Rob Pruitt

Like E. E. Cummings's "goat-footed balloonMan", Rob Pruitt is an ambivalent peddler of delights (his monumental Andy and sparkling pandas come to mind) and a showman-the host of his very own annual Art Awards. More satyr than Satan, Pruitt tempts with seemingly benign treats only to reveal, with mischievous bravura, a withering critique of society's mystifications of art, politics, and class.

In History of the World, his 2012 installation at the Kunstverein Freiburg, scaled chrome dinosaur sculptures stare at hyperrealist still-life paintings of accumulated junk, screen-grabbed from the reality TV show Hoarders. Combining the mythic reptiles with the paintings, Pruitt does more than deploy works in two and three dimensions to create an immersive environment. He endows these creatures with sentience through their relationship with images. The dinosaurs' stock expressions-copied from those on natural-history models-no longer signify an assumed prehistoric personality but rather singular subjective responses to a work of art: Velociraptor's shriek could be a critic's opprobrium; Allosaurus's cocked head-a befuddled tourist wondering, "Is this art?"

The humor of casting the extinct reptiles (their weathered skin glowing from the latest treatment of La Brea tar) as art-world denizens (reacting with the same affective range of interest, disgust, and confusion that often greets a new body of work at an opening) sours when the viewer realizes that the titular history has been reversed. We are the extinct species: sad-sack collectors buried beneath our all-consuming bric-a-brac. The Jurassic crowd is left to surmise just what those pea-brained humans did to wipe themselves off the planet.

Irony is a free radical in Pruitt's cosmology, shuttling between condemnation and celebration of cultural excess. And if the viewer digests the camp glee of these "artosauruses" and the moral of the post-Anthropocene fable, History of the World finds its appropriate end. Examples of "Dinosaur Dropping", 2012, punctuate the installation, as if someone popped open a can of Manzoni's 1961 Merda d'Artista only to find a chrome-varnished, larger-than-life dollop of non-dairy whipped topping. While the prehistoric poop coils like a question mark, it also rests stubbornly like the final word on this history-which may be Pruitt's intention, maybe not-that, after everything, all that remains is shit.

Miciah Hussey