John Miller

Public Display, the title of John Miller's painting-sculpture hybrid created for "Empire State", derives from the expression "public display of affection," a euphemism for inappropriate behavior. Public displays of affection are not inappropriate, in the sense that they are not permitted by legal consensus (unlike, say, groping). Rather, the inappropriateness demarcates the intangible yet ever-present limit of what a specific social group thinks is acceptable. Like any euphemism, "public display" represents a subtle form of condemnation and repression as well as an uncannily precise construct to map cultural and class differences. Using a euphemism, we can imply things that would be politically incorrect. In the euphemism we can construct an "us and them" logic without risking our own social condemnation.

Miller's installation contrasts a painted image, repeated on all fours sides of Public Display, of a woman crying (taken from a British reality TV show) with printed images on wallpaper of pedestrians - a family - on holiday in Cala d'Or, a middle - and workingclass tourist destination in Mallorca, Spain. The stakes of that place are immediately apparent, as tersely and violently portrayed in the Sex Pistols classic "Holidays in the Sun": "A cheap holiday in other people's misery / I don't wanna holiday in the sun." The perspective and social ambience of the black-and-white photograph of the quasi-nuclear family walking in front a generic low-rise shopping complex evokes the ambivalence of Dan Graham's photographs of suburban New Jersey homes.

Perversely, the picture has been blown up such that the figures operate on a human scale. Moreover, it has been mirrored and installed, printed on wallpaper in a gallery corner to create a trompe l'oeil effect: the gallery space appears to continue into the depicted social space; the vanishing point of the perspective now placed precisely at the edge where the two walls meet. The duplicated family marches inexorably toward us from the boredom of their leisure time, meeting us as art consumers in ours. The effect of this quotidian familiarity is more uncanny than spectacular.

The form of Public Display alludes to a quasi-public display structure and in part derives from Miller's ongoing interest in Litfassaulen (the Euro-style advertising columns that originated in Berlin). These differ from American forms of commercial public address-the billboard, for instance-because they target pedestrians in a 360-degree space. Covering walls with contemporary human representations frozen in the stationary depth of photographic time, Miller negates the reductivist logic of Minimalism where, for instance, a cube might be installed smack in the middle of an exhibition space for spectators to walk around, allegedly becoming conscious of their bodies in relationship with an ordered space-modern phenomenological aspirations with a sublime underpinning. In Miller's revision, we become part of a topology of the white cube, a space of interiority for the viewer to navigate between two continuous surfaces that reflect socially constructed, alienated and alienating interiorities. In this piazza, we meet intersecting orders of social disenchantment, including our own. Us and them are now alike.

Nicolás Guagnini