You may not be seeing it from the right angle. Maybe some blue, maybe some orange, maybe a red fleck juts out to you. You see that clearly, what stands behind you is a bunch of broken plastic objects, like what you would find in a random corner of a parking lot or at the bottom of a municipal trash can. But once you turn your body to face the work and step back a few paces you will see it. Each color and texture lunging forward at you somehow settles into focus to reveal an image. And you realize “Is that a bird?”.
Tom Deininger ́s work is particularly surprising because the head-on image from a distance is so distinctly a figurative portrayal of a bird, but it's perplexing to understand how the viewer arrives at seeing a bird from a bunch of trash stuck together. Why use this material specifically to make a bird?
The answer informs the viewer of a true sense of integrity on behalf of the artist. Deininger’s work, amongst other things, is a commentary on the ravages consumerism has on the environment. As a true outdoorsman and lover of the natural world, he has witnessed firsthand the way our institutionalized gluttony has laid waste to our natural resources. The river he grew up going to is now so polluted, it is dangerous to swim in. The different beaches he spent his early adulthood surfing in are now littered with trash and plastic waste. Deininger’s challenge thus was how to make a stance against consumerism, without also necessitating the same consumerist behaviors via the purchase of materials for his artwork. In an interview with Ethan Cohen Gallery, Deininger says “I’ll worry about the anatomy of a cardinal... leave that to me. I’ll find it in a gutter”, a quip that not only illustrates a deep commitment to the praxis embodied in the creation of his work, but a lifelong, personal relationship with nature.
Look back to the bird you saw, and approach it closely as you look at its different features. You will see that the bird's eye may be a pen cap, its wing is a broken water bottle, its beak is a children's toy or the plastic netting from the grocery store. Deininger finds materials that fit the needs of his anticonsumerist artmaking lying everywhere in our modern world, the very byproduct of our lustful excess, some from landfills. It is our trash. He meticulously collects his parts every day and brings them home to his studio, where they will wait until they find their purpose. Some items will remain for several months, or even several years. Some will find their way into a sculpture soon after being picked up from the floor. Sculptures like these are not merely done on demand, by going out in trash heaps and hunting for the right objects to assemble all at once. They are the slow culmination of a studio that breathes in others' waste and breathes out assemblage pieces, an oeuvre that is equal parts exercise in perspective and anti-establishment commentary.
Now that you have seen the upfront image, look at the underbelly of these bird sculptures. Within each piece lives a microcosm of comic, violent, perverse reverie. On one, you will find a psycho Elmo gesturing at a fridge of decapitated doll heads to his right; in his left hand, he holds a bloodied knife. On another, you will find a doll's head attached to a female action figure's body, performing fellatio on a stormtrooper with her hair in pigtails, all with a miniature noose wrapped from her neck. On yet another still, an army of red figurines works together in driving a spear at a half-dressed Donald Trump figurine, with a penis so small that the neighboring smurf needs to use a telescope to see it.
You do not know if to be put off, if to find the work funny, if to consider the artist unhinged. Ultimately, the viewer can receive the imagery within these sculptures in any of the aforementioned ways. It is impossible to not find humor in psycho Elmo. It is similarly impossible to not find the humor in Trump's small (and I mean small, even for a doll) penis. These assemblages are reminiscent of Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, where the world falls into a chaos of lawless, biblical decay. The debauchery portrayed in Deininger’s work is more humorous, but its very materials are representative of a more frightening, real-world manifestation of Bosch’s pseudo-nihilistic portrayal of the world's end.
But the humor, the potent sex, and the violence that underlies most of these assemblages reflect the way that Deininger views modern culture. It is imagery like a shirtless blonde stuffing her face in a food commercial or an A-list athlete taking off his clothes to spray a sports drink into his mouth that reminds us that our relationship with taking things and consuming them is weirdly sexualized. Buying is supposed to satisfy. Spending to fulfill. Sex sells. The next thing you purchase on credit may bring you closer to what you want and who you want to be. These are adages reiterated in our media, on the internet, and on apps like Instagram and Facebook where people make a living pushing products through their artifice of an enviable life. Most people intellectually know these truths pushed by big businesses are not true, and yet many amongst us continue on this cycle of buying and dumping. Today’s consumers are too hopeful that maybe they will be made whole the next time they buy something that is not a necessity, or they are too busy and overstimulated to think more critically about how to consume consciously.
How these figures interact with each other, how they seem to melt into each other in viral reverie is especially disturbing because many of these objects are children’s toys. Not only children’s toys, but iconic, easily recognizable figures that color the childhoods of generations of Americans; the Supermans, Batmans, Smurfs, Elmos, and the Spongebobbs of the world. The ultimate victims of human detritus, single-use plastics, and rampant consumerism are those who were brought into this world amid its decay. Unless global politics change, unless people's opinions change, and unless something drastic is done as quickly as possible, there will not be a world for them to grow old in, for them to come of age and make mistakes and have children of their own. There will be no rivers left to swim in.
NOTE: After seeing what I wrote for Shelly McCoy, Bernice Streinbaum reached out to me to make a similar piee about Tom Deininger's work. It was reeally fun getting to know Tom and to talk shop with an icon like Bernice, and I am pretty proud of the second to last paragraph.