Danny McDonald

It starts with a charm bracelet, then comes full circle with a strand of beads. To start, Mindy Vale, with the use of a time machine, goes on a mission to reclaim the beads that were apocryphally used to purchase Manhattan.

The exploits of Mindy Vale-the alter ego of artist Danny McDonald-serve to fictionalize the social relations inherent to the art field to address conditions of production, something that American Fine Arts, Co. founder Colin de Land insisted upon since McDonald's early involvement with Art Club 2000, founded in 1992. McDonald has noted of this period: "There was always some element of parody and parodying the act of making an exhibition, which at that point we saw as a project; the idea of doing an exhibition and trying to change the world with it was a somewhat dubious and hilarious prospect, but we were actually trying to do that." Mindy is the veiled "artist" who engages with the locations, gallery players, and surrounding scenes to which she travels, just as they meet her as their own "characters".

In McDonald's videos, Mindy exists in a cinematic world of long corridors and attenuated shadows, horror movie and karaoke sound tracks, variety show and video game effects. Her mimetic sensibility is revealed in this form, while in live performances she casts emotional disaster as stagecraft. Mindy shares an aesthetic family tree with Kembra Pfahler of the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, Ryan Robles (of "creepy Filipino talent show" YouTube fame), as well as Cousin Itt and the creatures of Sid and Marty Krofft. An outsider born in a cave, Mindy later emerged as the face of McDonald's legendary costume jewelry company Mended Veil during the late 1990s. The line has spawned the aforementioned "questionable beliefs" beaded bracelet, with charms representing fairies, Santa Claus, money, ghosts, aliens, astrology, Jesus, romantic love, and unicorns. McDonald then began producing a body of sculptural work, dollhouse-scale models of New York tenement apartments populated by modified horror-movie action figures playing the roles of artists facing economically driven dilemmas: "I sort of made this work about people who got left behind. 'Bohemian Monsters,' the title of the show, was about becoming a monster, where you're a spectral reflection of a time that existed before, looking at another context that you don't really fit into."
Much like the figures populating these constructions, McDonald's videos feature characters drawn from his own private bohemia. To conjure Mindy's dream version of this world, McDonald evokes what appears to be pure magic, but is actually a consumer-grade video effect available on all Macs. Actors can see themselves distorted in funhouse-mirror apparitions on the monitor as they perform, which establishes a tangible relationship with the illusion and leads to more stunning and disembodied animations of faces, animals, and Rorschach images rushing toward one another. In these dialogue-free shorts, sound construction is as important to the story as the visual effects, and McDonald's sound tracks are also made from common computer stock foley such as a chirping crickets, laser beam zaps, creaking doors, etc. Engaged in a right-brain left-brain exchange, the viewer may try to discern narrative space and action while becoming mesmerized by the music, the lights, and the shapes.

Metaphorically, the mirror effect has myriad implications: Alice through the looking glass, the surrealism of twins, the idea that, as an alter ego, Mindy is only allowed to occupy one side of the artist's life and art. More tangibly, mandala-like compositions and incense-fueled, drug-inspired '60s forms (McDonald grew up in Los Angeles) are married to surrealist film techniques and the vanity inherent in a mirror world. As McDonald put it: "I see it as the equivalent of shooting on a New York City rooftop: available, evocative, pedestrian, and expected, but also classic and iconic."
In McDonald's 2013 exhibition at Cabinet gallery in London, "Danny McDonald as Mindy Vale in Mindy Vale Goes to England to Uncover The Meaning of Lyke Wake Dirge, as Illustrated by Trenton Duerksen," Mindy constructed a time machine with elements drawn from the gallery's holdings. In the latest work, THE BEADS (That Bought Manhattan), presented as part of "Empire State," she uses time travel to illuminate the mythical origins of a string of beads she found in 1969, partially buried in what is now Inwood Park. In this fiction, upon realizing the role that the beads played in history, Mindy employs her time machine-and the information to which she has access as a Census worker in Manhattan-to reassemble the beads she had bartered or gave away over the years so that she can seal a spell to reverse the tragic trade. As she travels from door to apartment door, Mindy revisits downtown luminaries in classic New York period rooms to take back (or, yes, "Indian give") the beads while being tailed by a nefarious Time-Shifting Observer, played by curator Alex Gartenfeld. Curator Sir Norman Rosenthal is cast in the year 1626 as Pope Urban VIII (Maffeo Barberini). 

Like the film and video work of Ellen Cantor, Laura Cottingham, and Leslie Singer, McDonald casts lovers, friends, and available art-world actors supplied by the exhibition venues where he is working. In this version of "institutional critique," Mindy serves as the dancing fool who directs the collective against bourgeois taste in art, self-seriousness, and didacticism. To this aim, the videos are situated within life-size tableaux, further animating the scripted environment McDonald stages at the exhibition site. For instance, viewers enter his installation through a corridor of wooden crates, borrowed shipping containers used to transport other artists' pieces in the show. Inside the tunnel, works from previous stops along Mindy's tour serve to integrate the multiple story lines and characters within the present iteration of her bead reacquisition trek. Site-specific elements from Rome, homemade action figures, drapery, and other objects used as projection surfaces (a ladder leading to a window, an open pad of drawing paper, a painting in a crate) insinuate a storeroom campsite bathed in black light: a set piece for Mindy's moralizing condemnation of Western culture.

Lia Gangitano