February 17 to March 19, 2005

Jim Dingilian’s marker drawings and altered found photographs at Mackenzie Fine Art are intriguing in their process and choice of materials, so much so that it can require a conscious decision to linger for a while before individual works and allow their subtle plays on memory and narrative to come to the fore. The effort is well worth it. The unexpected surfaces gradually in Dingilian’s work, and when it does the experience can be lovely and quietly moving.

Of the two bodies of work, the drawings are the more easily overlooked: small, seemingly ephemeral works on paper that could be mistaken for offhand studies or doodles. However, when seen up close these pieces reveal an evocative and in some instances elaborate abstraction, the forms suggestive of traditional western and Chinese landscapes, cityscapes and crystal and leaf shapes. On further study one notices figures and groups of figures emerging faintly through the compositions, in something like Victorian ghost photographs that purported to show the spirits of the dead lurking in the background of ordinary domestic settings. In a sense the figures in

Dingilian’s drawings are themselves ghosts, the ghosts of the original photographs. The lines in these pieces are what remain of the photographic surface when the snapshots are dipped in bleach. Dingilian applies a resistive coating, which preserves the lines; he contributes nothing otherwise to the finished work. Some interrelationship of erasure and selection is always at work in a drawing. The ghost-figures, however, introduce an uncanny otherness in the compositions. This otherness is all the more evocative and intriguing because it is so resilient and, to some degree, independent of artistic control.

The process also says something about a paradoxical desire for the unexpected, one that a good many visitors to the gallery no doubt share. It is as if one were to go looking for an experience of déjà vu, and find it. Dingilian’s drawings on grade school desk tops differ so in mood and approach from the found photographs that they could be taken as the work of another artist; one might wonder why the two bodies of work were shown together. Nonetheless, certain parallels are apparent. Whereas the photographs involve erasure, the drawings involve the trace and the residual mark: scratches and wood grain on the desk surface picked up by blue marker. The drawings all but eliminate photographic images, the desk top images evoke them. The photographs explore memory, the desk top drawings suggest emotional atmosphere or the setting for narrative. They depict a peripheral dreariness in urban and suburban landscape: truck stops and fields, the edges of strip malls. One sees them through the blue filter of the medium, as if one were looking underwater or, as the gallery statement suggests, through an old cyanotype print. The effect is of a chilled or distanced nostalgia, or creepiness or beauty. Since the blue marker is not fixed to the surface, measures must be taken to hold the image in place, an interesting metaphor in itself of the lengths one can go to keep the ephemeral. One looks forward to seeing what other materials and forms Dingilian will choose for this impulse.

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Jurgen Teller: Daddy You’re So Cute
Lehmann Maupin
540 West 26th Street
New York NY 10001
212-255-2923
September 13 to October 18, 2003

my people were fair and had cum in their hair
(but now they’re content to spray stars from your boughs)
curated by Bob Nickas
TEAM
527 West 26 Street
New York NY 10001
212 279 9219
18 October through 15 November 2003

In two exhibitions encountered at random during recent visits to Chelsea galleries, sex is used as a vehicle for investigating issues of national and racial identity: Jurgen Teller’s beer, pork and penis studies of German-ness as reflected in a series of self-portraits is one, and Reagen Louie’s brothel and sex show encounters with Asian-ness the other. Additionally, a group show at Team Gallery offers a survey of utopian and mystical extensions of the sexual, dating back thirty-five years or so, with male artists looking at male subjects (and a few women) giving and receiving pleasure with a nostalgic abandon. Here, multiple Christ-like figures engage in anal sex, an attractive young man offers himself through an open car window, and another young man pleasures himself with a pumpkin, all in an effort to convey”sexual energy as key to kingdom and entering into a more fluid state between the mind and the body,” as Bob Nickas, the curator of the exhibition, is quoted in the press statement.

In short, what these three shows had in common was a male evocation of a social erotic, a situating of the masculine in relation to a collective identity or transcendent figure (Christ or Shiva, Eastern or Western sexual experience). Images of identity construction on the outer margins were few-no blood or whips or extreme piercings; nothing particularly squeamish or ‘kinky’. Theory was absent as well. No sightings of the fearful objet petit a), but lots of young flesh posed in the landscape of conventional male fantasy: bordellos, parking lots, hotel rooms, restaurants, and beaches. Irony was rampant, but so were various forms of earnestness. Sometimes the two were difficult to distinguish.

This blurring of the earnest and the ironic was particularly evident in the work of Reagan Louie. The implication of his images of sex workers is that-surprise!– they are individuals just like you and me. They horse around together, chat over cigarettes or soda, and work. Although they are often photographed nude, the fact that they have sex for money is kept out of view, and the voyeuristic pleasure of exposed flesh is deflected by the lush composition of the images. The seemingly hygienic attractiveness of the women, the tonal warmth and elegant structure of the compositions, and not least the absence of sex make women seem all the more wholesome. Yet isn’t that the core of fantasy in scenarios involving commodified sex? The woman for hire is lovely and sweet, just like the girl next door, and conversely the girl next door is, with the right man or in the right circumstance, sexually voracious or ‘slutty.’ What is fascinating about these photographs is that, even whilefantasy operates within them, the images also appear to be motivated by a desire for kinship or sympathetic bond with the subject, a bond that would turn wanderings in the sex industry into an artistic or spiritual quest, a visual bildungsroman with pasties. A fifth generation Chinese-American, Louie previously explored questions of identity, journeying to China to take the documentary images collected in “Toward a Truer Life” (1991). For this project he undertook a six year odyssey through Taiwan, Thailand, Japan and the Philippines. So, whereas one might expect images that raise difficult issues of sexual exploitation, racial exoticism, and decadence in the global marketplace, one finds unresolved attempts to find human contact in the most unlikely places.

At Lehman Maupin Gallery Jurgen Teller turns his lens from the celebrities and fashion models of his recent work onto himself. The confessional rigor of this work suggests the paradox that photography with sex as a focus is likely to achieve greater depth with the absence of the other. In place of objectified women, Teller conjures his dead father and a macho culture of German soccer and beer, each a bitterly unresolved attraction and repulsion. “Father and Son” depicts the artist nude on his father’s grave at midnight; a soccer ball serves as an allusion to his father’s dislike of the sport. Elsewhere, Teller lounges in a sauna, his face hidden behind a soccer magazine. With his rear presented to the camera, he exposes himself as ‘arsehole’ (his term) and as an object of desire. Beneath the self-loathing of these images, it is not hard to find a longing for a masculine ideal made problematic by a confluence of German and personal recrimination.

Almost six decades after the end of the Second World War, Germany and ‘the orient’ (a term Louie employs in the title of his show) still conjure sexual mythologies too troubling and complicated to confront directly or dismiss completely. Still, Teller’s pasty, drink-addled figure is the “real” element missing in Louie’s photographs; conversely, the giving and attractive women in Louie’s work are the fantasy missing in Teller’s images.

After seeing the Louie and Teller shows, one can be thrown by the poetic dreaminess of the organizing theme at Team: “My people were fair and had cum in their hair (but now they’re content to spray stars from your boughs).” Perhaps a new sexual revolution might run like an x-rated production of Midsummer Night’s Dream or a recitation of early Yeats by the cast of a gay porn film, but probably not. The reactions, or lack thereof, of visitors to the gallery indicated that the premise of the show (“Lately, a lot of work by younger artists has brought back ideas revolving around hedonism, liberation and revolution”) provokes the same sort of wary if bemused interest as a pair of outlandish sneakers at Jeffrey. This is because hedonism is already a given of contemporary consumer culture. Self-control is the new lost paradise-lose weight, organize, manage time, manage money, eliminate the menstrual cycle. This is not to suggest that all of the works at Team are glimpses of simple pleasure. Jules de Balincourt’s satirical image of corporate sexual processing (people burn their clothes upon leaving the plant) gave a refreshingly whimsical take on capitalism and sex, and Tim Lokiec’s cartoon grotesque of oral sex was intriguingly fierce and unresolved. Wolfgang Tillmans’s “Do Not Disturb”-an image of a man opening a door just enough to present his genitals- was amusing and disturbing all at once. It would be interesting to see what else lies behind the door-a geisha, a harem, a rucksack for a back to nature stroll, a pile of crumpled beer cans…We’ll see.

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Around the gallery walls at Art Link in New York’s garment district stand vivid and yet seemingly disconnected images of animals, buildings, keys, and chairs painted against flat neutral tones. The background serves here and there as a placeless terra firma, or as ether or ambient space. The effect, on walking in the gallery, is familiar and mildly disturbing. It is as if the contents of a child’s toy box had been scattered into a noumenal otherworld we can see only partially through apertures of random size. Most of the images are painted as if cropped; we see the upper two stories of an apartment building, the upper half of a swan, most but not all of a chair. Chair-ness, swan-ness, floating in a delimited sea of beige or gray paint and so cut free of narrative or purpose, taken on a haunting glamour, in the old and more recent senses of the word. The objects depicted are beautiful, and desirable; one wants to own them, to have them around, and they are somehow present and radiant, almost alive. So one is lead to ask, without taking anything away from the work, why? what is the hold of these images?

In his gallery statement the artist, Spanish artist Inaki Lazkoz, refers to the “pure enigmatic presence” of his subjects. Each word, taken alone and relation to the others, has a lot to say about the attraction of his work. Their purity has much to do with the composition of the paintings. The cropping of the images, particularly of the buildings, gives them a portrait-like focus and a non, or more accurately, an a-functional self-sufficiency. The apartment building in “Utica Avenue,” for example, stands in a non-differentiated ochre or taup sky, a diminutive composite of residential forms cut off from the street-level perspective or surrounding structures that might distract us from the interplay of linear forms. Elsewhere, it is hard to tell what some of the buildings are, in functional terms; is this a barn? a garage? a house? Yet the meticulous rendering of detail enforces an impression of particularity distinct from social or commercial context. There is something refreshing and yet bewildering in what Lazkoz is showing us-this non-referential purity. What is a building that is not on a street or a lot or a field, not even in a space? To say that is a painting of a building tells us nothing, or next to nothing. We know it is a painting, but more than that, what we are offered is a kind of abstracted nostalgia, a nostalgia, perhaps, for the act of seeing itself.

Thus their enigmatic quality. The paintings are pure, in the sense I have described, but they are hardly simple or naïve. Yet what is enigmatic about them derives from their purity, or, to put it in more visual terms, their stark clarity. Given the density of the sensual spaces that we move through-with our headsets or car sound systems, crowds everywhere, traffic backed up, pollution draping the edge of the horizon like steel mesh-how often or how well do we see the formal properties of the urban and suburban spaces we move through? Contrast the perceptual clutter of a given moment in a workday with the solitary stillness of the buildings in Lazkoz’s paintings. Lazkoz samples the disjointed stream of daily experience, isolates seemingly arbitrary bits, and in doing so discovers a surprising familiarity, as if the images were there around us but we didn’t know where to look-and of course they were there all along… To some degree the images existed, or images like them, in the tradition of representational painting. In its desolate eloquence his work resembles the haunting interiors and architectural studies of Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershoi, but without the light or space, or a Hopper without the narrative implications.

This brings us to presence. Here, Lazkoz’s animals make clear what occurs in a more subtle level in his paintings of objects: an animate and articulate if as yet non-verbal engagement projecting from the painting, an intelligent presence looking out from unexpected places. The bull that stares back at us from an atmosphere of warm honey has that confrontational blankness in its big eyes that can stop thought momentarily on a walk along a country road. The eyes takes us in and see through us at the same time, include us in a holistic everything and dismiss the whole as a blur between a blink and a snoutful of grass. The swan includes us in its floating tranquility. The paintings of buildings, similarly, look at us as we look at them, as portraits often seem to do. So, in a sense, our portrait has been taken; we have come to know something pure and enigmatic in ourselves by looking at Lazkoz’s work.

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“Stalker 3” is a 53 minute video that documents the destruction of a Russian tank convoy by lightly armed Chechen partisans. Two photographs of an attractive Russian woman flank the projection on either side. The wall on which the images flicker is pierced by what could be taken as the barrel of a tank cannon. Elsewhere in the gallery, a few objects-rabbit skins and paper brushed with black oil-allude tenuously to a symbolic narrative the artist chose not to develop or identify further in visual terms (the installation does include a gallery statement criticizing multinational corporations). It is important to his project that what we are seeing is a military dispatch in video form (edited, with additional sound, by Bugaev and fellow artist Dimitry Gelfand) the Chechens intended to support their claim for an Al Qaeda bounty calculated on the basis of a body count.

This display of amateur war footage provoked an NPR reporter to ask, is it art? At first, my reaction to the report was one of annoyance. Why would one feel compelled to ask such a question, I thought, and, for that matter, why answer? After decades of avant garde (and avant avant garde) art practice, asking if this or that piece in a gallery is a work of art seems analogous to asking who is buried in Grant’s tomb. What is displayed in an art gallery? Art.

But what has been decided by such an answer? Imagine if “Stalker 3” were shown inside a church, or if it were screened in a mosque in Grozny, if any mosques remain standing in Grozny (in either case, would the question be, is it spiritual?). Or imagine another scenario: amateur footage-taken from an Al Qaeda camp in Afganistan, perhaps– of the World Trade Center attack screened in a Chelsea gallery, with accompanying props (a shard from the towers piercing the video projection). Although such a scenario is conceivable it is probably not a coincidence that this has yet to be realized. Examples of photojournalism and amateur images of the 9/11 attack have been exhibited, but the kind of project “Stalker 3” represents is something else entirely.

Here, the appropriation, rather than the making, is at issue. That is, the circumstances of the making of this video matter, within a broader cultural context (beyond the battlefield, beyond the purview of Russian and Chechen military forces) only in relation to the circumstances in which the video is shown. The video could be used, for example, in a documentary piece on the war; this would hardly be unusual. “Stalker 3” presents itself as something other than that. By displaying the video in a gallery, as part of an installation, Bugaev raises the question whether the footage can, like any other found object, be transformed into an artifact by virtue of his appropriation of it. What he does not appear to have considered (or taken into account sufficiently) is how the larger social context can efface this question, absorb the footage into preoccupations external to the process of art making, and appropriate the project in turn.

While the Chechen fighters were firing over and over at I-20 Gallery, the relatives of those lost in the World Trade Towers were appealing for dignified treatment of the body fragments interred in the debris shipped to Fresh Kills. The public was reviewing architectural plans for new buildings at the World Trade Center site. There was talk of kissing towers and memorialized footprints of vanished buildings, of gardens set by the water, and of height in relation to terror. Listening to the radio, I could not get out of my mind the image-largely of my own imagining–of people sifting through the dust and scrap of a landfill for bits of bone, strands of hair, or scraps of clothing. It happens that some research I did not long ago involved reading passages on resurrection, particularly in the Old Testament (“Many of those that sleep in the dust of the earth will awake…” Daniel 12:1). The relatives of the World Trade Center dead were speaking from the same texts, though in the terms of forensic medicine.

Sergei Bugaev’s academic exercise in cynicism or faux cynicism stood in contrast to the spontaneous demand by the public and commercial interests (with, inevitably, some degree of calculation on their part) for a spiritual or mythic structure for the aftermath of 9/11. It would almost appear that there is an inverse relationship between the social distress associated with images (photographs, news footage, amateur video, and so forth) and the availability of those images to conceptual manipulation (the projects of a visual avant garde). Again, the appropriation of images (photojournalism, news footage, and the like) is at issue here, rather than the production of original instances of provocation or what is taken as provocation (images by Mapplethorpe or Offili that stirred attempts at censorship). The World Trade Center images have not yet been assimilated into an iconic repertoire (which would include images of Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire, of children mutilated in napalm bombings, or students crying out in dismay and horror at Kent State, all images quickly absorbed in cultural discourse) within art world, as opposed to journalistic or documentary, practice. Simply put, they hurt too much for us, or those of us not immersed in Russian issues, to process in anything like the way we process the images of Russian soldiers dying in distant Chechenya. The allusion in the title, “Stalker3,” to a science fiction movie set, to quote the gallery statement, in an “anomalous zone, a place where extraterrestrials visit the earth, and danger lies in wait” aptly describes the remove of the mythic material Bugaev employs.

This is not to say that”Stalker 3″ lacks spiritual pathos, but this pathos emerges in surprising ways. In the confines of a gallery, the vacuous immediacy of the film corresponds to the categorical emptiness of death, its refusal to hold meaning (the afterlife is something else) except in negative terms; death as such is not an experience, and the person who has died is not a person but a name or placeholder for that person, and so forth). The video displays the mechanics of death with the most minimal organizing narrative (the piece ends with a funeral and dirge), confronting us the translation of an experiential world, a life (or, lives), to inert matter. By lifting “Stalker 3” out of the political and cultural circumstances of its production and placing it in a Chelsea gallery, Bugaev reduces content to an exacting and pertinent near-nothingness. The soldiers in his film, caught in the documentary tedium of their annihilation as it is played and replayed, signify loss-the loss of their lives, or to put it simply, their deaths–and little else. It is worth considering whether this confrontation with the starkness and simplicity of death is facilitated or distorted by the cognitive dissonance of the medium itself: the noise, the switch from black and white to color, the varying film quality. I suspect that the former is true. In any case, the experience is disturbing and worthwhile, whatever one feels about the art-related issues of the installation.

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In the large video projection “Pietà,” facing the desk at Matthew Marks Gallery, the artist Sam Taylor Wood labors to support the draped body of Robert Downey Jr. Why him, one might ask, and for that matter, why her? Why ask, is the likely reply. Taylor-Wood has appropriated widely in the past-from Atlas to Roman orgy scenes (updated to the present day) to Hollywood movies. Here, as elsewhere in her work, surface registers of emotion and physical distress take the place of narrative. The pietà becomes an icon of exhaustion and distress, in her hands. Or, to put it differently, exhaustion and distress become iconic, if only by association. Elsewhere, a young woman is depicted morphing into distress, frame by frame in slow, slow motion. Taylor-Wood has returned several times in her career to this approach, breaking down highly charged scenarios with a wry slow-mo detachment, like a female Freud liberated by an encounter with Marcel Marceau. A closer analogy might be early photographic studies of the emotions: Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals or Hugh Diamond’s studies of the mentally ill in the 1850’s. She approaches her subjects, at times (not always, by any means; as, for example, the early “Fuck, Suck, Spank, Wank,” not shown here) with a similar analytic curiosity, a similarly unremitting urge to defamiliarize. One misses, in these works, the visceral or the raw. Perhaps, however, that is Taylor-Wood’s point. A photograph of a nude male laid out like Holbein’s dead Christ appears so matter of fact, so drained of significance, that the idea of death asserts itself with the chill subtlety of a business card dropped on a dinner setting. Similarly, a series of small richly colored photographs of a couple having intercourse decomposes the act analytically without titillation or decorative panache that the tones and choreography of bodies would at first suggest. Here is sex, post-Hefner, post-Koons and -Mapplethorpe, post-voyeurism. It is pleasant enough, but the erotic epiphany is elsewhere, or is not to be had at all. In this context, the image of the artist holding up a dead hare is the most hopeful work in the current show. The artist’s deadpan vulnerability-the photograph makes a punning allusion to her difficult recovery from cancer-suggests a return to the defiance and surrealism of her “Soliloquies” (1998-2000) and “Five Revolutionary Seconds” (1995-98). Somewhere between sex and death passion may yet emerge. In the meantime, Sam Taylor-Wood’s work displays the stimulus, even the pleasures of the candidly unresolved.

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May 17 – June 22, 2002

Laura Larson photographs hotel rooms in disarray, discovering in them not only that unsettling convergence of corporate artifice and fugitive intimacy peculiar to such places but something other and particular to her own sensibility. The images are familiar, generic, at first almost invisible. The cleaning service is making its rounds. The guests have gone, the maids have yet to strip the rumpled beds. Apart from the soiled sheets and the trash scattered on the floor, there is nothing in the room to draw our attention. On second look, however, the formal tensions and peripheral oddities in the photographs assert themselves. A blanket is folded on exactly one half of a bed, exposing the impress of a fastidious or lonely someone. The carpet in the foreground of a hallway fills the picture plane like a prairie landscape, then quickly-too quickly-blurs in the recess. Perspectives shift from dead on to overhead, the two coexisting queasily rather than merging. Light insinuates itself from an odd variety of sources-natural or artificial, focused or diffuse, from screens, bulbs, windows, and reflective surfaces, from above and below, from the recesses of closets and bathrooms.

The colors in these rooms, however, appear disconnected from the sources of light that ostensibly produce them. It is as if the muted whites and beiges in several of the rooms were laid on with plastic sheets, or the intense red on blankets in other scenes had splashed out of that bathtub-half full of brackish or bloody water-or radiated out of the man-made fibers in the carpeting. It is all a bit much and not enough, like much of modern life in middle class America. We are privy to signifying systems without apparent significance, clues in crime scenes without the crime, or dreams without the dream. No dead body floats in the bathtub, no sexy underwear hangs from a light fixture. Like the random tableau in Philip-Lorca Dicorcia’s street scenes, Larson’s photographs tease us with the blank eloquence of nothing in particular in the lives of no one we are likely to know. The primacy of the surface in these reverses the inclinations of the recent past: no sniffing in the subterranean recesses of the emotional landscape for clues to some buried trauma. In those places where public and private meet-hotel rooms, or perhaps the booths at restaurants or nightclubs–what we see, right in front of us, is what we see.

Behind the desk at Lennon, Weinberg, Larson’s photographs of museum period rooms and crime scene miniatures harken, with charming poignancy, to that Hitchcockian dream-like strangeness so conspicuously absent in the hotel scenes. It would be interesting to have these little images and the large-format hotel scenes interspersed in the same exhibition space. As it is, the placement of the smaller photographs behind the desk and around corners of rooms makes an intriguing parallel to the visual experience within the hotel images. One leaves the gallery intrigued and dispirited, curious to see more.

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Those familiar with the work of Marcus Harvey primarily through his piece at the Sensation show will be in for a sensation of a different sort at Mary Boone Gallery. “Myra” (1995) employed children’s handprints in an image of a child murderer. No portraits of serial killers here; the gallery is dominated by three large (61/2 x 16′) still lives of dildos, vibrators, and the detritus of what is known in England as an “Ann’s Summer Party.” This, it was explained at the gallery, is like a Tupperware party, but not for Tupperware. Who knew? So, amidst the sex toys one finds pizza crusts, glasses of wine, stacked plates, and full ashtrays. This holds for two of the paintings; a third offers an overhead view of a bureau, with two top drawers open to reveal what one assumes were purchases made. This painting offers a key to the formal and semantic arrangements of the paintings, revealing visual interest far more considerable than the initial shock value, such as it is. One drawer is dominated by the warm tones and vertical shapes of the toys, the other by the cool rectangular shapes of folded clothes. The bureau top, seen from above, establishes a mediating art historical reference. The painting on the wall opposite is similarly divided roughly down the middle by two pillars of a black and a red sex toy-looking totemic with pleasure-delivering animals perched near the base of each. The division of the painting suggests a whimsical opposing of social spheres, with a good deal of messy spillage from one into the other: on one side the domestic references of stacked dirty dishes and party leavings in cool tones, on the other dirty (in another sense) sexual apparatuses in hot reds and pinks. On the far wall, toys shaped like corn and cucumbers rhyme visually with more traditional still life objects. Round shapes of handcuffs tuck up against rounded pizza crusts; a dildo penetrates the tranquility of a bowl of fruit. The paintings are about lots of things: the publicity of the private, the commodification of sex, the tedious monumentality of the erotic in the media age (acres of flesh in Times Square ads, and the like). And the paintings, one suspects, are about silence and self-censorship, or the evident preference of those visiting the gallery not to say much about what they are seeing. No matter how much we are inundated with sexual display and reference in ads and media, sex tends to reassert its mute privacy when we encounter its paraphernalia, its alien thingness as opposed to purely social immanence…So here is the it of sex-dildoes of all sorts, handcuffs, vibrators-as opposed to the id. When spread and magnified as they are in Marcus’s paintings, do these objects start to lose their particular reference, and settle into the formal interest of genre pieces–still lives on wooden surfaces-or do they so insist on their oversized potency, like big farm animals fattening on waves of lascivious interest. For most of us, it is somewhere in between, but the show is well worth a visit to find out.

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January 5 – February 2, 2002

A fat graphite figure slops out of a multi-colored disc in David Dupuis’s “Love Connection” at Derek Eller Gallery, licking the edge of the twin disc on the opposite panel of the diptych; the color wheel has got its tongue. Or phallus, which suggests that if color could talk, it would talk about sex. Language often appears to be rising (or falling) out of the surfaces in this remarkable group show, rising and receding, changing form, just eluding one’s grasp, as it were. Biomorphic shapes drift over colored-pencil wave-patterns in two other compositions by Dupuis. Abstract shapes within thought or dialogue balloons of cartoon illustration imply that something is being expressed under the pleasant glow of amorphous suns hovering nearby. The allusions to thought and talk tease us out of the merely decorative without resolving into reference or abstraction. The general effect is a trippy isolation, the odd creatures of another world viewed through sealed glass. Even in those works in which the figures are somewhat more accessible there is a sense of pre-verbal yearning, of significance pushing up from the surface.

In Nina Bavasso’s “Suzanne’s Burial Mound,” [see cover] flower shapes and quilt patterns in pinks and lavenders weave through the geometric lines. The composition, breast-like, mound-like, pillow-like, forms into something at once comforting and restless, improvising on feminine motifs while allowing the momentum of repetitive pattern to inscribe the surface with an intensity of gesture. Bavasso’s elaboration of simple, freely drawn shapes has been compared to doodling, but, as is the case with Dupuis’s work, the building up of irregular forms into an off-balance mass suggests something more complicated and ambitious than that. Her images get at a merging of biology and signifying system, of vital energy and consciousness, as if the unwieldy cell structures she draws were tottering into nostalgia or whimsy.

Andrew Masullo’s three-dimensional paintings introduce a brightly colored and palpable thingness to all this play on signifying and not signifying. He builds and shapes with paint, raising three-dimensional shapes off flat, painted grids or monochrome surfaces. Again, there are biomorphic shapes, and hints at codes and signs, as well as cheerful allusions to Pop, Minimalism and Modernist abstraction. It is difficult to say what this adds up to, or if adding up to a particular point is at issue. Masullo titles his works according to their place in his oeuvre, and by now the four digit stretch of each title has its own poignancy. In this near hermetic persistence Massullo connects, paradoxically, with Dupuis and Bovasso. That Derek Eller should bring together such particular artists, and allow their works to speak among each other without an imposed rubric, is a credit to his eye and to his critical acumen.

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September 22- November 3, 2001

A hand blocks the landscape view in Catherine Murphy’s painting “Backlit,” recalling a gesture familiar from celebrity sightings and crime scenes:’no pictures!’ The image of the hand, oversized and cropped at the frame, compels our interest. Backlit, the ridged flesh between thumb and forefinger is almost translucent, while the tilted columns of the fingers appear wittily massive and vibrant against the wisps of summer foliage behind them. The gold of the wedding ring is flecked with blue sky, the vertical lines of the stretched palm rhyme visually with the verticals of the grass and trees. Landscape and artisanal hand merge and separate, in a finely nuanced play on the Modernist dialectic of object and expectation-this is not a hand, yet it is.

Similarly, traces of a landscape show through the letters of “Cathy” (seen backwards) written on a fogged window, a beautifully immediate rendering of the frustration of peering through subjectivity to that which is being represented. Painting, in these works, seems haunted by an anticipatory nostalgia for the actual, the subject that constantly slips into change as the process-Murphy is known for taking months and years on her work-goes on. The crumbs scattered across a stained tablecloth in “The Windsor” suggest that if the artist at work must inevitably come late to the feast of sensual experience, this must suffice. And it does; the painting is at once intimate and forlorn, cerebral and keenly felt. Even paintings with a largely formal interest reveal an underlying tension.

The images of a hunting scene in”Wallpapered Corner” reverse and repeat on the vertical, playing abstractly on the geometric configurations of walls, trim and carpet, at the same time drawing us figuratively into a painted corner. But it is a lovely corner; why not stay there The puzzles of Murphy’s work are nearly as seductive as the sensuality of their color, yet in her drawings one sees that something else is at work that transcends both. “Swept up,” completed in 1999, gathers endless debates over representational art where they belong, in a carbon swirl of beautifully rendered dust. A drawing that nearly cost Murphy her eyesight asserts the exactitude and rigor of her vision.

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September 22- November 3, 2001

Cox’s “American Family”, recently seen at her first solo show at the Robert Miller Gallery, a large group of family snaps fanned out on the floor of a side room. Set against the large-scale erotic images in the other rooms, this group of vacation shots and family momentos may appear to be a point of departure, or the safe domestic ground for the artist’s sexual bravado. But, as with many aspects of the show, this deserves another look. Images suggestive of patriotism, Catholic piety, and strongly asserted black and Jamaican identity complicate, and in some instances blunt, the irony of mock-heroic iconography in a few larger photographs, and the casual eroticism in a few smaller ones. And, one can’t help but notice, amidst the many references to Cox’s African heritage, that her husband is white, the children posed elsewhere in African garb are of mixed race. Over and again in this show, what appear on the surface to be bold assertions of identity or sexual empowerment are offset or rendered ambivalent in the graphic subtext. In a film close-up of french kissing, for instance, length and silence wear at the satire of hardcore pornography, the relentless thrust and counter-thrust of the two tongues suggesting a mute and ambiguous stalemate in an oral battle of the sexes. On a wall nearby, male legs in drag open and close slowly, the man’s sex faintly visible in the darkness between his thighs. The parody of sexy posturing is neutralized by its visual obscurity (we can’t get the punch line because we can’t make it out) and the tease by its scrambling of gender. Cox drew Mayor Giuliani’s ire with “Yo Mama’s Last Supper,” a frontal nude of the artist assuming Christ’s place amidst his disciples. Looking at her follow similar appropriation strategies in this exhibition one finds, more often than not, that the work is appealingly unresolved. One of the more erotic images in the show – which features yellow, red-tipped roses fanning from a lap to just below the subject’s bare breasts – hangs opposite Cox’s African reworking of Manet’s “Olympia”, sans black servant. The offering of roses is thus detached from its original context. The political and sexual audacity of the black servant assuming the temptress role is largely, but not entirely de-contextualized and softened in Cox’s photograph, which replaces the servant with her sons in tribal garb. In other works, the obviousness of her art-historical appropriations renders the appropriation almost beside the point, the artist’s nakedness appearing all the more vulnerable. It is possible that the images of Cox in fetish gear or her juxtapositions of nudes and childhood snaps were meant to shock. The remarks of visitors to the gallery, however, tended to be glibly or blandly objectifying (‘nice abs,’ ‘nice rear,’ ‘I’d like to know who her personal trainer is’). It could be argued that we are now in a post-erotic time, at least in regards to visual art, since our capacity for shock has been depleted in other contexts. If this is so then all the better for Cox. She should exploit the change of erotic zeitgeist, however it plays out, as an opportunity to tease out further doubts and confusions underlying her sexual bravura.

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