Messenger Boys Lapinski’s work philosophically expands Kyle Dancewicz Steinbach’s prepositional project of “next to” across space and time, outlining a realm of appearance populated by objects who stand in for Do Lisa Lapinski’s sculptures know each other? themselves, but also for the particular ways in Is that a very dumb question to ask? Since the late which their sovereign characteristics are chopped 1990s Lapinski has made sculptures and installa- up, distributed, and received. A small red chair tions that bring handmade, altered, and reproduced hanging by its face in Little My Chair #3 (2017), objects together in apparent conversation. Critics for one, depicts Little My (1950 – ), a supporting who have written on her exhibitions have often character from Tove Jansson’s (1914 –2001) imagined that their disparate elements are arranged Finnish-Swedish Moomin fairytales, first with some kind of syntax in mind, speaking to each published as novels in the 1940s. In another other and the viewer in “an extremely protracted work simply called Little My Chair 2 (2011), and complicated form of address.” i But given their she appears similarly compromised, with her stillness, their muteness, their blank stares and stern, ageless face removed and her upper body expressionless or absent faces, the idea of conver- swapped for tightly stretched chair caning. sational content in Lapinski’s sculptures seems less important than envisioning the structure that In Lapinski’s exhibitions, Little My and other determines who can talk to whom, on what terms, characters meet each other on neutral ground at and with what vocabulary. different phases in their respective processes of replication, dissemination, and brand extension. Writing on Haim Steinbach for a catalog in 2008, Like Little My, they may enter as reupholstered, Lapinski borrows from Hegel to describe the way almost-found objects, imported into the exhibition that Steinbach’s shelves and rows of objects work: from foreign contexts after some heavy, often “Appearance is not a realm where difference is craft-based altering. They may also be handmade constant, but one where equals become unequal and avatars, partial and unrecognizable, as though unequals become equal (necessarily); and this struc- appearing in a different aspect of their being. In ture of appearance is the structure of the object that this category, Holly Hobby Lobby Bow #1 (2017), appears.” ii Avoiding a more conventional reading an angular upright bow made of wood and a skin of Steinbach’s work as “commodity sculpture,” or of matte black paint, stands in for Holly Hobbie as concerned with the ability of display to activate (Late 1960s – ), a frontier-girl character known dimensions of an object’s social history, Lapinski from figurines, stationery, and similar items that instead tries to understand what is happening when might be found in a greeting card store. Tobacco one object is put next to another, and the two are Camel (2010) is a plusher version of Camel’s thought together and thought apart at the same time. flat cigarette carton logo, and wears a coat of the material he pushes. But he is not Joe Camel This is not to say that Lapinski is particularly Gustave Miklos (1888–1967), another achiever about? Generic familiarity like the Miklos birds (1987–1997), an attractive, bipedal cartoon camel interested in visualizing the commercial mach- of the “higher power of generic style” that has in Nightstand, or the barely-legible painting of a who appeared as a company mascot until 1997, inations of intellectual property or licensing. A turned out to be modernist sculpture. Nightstand skeleton-witch trudging through a swamp perched when the Federal Trade Commission banished higher dimension of her work is concerned with recounts the sweep of early American design into above them, which looks like a German painting him for appealing too much to minors. iii the splintered integrity of characters, objects, and Midcentury mass market into entangled legacies but is actually modeled on a blown-up textile styles as they appear in the present, often severed of craft practices and industrial aesthetics, all pattern? Or familiar within the idiosyncratic That Little My, Holly Hobbie, and the spirit of from their source materials or original referents. uttered in one breath, while the sculpture itself suspension of disbelief that requires Holly Hobbie Joe Camel can somehow all exist together in She semi-directly engages, for example, with explodes into a mess of parts with all of its draw- to appear as a knotted ribbon with an Atari-esque their various deformations, “next to” each other illustrator Patrick Nagel (1945 –1984). In a series ers flung opened and emptied out. The exposed silhouette in order for her to communicate with but fragmented and emotionally “beside them- of paintings-in-sculptures titled Th th th th th drawers of Nightstand perform a constant swing Little My about different expectations for young selves,” so to speak, represents two related regis- Snow White (2010), Lapinski reproduces found between expression, expressing expression, and women in Scandinavia and New England, or ters of appearance, both marked by desperation. paintings of bikini-clad women executed, proba- expressionlessness in Lapinski’s work: it’s an whatever else they have in common. One register senses the processes of dissolution bly without direct referent, in the style of Nagel, exasperated, ecstatic gesture (or gasp) that yields and reconstitution that have resulted, for example, “the most successful & anonymous American nothing inside, only more on top. Appearance, Lapinski’s work shows, is not pure in Little My’s debased yet ergonomic form.iv artist of the 1980s.” vi Nagel, like other figures and direct, nor is it completely structured by The other tries to string these alienated objects who appear in Lapinski’s work, is extremely Alongside the perverse joy of edging up to external forces of economics, aesthetics, or other. together with tenuous narrative and imagined iconic, but is unnamable for most. His off-ico- Lapinski’s work with sympathy or pity for her Her work trades instead in complex, extended in- relations. Together they might behave as a dia- nicity comes back around as ubiquity. History spiraling subjects, there is a greater and more teractions of misidentification, misremembering, gram, which, as another artist recently described, forgets his particular position while his graphic perverse seduction in starting to doubt that any tracing the intricacies of influence, offshoots, af- is something that “creates a certain dynamic formal tropes, sharply reduced facial features, and object, character, image can convey anything finities, productive and unproductive associations, that can be seen as a form. It is not something bleached-out skins define 1980s popular erotics. about its own “object history,” as if it might false morphological comparisons, dead ends of that follows. It is a machine that is producing Nagel reaches a “higher power of generic style have nothing to express but an object present, interpretation, revised assessments. It picks apart something different than itself as part of itself, called existence,” a diagnosis also worked out in or the fact of itself. Consideration of any ele- the world to figure out if things are becoming something that is different each time a repetition Lapinski’s writing on Haim Steinbach, objects, ment in Lapinski’s exhibitions is locked into a more different or more the same. They definitely occurs.” v In Lapinski’s hands, the diagram is a and appearance.vii larger accounting of floating hints of characters know what they’ve been through, but do Lisa condition that feels like a cross-over special, or in an equalized world without stories, often Lapinski’s sculptures really know each other? The an expanded universe, as in the popular branding A sculpture like Nightstand (2005) pushes a punctuated by the uncomfortable alienation of only work in the show that actually speaks says: and content-production phenomenon that allows dynamic of integrity and ubiquity as well, but misunderstanding or non-recognition. “What do you think I am, a messenger boy?” viii for certain comic book characters to break off directs its energies at the textures and aesthetic into their own side stories. It can also result in imperatives of modernism and other standardizing There is always a fidgety question to be asked of the jarring revelation that two separate cinemat- forces. At its core is an assortment of painstak- Lapinski’s work. What do all of these people and ic worlds are actually the same world, where ingly handmade Shaker-style sewing chests, all things have to do with each other? Are Little My, previously unrelated characters pass seamlessly of which serve as pedestals for caned screens, a Holly Hobbie, and Snow White (1812 – ) all on into and out of each other’s lives without much jewelry display hand, a crystal vase with feathers, the same page? Maybe a better question to ask concern for their own histories. and photographs of Art Deco birds by artist is: what kind of familiarity is Lapinski’s work IMAGES WITH ESSAY i. Giovanni Intra, “Lisa Lapinski: Sculpturicide,” Artext 76 Top to Bottom, Left to Right (Spring 2002), 50–55. ii. Lisa Lapinski, “Raider’s Blanket,” in Special Project: Holly Hobby Lobby Bow #1, 2016. Wood and paint. 49 × 49 × 7 in. Mr. Peanut, Haim Steinbach on Mike Kelley (Los Angeles: (124.5 × 124.5 × 17.8 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Kristina Kite Overduin and Kite, 2008), 17. In an essay on a Haim Gallery, Los Angeles. Steinbach work installed in a guest bedroom in Mike Kelley’s house, Lapinski references part of Hegel’s distinction Little My #3 (Shaker board), 2017. Wood, tung oil, Little My chair between appearance and essence. and hardware.