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Corbero's work looks fairly orthodox, nevertheless, beside that of the young Scotsman David Mach, 32, showing at the Barbara Toll gallery (also through June 11). There is one object on view. It fills most of the gallery. It is called A Million Miles Away and is made from some 28,000 magazines -- surplus copies of House Beautiful, Esquire, Town & Country and the like -- spilling in a torrent from a fireplace, across the floor and through a wall and another fireplace. Embedded in them are a bathtub, a stuffed zebra and what must be the world's largest outboard motor, a 300-h.p. Johnson V-8, which looks big enough to drive the Queen Mary. The work is not for sale, and will be dismantled at the end of the show; Mach likens such setups to performances, and this one was done before in England with different objects and a different title, Fuel for the Fire. The current enigmatic title comes from the absentminded state one gets into when stacking up tons of old magazines, one by one, a condition Mach compares to that of an assembly-line worker whose thoughts are "a million miles away" while his hands do their repetitive chores.
What is this weird object about? Plainly, a satire on commodity culture, the bulimic gorging of mass-produced imagery that is built so firmly into our social responses by now that we cannot, or will not, see its inherent strangeness. Mach is not just a fine-art version of the reclusive hobbyist who makes Eiffel Towers or Brooklyn Bridges from a million spent matches. He wants to turn surplus against itself -- not in the friendly way of Kurt Schwitters or Robert Rauschenberg but with real bloody-mindedness. A Million Miles Away posits a world in which things are carried along, bobbing like corks, on a gross, value-free cataract of media imagery. The waves of magazines undulate with a glutinous, twining rhythm, and their movement seems irresistible: they are going to take over the gallery first, and then the world. Only the zebra seems above it all; but then, it cannot read.