Ghost of a Dream’s show is peak doomerist art - The Washington Post

Do something! It could be a mantra for the times. Beset on all sides by crises — climate, housing, border, pandemic, democracy, polarization, crime, you name it — frustrated Americans cry out for relief from the din of constant catastrophe.

Rarely has a message so urgent been so widespread, and felt so weakly, than at the museum. Cultural centers today are so saturated with social messaging — and so profoundly incentivized to display art with explicit social themes — that other ideas fall away. Artworks that indulge in experiments in form or medium have taken a back seat.

So the bleached corals, cobalt tailings and burning mountainsides at the heart of new works by the artist duo known as Ghost of a Dream register as current. And yet these works don’t elicit any feelings of distress — the opposite, even. “I Know a Place Where They Perform Miracles,” a show by Ghost of a Dream on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, depicts a world on fire, but the project is cool to the touch.

Ghost of a Dream is an ongoing collaboration by Lauren Was and Adam Eckstrom, artists based in Wassaic, N.Y. Since 2007, the artists, who met at the Rhode Island School of Design, have worked together on elaborate projects that explore the id and impulses of America’s working class. At the height of the financial crisis, the artists turned discarded lottery tickets into sculptures of luxury — a Lamborghini Countach, for example, or the interior of a European period room, both rendered in the manic colors of scratch-off cards.

Exaggerated yet subtle, that series mined the dopamine and despair of low-stakes gambling to produce vivid, mandala-like objects. Ghost’s more recent works depict literal mines: “Thunder Drowns Out What the Lightning Sees” (2024) is a mounted print comprising dozens of news images of a stripped cobalt mine layered on top of one another. The image is blurry, suggesting the dull, insensate entreaty of a measureless problem, captured nowhere in particular yet everywhere all at once.

Other prints from this series on view at MoCA (formerly the more modestly named Arlington Arts Center) survey flooded homes and burning oil rigs. Titles for the works point to popular music: “And If the Ground’s Not Cold, Everything Is Gonna Burn, We’ll All Take Turns, I’ll Get Mine Too” (2022) tags in the Pixies for a piece about melting icebergs. This system for producing images links different disasters without saying much about them as a whole.

Consider “Hold This Thread as I Walk Away” (2023), a composite of overlapping hills of clothes. Wall text indicates that the crisis at hand is fast fashion; without that hint, it might be hard to make out the mounds, or indeed that there’s a problem related to the misprinted championship T-shirts that wind up in landfills (for example). The title is a nod to a “Buddy Holly”-era song by Weezer, a rock band that sounds worse for wear since its 1990s heyday. Radio cringe aside, this piece might be the point at which the series threatens to unravel.

For if the fast fashion crisis is on the level of the ice cap crisis and deforestation crisis and acidification crisis, is there anything to say about these crises at all? The answer, I’m certain, involves extractive capitalism and late-stage empire, but the prompt, at least as posed by Ghost of a Dream, is so bloodless that it flattens the challenges of our time into a monotone, indivisible doomerism.

After all, there’s no real telling between “She Got Both Feet on the Ground, and She’s Burnin’ It Down” (2023) and “They Wrote It All Down as the Progress of Man” (2023). Both works feature enough green and ocher to suggest verdant landscape interrupted by devastation, but they land with all the resonance of a chart in a PDF.

Curated by Blair Murphy, “I Know a Place Where They Perform Miracles” features more than a dozen of these composite images, drawn from an ongoing series called “Is This Paradise …” The flip side of this presentation is “Aligned by the Sun (Within the Revolution)” (2020-2024), a video installation that takes up an entire gallery. For this project, Ghost of a Dream invited artists from all over the world to submit videos of sunsets. Projectors suspended from the ceiling slowly rotate, bathing the room in golden sunlight in a motion that resembles the Earth’s rotation.

While Ghost credits all the many dozens of artists who submitted videos — detailing that they hail from all but seven of the 195 nations recognized by the United Nations, and several other places in addition — it’s of no matter, since the videos bleed together in a blur of lens flare. The piece is pleasant, especially when the reflection of sunsets over water falls on the floor: a dose of hopium, maybe, to counteract all the gloom. But “Aligned by the Sun” is uplifting only in the most straightforward way, like an art-world pen-pal campaign.

What’s missing in “I Know a Place Where They Perform Miracles” is the notion of craft that Ghost of a Dream has shown in previous projects: the tedious act of assembly, for example, to reflect in some small mimetic sense the motion of scratching off a stack of lottery cards. For a landscape project built around catastrophe, the artists fail to evoke any cataclysm. There is a big difference between telling viewers that they shouldn’t look away (do something!) and helping them to see.