ART CITIES:N.York-Julie Becker
Since the 1990s, Julie Becker’s (1972-2016) multimedia practice has activated vacant interior scenes with psychological resonance. Working in drawing, video, photography and installations, Becker portrays spaces expelled of human presence, populated instead with indices thereof that accumulate to layered narratives. Often employing visual tools such as dioramas and miniatures, Becker folds dichotomies of the public and the private, the factual and the fictional, the fantastical and the abject.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: MoMA Archive
The exhibition “I must create a Master Piece to pay the Rent” is the first Μuseum survey devoted to the work of Julie Becker. Inspired by the psychological, cinematic, and physical geographies of her hometown of Los Angeles, Becker produced a rarely-seen body of installations, sculptures, drawings, photographs, and videos immersed in the human psyche’s formulation of truth, fiction, and myth. First presented at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in 2018, the exhibition features an expanded presentation of Becker’s work, including the artist’s formative installation “Researchers, Residents, A Place to Rest” (1993-96), a large architectural complex created while she was a student at Cal Arts. This major piece is joined by more than 60 photographs, works on paper, video installations, and sculptures. The exhibition also features the largest group of works to be shown together from “Whole”, a multimedia project that started in 1999was still ongoing at the time of the artist’s death. These works center on a run-down home in the Echo Park neighborhood of East Los Angeles that the California Federal Bank let the artist rent cheaply on the condition that she remove the belongings of the former tenant, who had passed away from AIDS-related complications. At turns embellishing or skewering the idylls of the 20th Century American dream, Becker’s singular aesthetic visions articulate the fantasies, nightmares, and dispossessions underpinning the social imaginary of late capitalism, with special emphasis on the loneliness and estrangement that results from social inequity. Drawing from sources as diverse as Stephen King’s “The Shining”, Kay Thompson’s children’s book “Eloise”, and Disney’s “The Gnome-Mobile”, Becker found inspiration in the Lifetime television network, and popular lore about the karmic convergences between MGM’s 1939 musical fantasy “The Wizard of Oz” and Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon”. Dream scenarios weave throughout Becker’s work, and her drawings feature fantastical inventions and landscapes. Her architectural spaces expand and contract, both realized at actual scale and in miniature. Becker’s work reflects her own personal experiences living in precarious spaces, both as the child of itinerant artist parents moving from one generic Los Angeles apartment complexes to another, or later as an adult living in a dilapidated building caught in the flux of real estate speculation. Within these works, the artist’s chosen cultural references collide, rendering interior space as psychically charged and provisional, conjuring sites that function both as refuge and escape.
Info: MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue at 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, New York, Duration: 9/6-2/9/19, Days & Hours: Mon, Thu & Sat-Sun 12:00-18:00, Fri 12:00-20:00, www.moma.org
