LA Weekly Art Around Town Flashism By Christopher Miles August 14, 2008 Kori Newkirk at LAXART If you first visit Kori Newkirk’s survey exhibition, currently at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, you might not peg Rank, an installation at LAXART, as Newkirk’s. It lacks the telltale plays on skin color, the riffs on whiteness and blackness and the deliberate mix-ups of racially laden signifiers that typically define Newkirk’s varied maneuvers in the terrain of “postblack” identity politics. And yet, as race and class dominate the trudge toward November 4, and as the identity-politics debates that once thickened art-school seminars have entered the mainstream, you can’t escape implications of race or other means of identification with a work like Rank, which addresses the commingling of surface, appearance, style and power. Rank is a sculpture in the form of a grand podium, looking like it might have been designed by an interior decorator specializing in fun houses, fashion shows and discos, and who is channeling Liberace, Albert Speer, and Jules Hardouin-Mansart, the architect whose remodeling of Versailles was tethered to Louis XIV’s consolidation of power. Stairs lead to a stage, from which extends another flight, leading to a second platform and a podium barnacled with two-dozen microphones. Every inch of the structure is clad in mirrored acrylic plastic, and even the microphones are variously painted and plated with a matching chrome finish. Towering above you and backed by a curtain of silver tensile material, the set is suggestive of bad lounge acts and convention politics, and specifically evokes the curtain-backed press conferences that have been the standard of American presidents since Nixon, and the grand pulpits favored by Hitler, whose Neumann CMV3 microphones ushered in the marriage of power and modern public-address technology. With grandeur and precision, Newkirk employs the faceted geometry and slick surfacing that minimalist sculptors embraced — and that their detractors derided as representing a kind of untrustworthy theatricality — in service of political metaphor. His open-mic podium speaks of a kind of power that is at once pandering, slippery and impenetrable; of a public eager to see its own reflection in the architecture, rhetoric and spectacle of power; and of an addiction to a certain combination of bling and authoritarianism — call it flashism. LAXART, 2640 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A.; Tues.-Sat., 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; thru Sept. 6. (310) 559-0166 or www.laxart.org.