over.
While there are a few too many inside jokes, pieces such as William Newhouse’s exquisite silverpoint drawing of two male nudes frolicking outdoors with a pig let us in on the Dionysian fun. Still, I’m glad Helen McElroy kills viewers’ buzz with photos of an adorable piglet—wearing a BABY BACON T-shirt.
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