LACMA

look more like something out of an absurd third world infomercial, the destructive/survivalist nature of these objects—some meant for war, others for pleasure—speaks of the conflicting and interconnected web and flow of global capital, culture, and production. Appropriation is the norm while things that cause pleasure also cause pain. But all of this diachronic musing is firmly rooted in Villegas's ability to remark on the political and material world he perceives around him. Cheaply made and omnipresent knockoffs are meant to carry a copycat stigma, and yet they introduce a situation in which being from the periphery (where knockoffs often prevail) is the norm. The distinctions between rich and poor, the signifiers of wealth, ethnicities, and fashion are muddied categories. Luxury items have gone mainstream; their symbols, knockoffs of their own brand, somehow displace the economic discourse of collectivity for one of individuality. The self-reflexive nature of Villegas's impoverished-looking sculptures and videos belies an interest in an appraisal of art's continuing love of personal style. Where do branding logos go in time? For Villegas, they find their way home, remediated, back to us via the circuitous route of global consumption and cosmological musings. — BILL KELLEY JR. What makes an asterisk so special? Any writer will tell you that the asterisk is one of those odd grammatical signs that refers to something but actually means nothing. Come here but then go somewhere else—it is here, but this is only a sign; the meaning lies somewhere else. It is always interesting to see visual and linguistic signs or logos take on new meaning, hybrid signs that don't mean what their creators meant them to mean, yet are more powerful and elusive now that they are hybrids. The linguistic asterisk, on the other hand, is perfectly simple in that it points the reader somewhere else, somewhere categorical and precise, yet segregated: beyond the frame but within the text. Not so in Jason Villegas's hybrid cosmology, where something as simple as an asterisk is mined for all its worth and finds its way, like a mutation, into every- thing. Villegas works with seemingly certain but overloaded signs that are now so open to recontextualization that official contexts seem to be only starting points in an open-ended teleological journey. The asterisk has found a parallel conceptual space in what Villegas has called a "cosmic anus." Part crucifix, part black hole, part North Star, the asterisk/anus is all of those things and yet, of course, none of them. One can find them high on gallery walls, painted plaster orifices that shine like stars above an installation—gallery as galaxy. The cosmological interconnectedness of the images and objects in Villegas's videos and installations elude classification. In a recent series of handmade sculp- tures titled Ultra Bastards (2006), a familiar space invader toy provides a narrative of global destruction, T-shirt logos have magical animistic forces, and celestial phenomena and consumer goods inhabit the same visual and cognitive loop. What is one to make of all these strange combinations? This space/nonspace (the gallery, the cosmic anus) discharges worlds of coveted accumulations, disciplined categories of beliefs, and nature itself into aggregate detritus for some future use. In a related video, Ultra Bastard Commercials (2005), Villegas transmits a loud and visually assaulting wunderkammer of logoized and aggressively appropriated merchandise. In one in a series of six Ultra Bastards, an Izod Lacoste crocodile becomes a tank, slapped together with painted duct tape and cardboard. A sound- track belts out a heroic, Japanese anime-sounding anthem, while apocalyptic screen shots are interrupted by the flashing slogan Correct Dem All! Packaged to 205 JASON VILLEGAS

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