DON’T BOTHER WITH the back room at Café Select. Forget the basement of La Esquina.The new place to be in Soho is the burnt out meth lab on Wooster Street.
Beginning July 2 at the Deitch Projects annex on Wooster Street, you’ll find an artistic mishmash so thought provoking and racy that it will give the neighborhood’s usual debauched haunts a run for their (rolled up) money. I’m talking jars of mystery meat and faux fetuses, strewn kitty litter, a library, visual and auditory deconstruction, Chinese herbs, astrological pelts, the aforementioned meth lab, a blown up RV, aquarium rocks and a replicated penthouse art gallery. Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe, two New York-based artists completing their third collaboration, are the architects and alchemists behind this secret world.Welcome to the Black Acid Co-op.
The central aspect of the exhibition seems to explore how far America’s definition of counterculture has stretched over the last halfcentury.
Black Acid Co-op makes a Museum of Natural History out of society’s other side. A good starting point is the dropout room.This space references everyone’s favorite 1960s hippie movement, yet mixes a makeshift mosaic tent roof and walls decorated by roughly sewn pelts with astrology symbols. Native American signifiers dot the room’s odd wooden structures.
Shelves provide a dazzling series of random objects in jars straight out of an underground science laboratory.The basic elements (hippie kitsch) are familiar, but the combination with fractals, burn marks and holes in the wall takes the scene into another realm.
“We don’t think counterculture was something that necessarily happened at one time and changed into the mainstream. It’s more continuous,” reflects Lowe. “I mean, look at drugs as one of many examples.They’ve always been an integral part of counterculture, but it’s not like they just go away.They leave residue. Countercultures continue to find something new by mixing things together— through alchemy. I suppose the big counterculture thing nowadays would really be meth, which is a culmination of this idea in a way.” Methamphetamine, and its secretive production process, has been the main focus of Freeman and Lowe’s other habitat collaborations (Hello Meth Lab In The Sun in Marfa, Texas and Hello Meth Lab With A View in Miami during last year’s Art Basel).Those concepts reappear in the more expansive Black Acid Co-op. Step inside a blasted hole in the side of a torched RV and find destroyed chairs, exploded lights, beakers, tubes and soda jugs with pipes into jars, siphons and desk fans. It’s both stunning and horrifying in its intricate replication of the dank squalor that pervades meth labs in underground communities all across America.
“Starting out in Marfa with these ideas, we had so much space,” explains Freeman. “You could just walk into someone’s yard, chop down some cacti and they’d wave to you.” He laughs. “This current show gives us a more confined, boxed-in environment, yet that also opens up a ton of new possibilities.
One of things we’re really trying to convey is the crazy combination of urban people, neighborhoods and cultures right around this gallery.You have Chinatown, Soho and Canal Street, which is really a culture unto itself.
Think of all the undergrounds.” This comparison to New York neighborhoods and cultures is well reflected in the exhibit.
One room consists of a replica Chinese herb store with otherworldly posters and vials of mysterious plants decorating the worn cabinetry. Stare at the walls long enough and you’ll see the residue of the space’s past inhabitants and their strange activities.
Another unexpected space mimics an Uptown gallery and houses original paintings.The walls, so clean and white, seem odd in the context of the exhibit. But for Freeman and Lowe, this depicts a subversive twist on underground culture.
“The rich people have their underground cultures, too,” says Lowe. “It might seem a bit out of place, but these are all spaces where one can slip into different styles. How many people started in those Upper East Side dining rooms and then went downtown to become something else? Like a citizen of New York, a visitor to the exhibition can choose where they want to reside.”
The final piece of alchemy in the Black Acid Co-op comes from understanding how the stacked rooms fit together through physical connection. Freeman and Lowe use an architectural mastery (plus a healthy army of interns) to connect the rooms together via wires, sound, dingy fluorescent lights and incomplete overhead structures.The effect is total debasement.The hallways look like homes.The homes are only kitchens.The kitchens make drugs instead of food.The drugs bring people together and then erase them. It’s confusing, ambitious and really a sight to behold in an art world that’s finally returning to an era of intricate ambition.
At least pop your head in.
> Black Acid Co-op
Through Aug. 15, Deitch Projects, 18 Wooster St. (betw. Canal & Grand Sts.), 212-941-9475; Tues. through Sat., noon to 6, FREE.
