For the Tasteless Millionaire in Your Life
If you have not yet bought a small gift for the tasteless millionaire in your life, I recommend visiting H. Maxwell Fisher's Underground Toy Emporium & Spaceship Parking at Jim Kempner Fine Art. The "emporium" imagined by Randy Regier is an exhibit of the type of cheap toys in flattened colors from
If you have not yet bought a small gift for the tasteless millionaire in your life, I recommend visiting H. Maxwell Fisher’s Underground Toy Emporium & Spaceship Parking at Jim Kempner Fine Art. The “emporium” imagined by Randy Regier is an exhibit of the type of cheap toys in flattened colors from the mid-20th century that projected a robot-infested future in breakable plastic.
The pitch of the show is that shopkeeper, and “amateur space aeronaut,” H. Maxwell Fisher has recently passed away (it’s implied that the crashed “Firefly” outside the gallery in the “Spaceship Parking” was where Fisher met his end). The Underground Toy Emporium is the entirety of his store’s remaining stock, the same merchandise that had been in his store since it opened and it is an offering of the most comically unsellable toys.
The toys/art pieces are all potentially dangerous (a “blazing sun model” meant to be filled with gasoline), unsettling (“Tardy the Manpony,” a horse with the head of a man in a space helmet) or just boring (the “Municipal Electric Golfer”). Like Regier’s traveling NuPenny store, which never opened and left viewers to want and gaze at untouchable sci-fi toys in greyscale, it makes for an enjoyable comment on American consumerism. Those hovercrafts and robots advertised in the back of mid-20th century magazines were unachievable fantasies, but they are just like most contemporary advertising, where gleaming food is built from inedible concoctions of glue and motor oil and clothing is pinned back to formfitting perfection.
One recurring character in the exhibit is John Manshaft, a virile man depicted on box covers confronting sea danger and the Alamo, and dressed as a “Might Scot” and “Ye Old Knight.” Inside the box, however, he is grotesque: a vinegar-boned, pasty figure in his underwear, with a smeared grimace below bulging eyes.
Visitors are encouraged to touch all the toys and open boxes, and much of the fun comes from seeing what is beneath the earnestly promising box covers. Even the obvious result of opening the “Invisimobile,” which is packaged in a box that thuds when you shake it, provides you a moment of surprise. Whether or not that joy is worth $1,800 is up to you. Then again, if you are that eccentric millionaire, or perhaps billionaire in this day and age, it could be great for your holiday party.
My favorite piece was the “Electric Man Waiting for a Train Set.” A solitary man turns his head right and left in search of a train that will obviously never arrive as the track abruptly ends on both side. Perhaps it just reminds me of waiting for the subway late at night. “Electric Train Set” is emblazoned on the box with an exciting typeface, while the “man waiting for a” is in tiny, solemn sans-serif. Throughout the exhibit these little warnings are in the fine print, but like life itself these warnings seem to disappear, as we are easily dazzled by what looks like the veneer of the real thing.
So who are these toys for? Someone who would want to possess a “John Manshaft” action figure would probably not be the type to spend over a thousand dollars on it, while someone who could afford it would likely be put off by its cheap quality and one-off enjoyment. Even though the art is for sale, it is as absurdly out of reach as Regier’s eternally closed NuPenny store.
Randy Regier: H. Maxwell Fisher’s Underground Toy Emporium and Spaceship Parking is showing at Jim Kempner Fine Art, 501 West 23rd Street, through December 23.
