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Dale Frank's Social Realism was, in many respects, excessive. The wall-to-wall installation outstripped even Frank's usual retinal barrage. His large goopy canvasses, themselves unable to contain their copious grotesque viscosity, were in abundance, as too were his characteristically loud amorphous paintings. The black plastic, protecting every inch of the walls and floor, completed the orgiastic feeling of the exhibition as a whole, a feeling already evidenced in its parts.
On the plastic floor were seemingly banal objects which, conversely, were more likely to have been presented with their exotic properties in mind, in anticipation of a bourgeois audience. Fondue Periferique, a "Complete Lazy Susan Fondue Set" in its 1970's box on a plinth, was a daggy fragment of temporal otherness, while the marijuana plant in Pot. And I Need A Haircut offered a bit of exotic-substance naughtiness.
I <3 Billy Mummy, a heavy-duty piece of S & M gear suspended above a glass-top coffee table, was a piece of sexual exoticism, as was the homoerotic That Fucking Painting, the resulting imprinted canvas from two paint-covered men having sex. If there was any real empathy with bondage or homosexuality here, it was certainly not the work's fundamental purpose. For Frank, it would seem that the value of this presentation lay in the voyeuristic exotic value it holds for the normalised centre.
These objects were an extrapolation of elements of Frank's paintings, distilled and made (more) 3D. The dripping viscose paintings suggest the visceral, particularly that expelled anally. For Frank's objects, the bodily abject is attenuated to perceived breaches of the social body: sex, drugs and bad taste. Frank employs these codes of transgression in an epic