Deitch’s latest foray into the noncommercial is “Black Acid Co-op,” an immense, labor-intensive, maniacally contrived walk-through environment. A warren of some dozen rooms, interiors and passageways, it includes a burned-out home methamphetamine lab, a red-carpeted gallery of pseudo-artworks and a hippie haven.
Like Alice’s rabbit hole, “Black Acid Co-op” will take you as deep as you want to go, especially once you recognize the careful attention to detail throughout this mammoth effort. Nothing is accidental. Its disparate spaces sustain ever-closer readings and parsings, like a series of archaeological sites in perpetual excavation, and there are frequent cross-references.
The room-by-room shifts in reality have been aptly compared to jump-cut scenes in a film, with each door or — more likely — each hole in the wall introducing a different form of delusional retreat from the larger world. The varieties of societal detachment wending through the piece are echoed in recurring meditations on voyeurism, display and the remove of art and the museum. [via]
I’ve hit up this experience more than a few times at the Deitch Projects on Wooster and there’s no feeling I’ve had quite like walking into a meth lab Discovery Zone. The New York Times gives you an outstanding idea of what it’s like to visit, but I’d like to just throw out a reminder that the installation will close on August 15…that’s the end of this week!
And while you’re in the neighborhood, the same block actually, don’t forget to take a peek at the community memorial for Dash Snow. Yeahhh, I’m heading there again right now.
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