Exhibitions

The Collapse of Neoliberalism
John Miller

John Miller has been exploring notions of identity, economics, and social class throughout his forty-year practice. His latest exhibition at Metro Pictures concerns, among other things, a sense of everyday malaise and life’s petty annoyances. It features a series of large-format photographs, two installations, and a video work titled Toll Free.

Exhibition The Collapse of Neoliberalism
Artists John Miller
Venue Metro Pictures, New York
All images Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Mannequins are an iconic theme in this show. Miller characterizes them as simple anthropomorphized clothing racks that can nonetheless prompt unnerving degrees of identi cation. Miller’s current photographs, installations, and videos insert these gures into familiar, even normalizing, scenarios that underscore their function as objects of desire onto which we, as both spectators and consumers, project a miasma of eeting trends and fashions. These projections convey not only the sphere of popular culture but also the expectations of artworks operating within it. The eight large-format photographs, with titles such as The Tip of the Iceberg or Sleeper Cell, feature various mannequin groupings posed against odd, vaguely evocative settings—generic photo backdrops Miller purchased mostly on Amazon. They depict anything from the cockpit of a spaceship to hospital beds to a diagram that references Rosalind Krauss’s essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” The installation Project for a Revolution in New York is a schematic mannequin rock band seemingly locked in a state of detached contemplation. This deadpan ensemble suggests that what was once a counterculture has devolved into a mode of marketing. Another installation, Epic Theater, restages the kind of photo-shoot Miller used to produce the pictures in this show. Here, the lights and props are real, but the backdrop paper and the stands that support it are merely images printed onto a wallpaper mural. In the video Toll Free, on view in the back gallery, a camera slowly rotates from a central vantage point located in the middle of a busy intersection, picturing the view as if an observer was seated on a slowly rotating of ce chair. Generic “on hold” music plays softly in the background. As oating images of desk phones and mannequin hands come and go, robocalls urge listeners to call back immediately. These sequences alternate with close-ups of the inert face of a male mannequin.

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