A Carnival of Ego and Glue
Review of Rumination in Mixed Media by Rex Caltrop at the Alabama Museum of Objects
There are bad art shows. There are pretentious art shows. And then there is Rumination in Mixed Media, which exists in a rarefied airless void all its own—a vacuum-sealed package of unchecked ego, performance-grade nonsense, and glue gun abuse. It is less a gallery exhibition and more an endurance test conducted under the slow, suffocating weight of someone else’s mushroom-induced epiphany.
Rex Caltrop, who describes himself as a “meta-sculptural dramaturge of the Third Axis,” has produced a body of work so utterly divorced from reality that one begins to suspect he may, in fact, not exist and just be an elaborate prank by rival conceptualists. He claims the show was inspired by “a moment of deep grief during an ayahuasca vision.” I would argue the true inspiration was a burning desire to waste the time of the unsuspecting gallery-going public.
Upon entering the exhibition, you are handed a pair of broken opera glasses and a wooden egg. You are told these are “tools for your encounter.” What they are, in practice, is litter.
The first installation, Sadness Engine #17, features a decommissioned fog machine draped in yoga mats and surrounded by half-melted clown shoes, arranged in a perfect spiral. A placard informs you that this piece “interrogates the skeletal architecture of performance grief.” I stood there for ten minutes, wondering how it did this and hoping the fog machine might turn on and add some interest to the ensemble. It did not.
Across the hall is a video piece titled Mimehole, projected onto a wall of carefully crushed cola cans. It’s a 37-minute film of the artist, nude except for a single roller skate trying to climb a mountain that looked like Ben Nevis. I’m not exaggerating when I say someone in the room whispered “He’s so brave”. I strongly and quietly disagreed.
The largest room in the gallery contains Clownbone: The Reckoning, a “sculptural anti-form” made from deflated pool toys and one enlarged rejection letter from Yale. A lone red balloon sits atop the mess, bouncing around as viewers walk around. I asked a gallery assistant—dressed in full Aston Villa kit, including boots —what it meant. She said they were forbidden to discuss it.
The final room is an “immersive space” titled Bonezone: A Participatory Collapse. Guests are invited to lie on a vibrating floor mat while attempting to peel an onion with a tuning fork. The room smelt dangerously of used fireworks. The onion made me cry heavily.
To say this show is pretentious is to insult the fine tradition of pretense. This is not even faux-intellectualism. This is meta-pretentiousness—pretentiousness about pretentiousness, a feedback loop of pure, radiant nonsense curated under flickering lights.
I award Rumination in Mixed Media one star, solely because I’m legally unable to give it zero without the risk of a libel suit. The only thing more unhinged than this show is the certainty with which Caltrop speaks about it. He says his work “dismantles the hegemony of punchlines.” I say it’s a clown funeral organised by someone who’s never met the clown.
Avoid at all costs—unless you need a powerful reminder of why Dadaism was a phase, not a blueprint.
