AARON YOUNG.

Aaron Young at Bortolami Gallery invites the viewer into a participatory space constructed within the gallery. Creating a tension by the unexplained need for participation, the artist passively teases the viewer to take the required action. One has to walk around the deserted space to enter a room. Inside hang three large white-on-white canvases, along with a coin slot saying “quarters only”. Fork over your money and the lights will kill, revealing luminous mushroom clouds silk-screened on each of the canvases. Thirty seconds later, the lights turn back on.
 
Aaron Young flaunts laziness. This would be fine if this laziness counted for something, but Young has nothing to show for his idleness. On the other hand, he has something to show when he hires marginalized rebels, such as skateboarders and motorcycle riders to perform various stunts.
 
For Greeting Card, at the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue, the stunt riders have made on the surface (288 plywood panels coated in layers of fluorescent acrylic and then covered over in black) that huge and silly painting, divided into pieces and sold. This is supposed to mimic the lines of a Jackson Pollock greeting card from 1943 at over 1000 times its original scale. As a spectacle, Greeting Card was a bit thin and not as much fun as the anticipation. Assault on the senses via noise and smoke seemed to be the main point. “My work is an attack”, says the San Francisco native.