ART REVIEWS

Foul Play: John Miller’s personal metaphor for late 20th-Century life is . . . excrement. True, he does provide a few small, guileless drawings of suburban interiors. (Are they meant to be tongue-in-cheek reminders of Paradise lost?)

But everything three-dimensional in his show is covered with a big splat of dark brown--sometimes applied in a turgid, gloppy, “painterly” way that is probably as much about the Freudian view of infantile creative activity as it is about trying to be a bad boy in an art world that smilingly accepts all would-be transgressions. Not that Miller doesn’t have good company; Mike Kelley frequently has used scatological imagery to tease out suppressed passions and discontents from our airbrushed culture.

One critic has pointed out that Miller’s stuff doesn’t smell, which makes it rather harmless and amusing. A crooked old door painted dark brown (“Brown Door”) has a certain self-effacing charm, a sort of exaggerated anonymity, like a prop in a Beckett play. A suspended ball stuck with tiny objects and slathered with brown goo (“Storage Area”) is of course our poor old Earth, suffering one more indignity. “Ideal World,” a table-top model of a vaguely Asian-looking brown pavilion in a brown landscape studded with brown guns on tripods, describes one view of a cockeyed world order.

Miller’s most elaborate conceit involves a mirror on the floor--functioning metaphorically as a pool--which is encircled by figurines (a girl and a duck, a peddler, an 18th-Century lady) bathed in dollops of brown paint. Called “The Source” (in ironic homage to the Gustave Courbet painting?), the piece posits a universe in which the business of creation and renewal is usurped by kitsch objects dumbly admiring their own reflection.