Colby Chamberlain on the art of Dave McKenzie
Bobblehead from Dave McKenzie’s
While Supplies Last, 2003, performance, poly-resin figures, 7 × 2 1⁄2 × 2 1⁄2 .
“I KNOW YOU ARE DAVE, but who is Dave?” Sixteen years ago, in these pages, the artist Glenn Ligon recounted how a stranger once posed this question to Dave McKenzie’s face. Or rather, she posed it to a papier-mâché approximation of his face, which McKenzie wore while he handed out bobblehead figurines of himself during an opening at SculptureCenter in New York. Ligon floated a few possible rejoinders: Dave was a dancing machine; Dave felt your pain; Dave wanted to be like Mike; Dave believed he could fly; Dave was a dime-store Jesus, for whom made-in-China tchotchkes were the bread and wine of a secular communion. These musings riffed on McKenzie’s various attempts to embody public figures, such as when he marched through Harlem sporting a rubber mask of Bill Clinto