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Over the last decade there has been an increasing preoccupation with the staging of virtual scenarios in contemporary artistic production. Matthew Buckingham and Joachim Koester’s Sandra of the Tulip House, Pierre Huyghe’s Third Memory and Walid Raad’s Atlas Group, are among the more notable examples of this impulse to double and refract reality by means of its representation. In these works, categories of fact and fiction are made to merge imperceptibly with each other and are linked to a past that may or may not have taken place. Eschewing institutional studio activity, such art is open-ended, interactive and resistant to closure.
Working along these lines, the Swiss artist Mai-Thu Perret invents hypothetical social structures that propose a return of sorts to the unrealised utopian projects of the twentieth century. For her recent exhibition at the Renaissance Society, Perret presented a hybrid collection of objects under the organising fiction of The Crystal Frontier, a feminist commune founded by five women somewhere in the American Southwest. The works on display, which Perret attributes to her fictional female protagonists, draw as much inspiration from the formal rigours of modernist painting as they do from the feminised craft practices traditionally associated with the decorative arts. Perhaps most refreshing of all were the creative liberties that the artist took in reinterpreting her disparate sources, as exemplified by the enormous aluminum clad teapot that served as the visual centerpiece of the exhibition. Measuring over twelve feet in diameter, Little Planetary Harmony, 2006, instantly called to mind the topsy-turvy universe of Alice in Wonderland. From the perspective of sculptural history, the work points to the architectural scale and domestic iconography that Claes Oldenburg had