The title of an exhibition by the two-artist team Faile at the Brooklyn Museum is certainly promising: “Savage/Sacred Young Minds.” Considering American society’s neurotic preoccupation with youth and the hugely profitable exploitation of that obsession by a vast array of commercial enterprises, it’s a potentially rich vein for imaginative mining. In recent decades, artists like Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw have fruitfully excavated the weird, dark side of adolescent consciousness to reveal its narcissism, hypersexuality, grandiosity, and penchants for magical thinking and instant gratification.
Unfortunately, while the two members of Faile — Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller, Brooklyn residents in their early 40s — demonstrate impressive industry and ambition, the more thought-provoking possibilities inherent in the topic of modern youth evade them. The word Faile is a rearrangement of letters spelling “a life,” but there’s not a lot of real life in the duo’s work.
This exhibition’s main attractions are two installations, both dating from 2010. Presented in the museum’s spacious, neo-Classical rotunda gallery on the fifth floor, “Temple” is a life-size, walk-in construction of a seemingly ancient pagan chapel with a U-shaped footprint and a partly ruined barrel-vaulted roof. Its exterior has ceramic tiles arranged in large, raking modern letters spelling the words Savage Young Minds Sacred around its perimeter. Built into the outer wall’s upper register are large ceramic reliefs, glazed off-white, that are derived from sensational pulp-fiction book and magazine illustrations. One features the image of a girl menaced by a big snake and the headline “She Couldn’t Fight Temptation Any Longer.”
Going up semicircular steps and passing between open iron gates, visitors enter an extravagantly decorated sanctum. On a mosaic floor of stone tesserae stand two rows of five-foot-tall cylinders based on Tibetan prayer wheels. The upper halves, made of white plastic, have slogans like “Eat With the Wolf” and “Double Barreled Delights Seen Amongst the Stars” incised into them. Give one cylinder a push, and it revolves, albeit for no particularly clear purpose.
Above the front door, a relief depicts a woman posing within the jaws of a Tyrannosaurus rex above the words “Journey on the Wings of Madness.” At the other end of the room is a nearly life-size sculpture of the upper half of a horse outfitted with scuba diving gear. It’s the funniest and least expected piece of the whole installation. While some other parts of the temple are amusing, intense vibes of savagery, sacredness or insanity are absent. How those psychic states might be related is obscured by Faile’s bewilderingly overwrought and unfocused magpie appropriation of graphic signifiers from many times and places, from ancient Egypt to 20th-century comic books.
Back outside the temple are two larger-than-life, figurative sculptures that were machine-carved from marble, both from this year. “Untitled (Girl With Skateboard)” represents a teenager in a windblown skirt cradling a skateboard in her arms as if it were a baby. It’s a beguiling image. “Eat With the Wolf” is heavy-handedly obvious. It shows a man in a ripped-up business suit on his knees, wearing a wolf’s head and howling at the sky. It looks as if it were inspired by the movie “The Wolf of Wall Street.” But if you think about the ugly depravity represented in that film, you may grasp what’s missing from Faile’s work. It’s more PG-rated kitsch than seriously unsettling art for grown-ups.
The other installation is a collaboration between Faile and an artist who goes by Bäst, known in the street-art world for pasting subversive posters on urban walls à la Shepard Fairey. “The Faile & Bäst Deluxx Fluxx Arcade” has two galleries designed to imitate game emporiums. One room has two foosball tables in a gallery illuminated by purple UV lights. The walls are plastered floor-to-ceiling with fluorescent posters blaring images of sexy women, racecars, werewolves and much more demotic imagery. A connecting gallery, with walls covered by black-and-white surrealistic photomontages, has eight pinball machines and 12 video game consoles. They’ve all been modified by Faile and Bäst’s graphics, which don’t improve much on the visual aspects of unaltered machines of this sort. All are free to play.
The simulated arcade might have prompted thoughts about distraction, addiction and urban ennui. As it is, it’s hardly distinguishable from what it represents. The young visitors I saw playing the games when I was there seemed oblivious to whatever meanings Faile and Bäst had in mind.
In Times Square, another Faile project was unveiled on Monday. Sponsored by Times Square Arts Partners and situated on the Broadway plaza between 42nd and 43rd Streets, “Wishing on You” is a wooden gazebo housing a wooden prayer wheel about four feet in diameter and over six feet tall. (You’re supposed to be able to make the wheel revolve, causing colored ceiling lights to go on and off, but I had a hard time budging it more than a couple of inches.) The wheel and most of the other surfaces of the structure are covered with lowbrow imagery and bumper-sticker-like signs carved in low relief and painted in muted colors. With pictures like that of an alluring mermaid; words like “Never Never Land Brooklyn”; and signs advertising the lottery, cigarettes and cold beer, the construction resembles a restoration of an antique Coney Island attraction. In the electrified, hyperactive ambience of Times Square, it has a certain quaint, old-fashioned appeal, which is about the nicest thing you can say for it.
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