In Matthew Brannon’s latest output, candy-colored arrangements of objects and text\u2014a wedding cake, a pack of Lucky Strikes, a bottle of vanilla extract\u2014address the Vietnam War with a decorative aestheticism. This strategy may feel absurd, but Brannon deliberately avoids picturing scenes of violence, instead focusing on commodities, from a shuttlecock to a bottle of Heinz ketchup. These assemblages suppress violence almost to the point of invisibility, evoking a wartime America proceeding as if in an unaltered peacetime. In First Base<\/i> (all works 2015), what initially seems a straightforward still life comprised of recreational equipment\u2014a playing card, a World\u2019s Fair souvenir, a record\u2014is complicated by the fact that the record is a single of Barry McGuire\u2019s 1965 protest song Eve of Destruction<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Leisure time and conflict are threaded through each other, and war mostly comes through indirect signifiers\u2014world maps and international brand names that place the particularly \u201cAmerican\u201d iconography within a larger context of global politics\u2014or through civic imagery that has been so diluted as to be almost meaningless, as in an advertisement-like view of Washington\u2019s monuments (Camelot<\/i>). Clues to this latent violence abound. InPurple Heart<\/i>, Brannon places a historically accurate draft notice, carefully reproduced via letterpress, among comparatively carefree detritus (a Peanuts greeting card, a box of Corn Flakes).<\/p>\n
Concentrating on the conflict at home rather than on scenes of violence means that the images can also be funny. Three pictures of 1960s interiors, for example, are so pitch-perfectly bourgeois it\u2019s easy to laugh: a rubber duck in the corner of a doctor\u2019s office, a modish Braun radio. This comedic, almost satirical aspect offsets some of the nostalgia that underlies the abundance of domestically coded objects: If history is experienced through sentimental recollection in Brannon\u2019s spare montages, farce can also subject that sentiment to critical reevaluation.<\/p>\n
– Nicholas Chittenden Morgan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":11617,"template":"","categories":[5],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenewobjectivity.com\/KAPLANTEST\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/11677"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenewobjectivity.com\/KAPLANTEST\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenewobjectivity.com\/KAPLANTEST\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenewobjectivity.com\/KAPLANTEST\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenewobjectivity.com\/KAPLANTEST\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenewobjectivity.com\/KAPLANTEST\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}