Triple Diesel

The TD crew is a hung jury on Dash Snow's show at Rivington Arms.



The collages are weathered, assembled on yellowing paper and remnants of used books, some covered in dusty, second-hand frames. They include newspaper text, vintage porno pics, and weapons arranged in serpentine totems. The limited palette makes the images more iconic and sinister. However, they seem to carry a juvenile, priapic fixation on sex and weapons. The swastikas don't help. (Actually, we didn't count them, but sense that they were ubiquitous.) You probably knew someone in high school obsessed with knives, spiked bats, and Rotten dot com.

The assemblages are almost formless. Snow continues his book installations, first unveiled at the Whitney Biennial. The used paperbacks, about psychopaths, serial killers, satan-worshippers, and weirdos, are stacked in the back room as walls of a fort, with a blanket canopy hanging above. He's also used books as pedestals for vitrines containing more objects, and then there's the glass-covered box with hypodermic needles, boner-shaped lighters, knives, cigarette butts, and prescription medicine bottles (also recently used by Sarah Sze and Jean Shin). It's kind of like snooping in the desk drawer of a white-trash meth addict (or maker) and you can imagine him making a list of these transgressive trinkets.

Snow seems the anti-kitsch; everything is gross and rotting and severely wounded. But then it's all so easy and obvious, it becomes its own variety of kitsch. Thomas Hirschhorn's use of bullet-ridden bodies seems far more terrifying and poignant.

So what does it all mean? Snow fixates on and aggressively thrusts forward an underground/underbelly/viceland of sex and drugs and misanthropy, a world available only by the black market, dark alleys, and knowing where to look. Does the new work function like his Polaroids, as ambassadorial reportage from the fronts of drug-fueled parties and vandalism? Or is he simply searching out and pasting together shocking content, no better than Marilyn Manson? And how do we equate the bin Laden and Hitler imagery with the far less destructive drugs, guns, and porn? Or is this a critique of Bush's America, abrasive and aggressive only because it's, like, really frustrated?

We raise the questions but also hesitate because Dash Snow is a scenester. Here is Ryan McGinley's photo, "Dash Cutting Up Lines," and Dash Snow's response, a Polaroid of RMcG blowing lines off of a flaccid dick:














He boasts in interviews about parties and coke. (Of course, that could just be media manipulation.) He's a poster boy for AG jeans. (That could also be media manipulation.) He's a Menil. (Carlo McCormick claims that Snow never uses that familial connection, but can we really believe that?)