Curator

 Paul Smith

Contributing Artist

 Nicholas Amsel

Exhibition Statement as Preserved in the SUGS/SITE Archives:

The Dinner Was Ruined is an exhibition of paintings. Like many of its kind, The Dinner Was Ruined contends with a weighty past by querying the moderinst roots of contemporary art. Classic themes – heroism, the bourgeois interior, psycholoism and obscurantism (not to mention the suffix itself) – are addressed in the most direct fashion. Nicholas Amsel’s (BFA 2015) work raises intriguing questions about the persistance of painting’s concerns. A common pretension of North Atlantic Modernsim is the eternality of its themes – so often divested of their material conditions. By coinciding Lucio Fontana’s cut canvas with a Japanese author’s ritual suicide, Amsel sugests that even the most stringent formal experiments have their roots in a romantic – and properly bourgeois – set of practices. It is no coincidence that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the ascension of the psychological novel alongside the commonly painted bourgeois interior. Psychoanalysis itself might be little more than parlour-room drama. The inteiror was heralded as a new universal to strive for – something held common to all (now articulated in the mass appeal and distribution of inteiror design blogs, magazines, and materials, as is the regulated psychic structure planned by Charcot and elaborated by Freud. How could we resist a little pedagogy or a little obsession? Half the show grasps the aformentioned tropes through murder mysteries and obsurantism. Later, the gallery itself performs the bourgeois interior through on idyllic modernist hero – Yukio Mishima, postwar writing great, failed revolutionary, fascist, and gay. He becomes the emblem of Amsel’s concerns, and the crucible into which modernism – and its presence today – is thrown. Mishima’s framed macho postures are set in soft lavenders and grays. This scheme is less a defanging than a nostalgic slight, realizing the same confusion of modern life Mishima focused on, obsessed with persona to the point of death, repressed and trying to reinstate the Japanese Emperor. Using Mishima as a object of obsession, is less about reflecting on the conditions of postwar Japan than it is highlighting (still modern) media by which we consume hallowed literary heros. By reverting to a specifically claustrophobic environment of the bourgeois inteiror concerned with the persistence of Heros and their strange (and often idealized) fixations on donesticit, The Dinner Was Ruined exhibtions those few tendencies that despite our best attempts at escape, persist in our fixations today. Like the obsessed boy parodied to great result, Amsel’s work fixates on faux-universals to the near exclusion of all else. But there’s always a little indeterminacy in the plot: is the man lying in a pool of blood, bile, or piss? Can Mishima fail to be a hero? Is death inscribed in the work, or is this just another overdetermined conceit? To quote Mishima on what might be any encounter with affect, “his own heart seemed to him ot be much like an arrow stripped of the fleshing white feathers that gave it direction.” It is this joy of the murder-mystery novel – not so far as a seduction, but still a drawing curiosity – that brings the work close to us. Touching lightly on hallowed subjects might be the best way to touch them at all: by falling prey to their attraction, and suspecting resistance to a given constant, we can find new ways to as the same old questions – but even better, to see why they’re still asked.