There's a lot that is just sheer trash in the new Big Art Group show, an arch, frequently alienating Real Housewives–meets–Three Sisters jumble called Broke House. And the Big Art folk like it that way: Company founders Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson have always sculpted their work (like the plushy-filled SOS and the soft-core reenactment House of No More) from deliberately lurid, plasticky surfaces. They like texts crammed with hypermanic banality; they like wigs that look cheap and heels that look cheaper.
The team also likes actual clutter, so Manson's set for Broke House is adrift in shower curtains, silvery cardboard, bubble-wrapped toy cats (one of many references to Grey Gardens) and packing blankets—a shifting dune of detritus. Actors pin or tape this jetsam to a wooden grid, creating a series of makeshift rooms into which we can only peer, courtesy of a wandering “documentary” filmmaker. Live video joins the multichannel Big Brother–esque projections that form the proscenium over the “house,” and we soon find ourselves following sad sack Manny (David Commander) and his screeching sister RiRi (Heather Litteer) almost entirely onscreen as they bitch at each another, adjust the house's feng shui or fall, suddenly, into fugues about the value of work.
Broke House's distress about the American economy (everything is foreclosure and awful taco-truck jobs) occasionally slides more convincingly into an anxiety about multimedia-play making itself. The housemates, aided by a vampy pair of interns, shoot indulgent glow-in-the-dark YouTube movies about übersexed alien robots. These loopy moments are sometimes joyful (if inaudible), but they also point to a deep ambiguity about the usefulness of high-concept kitsch. The makers establish their intelligentsia bona fides: Chekhov's Three Sisters surfaces from time to time, and the program says things like “the players themselves become deformed into a new formlessness, and enter a transitional state of potentiality.” Seduced by tackiness yet intent on framing it as high-art investigation, Manson and Nelson are trying, as ever, to control camp with theory. That's why you can feel unease deep in the bones of the work—if there are bones in something so thoroughly and deliberately constructed from the shrill, vapid and shallow.—Helen Shaw