When the photos of Bernie Kaminiski solo show filled my Instagram feed last fall, I nearly walked past them, mistaking the TV producer-turned-artist’s papier-mâché recreations of everyday objects for the real deal. Although these scale sculptures of various trash drawers (ketchup packets, ball-point pens, orange-handled scissors) and other household items (spice jars, cookbooks, a potted plant) closely mimic their actual counterparts with exquisite detail, a longer look revealed the texture of paint and paper and the endearing human quirks of hand-drawn typography. The making of these objects began as a quarantine project for Kaminiski, while his typical television projects were on hold.
At the onset of the pandemic shutdowns, a cultural shift occurred in our relationships with domestic spaces and the objects that inhabit them. Flour disappeared from grocery store shelves as American kitchens filled with artful baked goods, like sourdough breads and focaccia topped with thinly sliced vegetables in colorful designs. Sales of puzzles, house paint and craft supplies soared. People gathered on Zoom for happy hours and dance parties and craft evenings. The home became the center of life in a more intense way for many, and practical household projects reigned supreme. In the wake of these periods of homebound isolation, art materials and patterns derived from home seem charged with new meaning and a strong sense of reinvention.
In a circular motion, the last art exhibit I saw in “before time” was Making known: craftsmanship in art, 1950-2019 at the Whitney, and when I ventured into museums again, the show (which ran until early 2022) was my first stop. During the cloistered days spent indoors, cooking every meal at home and cleaning every dish in a relentless loop, my mind kept returning to artist Liza Lou. “Kitchen” beaded behemoth, a 168 square foot scale sculpture of a kitchen made from millions of shimmering glass beads, which served as the de facto centerpiece of the exhibit. The trappings of domestic life fill the glittering work – a stacked sink, a pie coming out of the oven, a dustpan, a grocery list, a table littered with breakfast fixings. A feeling of entrapment persists in its severity, a feeling closely associated with quarantine. More than a quarter century after Lou laid down the final pearl, the commentary for “Kitchen” is sharper than ever. “I think it’s so interesting how you can never look at a piece of art outside of the history and the times you live in,” Lou said in a Hyperallergic interview. “He’s always, always, always aware of what’s going on around you.”
Sculptor Tom Friedman, who sometimes uses everyday objects as art materials (such as pencils, plastic cups and tube socks), also drew inspiration from the realm of home cooking for his 2020 sculpture “Looking Up”. The 10-foot-tall figure, gazing skyward, stood outdoors on the Rockefeller Center campus for the first two months of 2021, after being installed on President Biden’s inauguration day, a day the artist said he viewed with optimism, as the beginning of a new era. The crinkled texture of the sculpture’s shiny cast stainless steel surface came from a mix of aluminum pie plates, baking pans and roasting pans that Friedman purchased at grocery stores. At the same cultural moment that pandemic bakers began to pursue professional ambitions and flood culinary schools with interest, according to the New York Timesthis sculpture stood on Fifth Avenue as the human embodiment of the bakery, in a position that exudes hope for the future.
Housed inside the Turn Gallery, a serious apartment-like art space, Bernie Kaminiski’s solo show had a trompe-l’oeil feel, mixing real and handmade elements in the “Parlor Room” of the place. I walked right past a beige intercom before realizing it was constructed from paper, while a silver laptop on the gallery’s velvety sofa, it turned out, was real and belonged to the gallery attendant. Warm and inviting, the space is full of deeply human details. Sometimes Kaminski said That’s rightit will choose an item simply “to see if [he] can figure out how to do it. Something magical happens in the metamorphosis of an anonymous mass-produced object into a tactile, handmade version, with traces of the maker’s hands, made more charming by fun mash-ups (a hamburger on a desk, a communion cake with a pile of shreds National geographic magazines).
A few days after the end of the Kaminiski show in October 2022, The retrospective of Meret Oppenheim opened at the Museum of Modern Art. Images of the Swiss artist’s most famous work, dating from 1936: a porcelain cup, saucer and spoon covered in beige gazelle fur, simply titled “Objet”. Exhibition texts describe the piece as “perhaps the most notorious Surrealist object”.
Like Lou’s ‘Kitchen’, Oppenheim’s ‘Object’ resonates through the decades with the repetition of daily domestic rituals, in this case the preparation of a cup of tea or coffee. Fur makes washing up cozy, absurd, or uncomfortable, depending on your perspective — feelings associated with COVID nesting. As real estate journalist Ronda Kaysen wrote in the New York Times in December 2021, “Americans have spared little expense over the past two years to transform their homes into havens, ambitiously reimagining their spaces in an effort to navigate a pandemic in comfort. But at some point, even the softest cushions start to suffocate.
And yet, the way Oppenheim transforms ordinary kitchen utensils into something extraordinary – an enduring surreal icon, no less – speaks to a need for transformation. His approach mixes a contrast of form, texture and utility infused with a wink sense of humor.
During an overwhelming era of hardship after hardship, pandemic and “tripledemic“and endemic, the attraction of everyday household objects seems to continue to appear in sculptural forms in museum and gallery exhibitions with even pre-pandemic pieces shining in a different light and new works appearing as harbingers- runners of something, dare I say, hopeful. By reimagining the commonplace in deliciously weird and witty ways, pandemic creativity feels like an invitation to seek beauty and possibility, even in what is humble, imperfect and seemingly ordinary.
