Joe Scanlan: Pay for your pleasure (reprise)

About the Exhibition

Throughout his career, Joe Scanlan has investigated the distinctions that we make between objects made as art and objects made as products for commerce. He has exhibited works of art made from the refuse around his house as well as functional objects such as bookshelves, entertainment centers, and even underwear with removable parts which can be worn for several days. For his solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, on view through March 29, 1998, Scanlan will create an installation work that explores the nature of art as a commodity and the possibility of commodities being considered art. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue featuring an interview with the artist conducted by MCA Curator of Exhibitions Amada Cruz, who organized the show as part of the museum’s Refco Projects Series. It is Scanlan’s first solo exhibition at a U.S. museum.

Scanlan’s installation, entitled Pay for Your Pleasure (reprise), is a reprise of Los Angeles-based artist Mike Kelley’s Pay for Your Pleasure, a work Scanlan helped produce as a staff member at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago in 1988. Kelley’s work reflected on notions of art’s responsibility to society. It presented colorful banners featuring pictures of artists and writers along with statements they made about the ways in which art and the artist exist in a place beyond law and morality. The installation included a painting by serial killer John Wayne Gacy and a donation box for Illinois agencies who aid crime victims.

Scanlan was profoundly influenced by Kelley’s piece and uses it as the framework for his MCA installation, in which he pictures numerous personalities from both the art world and popular culture alongside statements they have made regarding the social or economic position of the work of art. On a pedestal in the middle of the gallery Scanlan will place a first-edition pair of Nike Air Jordan athletic shoes, which he considers to be one of the most successful works of art of our time.

The effect of the installation is to question art’s ability to have broad mass appeal while still maintaining a high level of intelligence and beauty. Scanlan asks us to consider what properties art objects and commercial products have in common and why contemporary art does not achieve the mass appeal of commercial products. Likewise, he asks us to consider why some commercial objects, despite the high degree of skill and invention they exhibit, do not achieve the status of art. In posing these questions, Scanlan asserts that the marketplace might be a better standard for judging works of art than traditional methods of art historical criticism.

Scanlan was born in Stoutsville, Ohio, in 1961. He received his BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design in 1983 and attended The School of The Art Institute of Chicago during the 1985-86 school year. The artist served as assistant director and editor at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Scanlan, who currently lives and works in New York, is a frequent contributor to such art journals as frieze, Art Issues, and Art Scribe. His work was featured in the Documenta IX exhibition in Kassel, Germany, in 1992, and has been exhibited numerous times nationally and internationally.