Art in America Capsule Review of Foose's "The Lesser Arts"

Long has performance art sought gravitas, a fundamental dignity and serious bearing - here Foose adapts Karen Finley's self immolation (with chocolate instead of fire) to recontextualize butter, with its further associations with the traditional feminine role, or Woman as milkmaid, as sister mammal to it's lowing origin, as a post-structuralist Lucy catapulting this greasy yellow domestic signifier at some considerable velocity to the floor, where again it is trod upon like a surprised bannana slug obscured behind a curve in the sidewalk, where she takes the event as insignificant by itself, but must instead present this as fundamentally a painting process, the creative form engaging the oil paint-like material, which is fundamentally a colored fat, thus injecting her process into the oeuvre of abstract expressionist gesture and it's consequent dynamical relationship with the history of painting.

Here is where I break not with the concept but the execution - the strong pattern of whites and blacks on the floor are a random but useful insertion, with a certain presence due to the juxtaposition of organic gesture against pattern. But as a critical action, it seems incomplete when one recalls Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters' masterpiece "The Merzbau": a massive interior sculpture that Schwitters created in his own house nearly a century ago. The Merzbau displays, or involves, feces and urine, as well as the incorporaton of many kinds of detritus, such as, one must presume, butter and a primitive dadaist version of risoto. The curator of the Merzbau exibit proclaimed it" a kind of fecal smearing — a sick and sickening relapse into the social irresponsibility of the infant who plays with trash and filth". Foose here engages a more domestic smearing and attempts a highly charged attack on culinary servitude, but using composition and color to bring an aesthetic coherence to the political thrust. But then, of course, this same early critique failed to stop Hitler.

So we fault Foose not for concept or execution, nor even originality despite the ancient dadaistic traditions involved, but rather the type of butter - an unsalted Land O Lakes would have graced this happening with a far more subtle yellow.