Michael Genovese
“We All We Got…”
Packer-Schopf Gallery
Layers of neon pink and green paper painted with bold letters are plastered over
the gallery wall like flyers that accumulate on urban buildings or discount signs at
grocery stores. These attention-grabbing colors, created from unmixed sign paint, draw
the viewer to concise yet open-ended, multilingual thoughts about society. Zora Neale
Hurston’s observation, “All my skin folk ain’t all my kin folk,” and the artist’s own
mantra, “We all we got,” are written in Korean, Urdu, German, French, Spanish, Polish,
and Bosnian on these humble posters. In the engravings displayed nearby, the two quotes
reappear alongside further social commentary and unknown names tangled within
baroque patterning. Where the signs are bright, outgoing, spontaneous, and fragile, the
intricate engravings on tar-colored sign substrate are dark, inward, laborious, and
relatively permanent. While the signs evoke grassroots advertising, the engravings evoke
dangerous and secret forms of expression, such as scratchings on trains and buses, in
bathroom stalls, or on desks at the back of a classroom. Executed during his residency at
the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (January 15–February 24, 2008), these textbased
works draw on familiar modes of communication encountered at stores or on the
street in order to capture contemporary voices.
To better record language that is alive, Genovese created this set of signs and engravings
in collaboration with visitors and staff at the MCA. Avoiding static dictionary definitions,
he enlisted native speakers at the museum to translate the phrases he ultimately painted
on neon posters. Likewise, the intricate engravings produced during this residency were
built up from messages carved by museumgoers. Because of his insistence on a human
element in his work, Genovese’s interaction with everyday life as art has a sincerity that
is lacking in the innovative contributions of Marcel Duchamp and Pop Art to this terrain.
While Duchamp appropriated ordinary objects, Genovese, informed by his prior career as
a specialty sign painter and sign contractor, creates his pieces with his own hands. While
Pop artists tended to aestheticize the vernacular, Genovese’s work is grounded more in a
collaborative process than in an aesthetic. Genovese effectively resurrects Josef Beuys’
conception of “social sculpture”—whereby social interaction is a work of art and every
person is an artist—without the utopian promise Beuys championed. Though his works
often involve painting, then, it is clear that Genovese’s medium is not strictly paint, nor is
it simply industrial sign materials; he also works with the abstract media of language and
human interaction.
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Aron Packer
Packer Schopf Gallery
942 W. Lake
Chicago, IL 60607
312.226.8984
http://www.aronpacker.com
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