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'Underground World Experience' goes back to the future
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SANTA FE — The animated television show “SpongeBob SquarePants,” known for its mid-century modern kitsch aesthetic, has a running gag of using wildly unpredictable time cards that say anything from “A Few Moments Later,” to “One Eternity Later.” The absurd contraction and dilation of time is part of the show’s humor.
The artists who comprise Future Retrieval, Katie Parker and Guy Michael Davis, engage in serious research- and craft-based projects, but their sense of time is equally malleable. Their exhibition at Form & Concept, “Underground World Experience,” toggles between 1970s home decor, earlier forms of utopian modernism and coral reefs that are thousands of years old. While the duo is not nearly as zany as “SpongeBob,” they’re not entirely straight-faced, either.
Cartoony ceramic knickknacks inspired by branched finger coral rest on a display case in the faux-Asian style of 1920s furniture designer Paul Frankl. A ceramic urn in muted 1970s orange, tan and misty teal rests on an ultra-plush shag rug. The coral sculptures and the urn, as well as the ceramic wall pieces in the show, use the same ’70s palette, and they all have the same texture: grids of floral polyps joined by a mysterious, lava-like mortar that drips and oozes. The floral bits look like those prepackaged royal icing cake decorations hanging in grocery bakery aisles. It’s an intriguing blend of high and low culture that brings to mind Mike Kelley’s garish, grotto-like “Chinatown Wishing Well” from his 1999 installation, “Framed and Frame.”
The retro feel of the show also made me think of Edd Byrnes’ 1959 novelty song “Kookie’s Mad Pad,” a beatnik bop about an apartment with “blue suede drapes,” “alpaca lampshades” and “plaid lightbulbs.” That song happened to be released just three months after the architect Frank Lloyd Wright died, marking a moment in American culture when Wright’s high-minded design principles were rapidly morphing into less artistically rigorous styles which were, nevertheless, more fun. It coincided with the rise of so-called “Googie” architecture — the “Jetsons”-like shapes and neon colors of Southern California coffeehouses and Route 66 roadside attractions.
Parker and Davis live in Scottsdale, Arizona, home to Wright’s winter home and studio, Taliesin West, built in desert masonry to blend into its environment. They recently spent time at the historic home as part of the Taliesin Fellowship’s new programming initiative to work with artists in the region. Much of “Underground World Experience” was inspired by their time there.
When Wright first conceived of Taliesin West in 1937, there was nothing else like it. But by the mid-1970s, practically every diner and fast-food joint in the United States had been retrofitted with natural stone walls and wood paneling — a phenomenon that the architectural historian Philip Langdon, in his book “Orange Roofs, Golden Arches,” called “the browning of America.” With the rise of postmodern architecture in the 1980s and ’90s, the fun, Googie-style shapes came back with a vengeance, although the architectural color palette remained mostly brown and muted.
This dialectical punch-counterpunch of popular and vernacular design styles over the decades is reflected in the work of Future Retrieval, whose deep dive into the Taliesin Fellowship’s library allowed them to discover, within Wright’s own archive, the seeds of modernism’s undoing and the emergence of new possibilities for the future.
Unsurprisingly, mushrooms are a big inspiration for the duo. Not only were mushrooms a popular design motif in the 1970s — in keeping with the overall look of the show — but the idea of new life springing from things dead and gone fits with the spirit of their practice. In addition to the ceramics, the rug and the shelf, Future Retrieval has included a few cut-paper pieces that look like marbled paper. Parker said those works were inspired by an early 19th-century book on mycology they found in the Lloyd Library in Cincinnati during a separate research project she and Davis did in 2019. Although those designs are nearly 200 years old, they feel very ’70s — proof that design trends, like mushrooms, are subject to cycles of death and rebirth.
From a technical standpoint, Parker and Davis are expert craftspeople, which I know because I saw a number of professional ceramicists at the gallery opening marveling at the work, unable to figure out how they had done it. Despite their obvious mastery, there’s an intentional imprecision that makes the work feel as warm and human as a hand-knit sweater.
If Wright was interested in ennobling the domestic experience through good design, Parker and Davis are interested in how people actually live. Outdated décor, touches of kitsch and deliberately imperfect craft objects: These are what make a living space comfy.
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So, go see Future Retrieval’s mad rad pad at Form & Concept, and reflect on the history and future of design.
Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the Albuquerque Journal. He covers music, visual arts, books and more. You can reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com.
