Show #18: Sold On Soylent (Sculpture's Back In Town), curated by Ludwig Schwarz at And/Or Gallery in Dallas, considers divergent forms of nostalgia through works by Ann Craven, Danius Kesminas & The Histrionics and The Estate of Uma Klick. As the title suggests, this sculpture-heavy exhibition sits under the allegorical umbrella of the 1973 science-fiction classic Soylent Green. The film embodies a nostalgia for the past that is both critical and utopian—a brand of nostalgia that aptly characterizes much of the work in the exhibition. Most notably, like Soylent Green, the sculptures in Show #18 simultaneously pine for and critique the conditions of the past and recognize the impossibility of recuperating that past fully in the present.

Set in New York in the year 2022, Soylent Green explores the consequences of overpopulation, which has resulted in extreme squalor and ethical degradation. As the protagonist Sol longs for yesteryear in a suicide chamber, wistful landscape footage from the past offers an escape from his otherwise dystopic environment. This lost landscape appears completely alien to the world’s current condition. Sol’s nostalgia for the past only reasserts how unattainable it is in the present.

Perhaps the exhibition’s purest expression of the nostalgia represented in Soylent Green is Ann Craven’s painting, St. Louis Cardinal (for Dallas) (2008). The painting features a loosely painted cardinal within an ethereal, floral setting and is installed upside-down. The bird, capsized, appears as if lifelessly dangling from a tree limb. The piece suggests a desire for natural beauty and, at the same time, presents the natural world strangely askew. In the light of Soylent Green, the painting appears to be a utopian, if somewhat distorted, vision amidst an ominous (art) world.

Spanning the better half of the gallery are selections from "The Estate of Uma Klick"—a fictional body of work clandestinely created by several Dallas-based artists. The gallery materials allege that Klick, who died in 1989, was a student of Joseph Beuys. The sculptures, supposedly produced by Klick throughout the 1970s and 80s, are paired with corresponding diary entries by Klick. For example, Untitled (sitting cross) (1978) is a Japanese-style padded cushion adorned with a Swiss cross, while in Untitled (date unknown), a silver-ribboned corset is suspended from the ceiling resembling chain mail; in Untitled (1977), a birdcage houses several curved slices of rye bread. Playing with the legacy of Beuys, Klick’s works are autobiographical, shamanistic and steeped in myth. The Estate of Uma Klick both honors and belittles Beuys’s enduring influence. Moreover, Klick’s works appear remarkably akin to the contemporary collaged constructions popular today—as seen, for example, in the New Museum’s Unmonumental earlier this year. Perhaps the joke is on these artists, too, illustrating that the tutelage of tradition is often inescapable. In addition, in the context of And/Or, a predominantly new media art gallery, the works look especially satirical and outdated. In short, by referencing sculptural tradition as well as contemporary art production, the works interrogate sculpture’s current ability to play a vanguard role in art.

Also in the exhibition is Danius Kesminas and The Histrionics, Sculpture’s Back in Town (2004), a looped DVD. Sculpture’s Back in Town is fittingly installed facing Klick’s works. Featuring a video montage (mostly of sculptors in the studio) set to Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys are Back in Town,” the piece offers altered lyrics poking fun at the stagnant state of sculpture. This work fits affably here, but does not quite offer the nostalgic complexity offered by the other works.

Nostalgia is certainly not a new theme in contemporary art. However, Sold on Soylent evokes a particular type of nostalgia: one that simultaneously unravels and embraces it subjects. The exhibition longs for a moment in which sculpture was able to be vanguard and, at the same time, recognizes the exhaustion of that moment. The artists poke fun at the traditions inherent in contemporary sculpture, questioning the presumed newness of this work and suggesting that dependence on history is inescapable. Perhaps, through a playful pessimism, these works critique the inability of sculpture to be truly new.

Alison Hearst recently received her M.A. in Art History from Texas Christian University and is a freelance writer living in Fort Worth.