DANICA PHELPS: WAKE
Zach Feuer to October 1
530 West 24 Street, between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 989 7700

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, September 22, 2005

Philip Pearlstein is a collector of oddities, in life and within his paintings.  A typical studio set up juxtaposes assorted toys and curios—kitsch or decrepit in varying degrees—amidst his trademark emotionally vacant, lithe, naked models.

The poses and arrangements are studiedly weird, but somehow, the more tricksy his jumbled and skewed images become, the more disconcertingly prosaic his paint handling seems in comparison.  The same hand is used, in an even, measured way, to render volumetrically complex flesh and flat fabrics, solid forms and elusive shadows.  It is as if in the execution of his mannerist compositions he has an attitude to match the disconnect of his models from their contorted repose.  The viewer is left in a similar space, poised between tedium and fancy, alienation and intrigue.

The artist would have us believe, apparently, that his sole concerns are perception itself and formal construction.  But such an array of at once functional and fantasy objects as a Chinese kite, decoys, a butcher’s sign, iconic pop trademarks, cartoon characters, a weathervane airplane, Americana, and tribal artefacts, not to mention the nude as “play thing” –at once locus and signifier of desire—cannot but operate at some level of metaphor, if not allegory.  Catalogue essayist Alexi Worth identifies for these recent paintings “a tricky middle zone where symbolism and formalism cohabit.”  At the very least, the images operate as object poems, even if they resist decoding.

But often as not, the symbolism seems as literal as the perception.  “Model on Bamboo Lounge with Artist Mannequin” (2005) is almost a manifesto piece for an artist concerned with teasing the boundaries between nature and artifice, what is alive and what is art.  The dramatis personae have interchangeable designations: the wooden lay figure could accurately be deemed a model, while the reclining female figure, by virtue of being in the employ of Mr. Pearlstein, could be termed, following the French term, an artist’s mannequin.  Her pose, kimono akimbo to reveal brown suntanned flesh, one hand upon her thigh, the other pressed on her brow, is oddly stilted (“wooden”) while the light lends a teasingly animated quality to the polished, heavily grained, actually wooden figurine.

Mr. Pearlstein often singles out this African-American model for images that play on visual-verbal issues of color and tone.  In an earlier series she would sprawl over a dollshouse model of the White House, for instance.  In the current group she poses a couple of times on a funky, 1970s inflatable blue blow-up chair in images whose titles reference her dreadlocks—again, the buzz words that go off, consciously or not, on registering the object and its perceptual properties are “color,” “skin,” “otherness.”

There are two pictures which feature a model with her legs crossed over an African drum, both from 2005.  In terms of visual metaphor there seems to be a play on tautness, a sense of stretched skin and tightened muscle uniting instrument and sitter.  The drum has stylised animals carved in relief—at yet another level, a verbal pun on the mannerism of the model’s pose in which tension and relaxation play off against each other.

Apart from the conflict between the literal and the metaphorical, the psychological responses that a Pearlstein elicits are complex.  Within the formal terms the artist seems to prefer there’s a confusion about status: are they “realist” in the sense of using a received language to achieve an impact and immediacy comparable to photography, or are they perceptualist, in the sense of really being about looking afresh and putting down what is seen and experienced, however odd and surprising and actually different from photography that turns out to be?  The awkwardness and distortion that arise from cheating or doing without singlepoint perspective suggest the latter: it is about fresh seeing.  But with all the years that he has been doing it Mr Pearlstein has generated his own set of tropes—radical foreshortening, shadow play, the play of fabrics that are already flattened against volumetric forms that he himself flattens—that are as much a language as is realism.  His naivite is a form of sophistication, and vice versa.

Time is an implicit element in the paintings of Mr. Pearlstein.  Although the surfaces give off, so to speak, conflicting reports—they are chock full of facts but dutifully delivered—the sense of detail and attention, not to mention the cheesed off expression of the models, suggest the long haul.  Danica Phelps, however, leaves no ambiguity about time in her work: It is the work.  Taking the diaristic to a literalist extreme, her show at Zach Feuer presents erotic doodles, flow diagrams, and expenditure charts that list her daily activities on an hourly, not to mention cent by cent basis.

Her hand—whether offering graphic designerish rendering or vaguely expressive, langourous figuration, and whether drawing or writing—is at once neat and dashed off, fastidious and fiddly.  She constructs Filofax-like (but handmade) charts filled in, retrospectively, with the activities that have accounted for her day.  “STUDIO” in block letters will account for long stretches (but not as long, one suspects, as Mr. Pearlstein or his sitters) while other repeating activities are walking the dog, paying bills, chatting with Debi, eating with Debi, making love with the lucky Debi.

The lovemaking brings out the draughtsman in Ms. Phelps, in overlapping, outlined wire figures in minimally defined interior spaces.  Expenditure alone however brings out the colorist.  Ms. Phelps continues from earlier shows an elaborate notational system of income and expenditure in barcodes of reds, yellows and greens.

Despite coming from a very different culture (feminism, conceptualism and fluxus) Ms. Phelps is definitely a coda of sorts to Mr. Pearlstein: Think nutty observation, repeating patterns, overlapping languages, and oddly compelling tedium.

The post Philip Pearlstein at Betty Cuningham and Danica Phelps: Wake at Zach Feuer appeared first on artcritical.

Danica Phelps: Integrating Sex Into Everyday Life
LFL Gallery 530 W 24th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, phone: 212-989-7700, through

Erwartung/Expectancy: A Video Installation by Dara Birnbaum
The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue on the northeast corner of 92nd Street, through January 4, 2004

Janine Antoni’s bombastic new installation at Luhring Augustine literally assaults the senses. Even out on the street, the eyes and nose begin to itch. Inside, there’s a full-scale olfactory attack. Between two awesome, rusting nine-foot steel reels – relics from some dark, satanic mill, perhaps – is gathered a vast heap of raw hemp fiber that fills the cavernous gallery with pugnacious dust.

It’s ironic that the senses should get it from so echt a conceptualist as Ms. Antoni, but then, her work has always knowingly collided the cerebral and the sensual. She came to attention in the early 1990s with work that earned her a place in course textbooks as the epitome of the art world’s obsession at that time with (capital B) the Body. Not to be confused with figurative art, Body art sought to reintroduce awareness of the somatic, and delighted in weird and wonderful imagery to do with fluids and organs and other yucky stuff. Apparently, it all tied in with critical theory at the time.

Ms. Antoni’s classic piece in this genre, “Gnaw” (1992), entailed performances in which she would chew away a gargantuan block of chocolate to reveal a (pre-prepared) statue of herself or, in corresponding fashion, model herself out of soap. Her aesthetic has always entailed an element of the endurance test. To witness, or know about, the physical suffering or tedium to which the maker has subjected herself became integral to the appreciation of the work.

The problem is that if you just chance upon the humdrum academic statue of a young woman in brown material without knowing (a) that it’s chocolate and (b) that a suffering, post-feminist, shaman chocoholic body artist ruined her teeth to sculpt it for you, you may think it’s just an academic statue.

Similarly, with this new work, “To Draw a Line,” empathy is hardly possible without news about how the piece came about. Before the show opened, apparently – and one has to read the press release to realise this – Ms. Antoni walked the tightrope of overstretched and eroded hemp that connects the two giant reels, knowing that despite a summer of practice (the invite card shows her balanced on a police barricade on Canal Street), she was doomed repeatedly to fall seven feet into the billowing dusty hemp that was her safety net. In this respect, Ms. Antoni recalls the antics of various classic conceptualists (Chris Burden, Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci) whose performances or processes entailed injuries or inconveniences of varying gravity.

But here the viewer doesn’t even have the thrill of seeing the artist suffer. The object under view, visually recalling Arte Povera artist Jannis Kounellis with his fondness for steel and stuffing, is really a souvenir for a main event that might not ever have happened. It pushes the divorce of artifact and performance (props as sops) far further than even Matthew Barney. His sculptures and installations, in relation to the Cremaster movies, make the gallery feel like the cinema foyer, but they have some life of their own (just less life than the movies). As an irate collector was overheard to ask on my visit to Ms. Antoni’s show, “Isn’t there even a video?”

In overblown and oversimplified form, “To Draw a Line” recalls Ms. Antoni’s one truly impressive work to date, “Slumber” (1994). In this, the sleeping artist had herself hooked up to an EEG machine; the resulting REM readings were then fed into a loom. Again, lots of string, lots of explication, but for once, the yarn was literally part of the art.

As well as belonging to the subgenre of machines that make art, “Slumber” took its place in a genre which is quite peculiar to recent art, in which a kind of poetry ensues from nutty documentation or registration of the artist’s presence, bodily processes, or mundane activities: Conceptual-process-performance art, in other words, for the era of reality TV.

An artist some years younger than Ms. Antoni who has made her career out of what one might call personalist statistics is Danica Phelps. Up to now, accountancy has been the probity of her art. She would keep head-spinning logs of her spending over long stretches of time or devise improbably elaborate bartering schemes: narrative flow kept pace with formal rhythms in the schematic presentation of her data.

Ms. Phelps remains a devotee of informational overload and dogged resolve, only now she has taken up the one subject sexier than money: Sex. According to an open letter to family, friends, and colleagues that forms a press release for the exhibition, after seven erotically uneventful years of marriage, Ms. Phelps has come out as a lesbian. As students of her compulsively diaristic exhibition, entitled “Integrating Sex into Everyday Life” soon discover, the lucky lady’s name is Debi.

Arranged in the middle of the gallery are a mattress, a makeshift kitchen, the artist’s somewhat grungy wardrobe, and a work station: Evidently (though not on the day of my visit) the artist will be *in situ*, making art (if not love) and living some of the very life that will be documented in her drawings. Hanging on the wall, and perhaps increasing in number as her life is further lived, are these drawings, which consist of copious date-book entries which hourly notatewalking the dog, gallery-going, drawing, reading, and – with healthful frequency – making love with Debi.

Next to these lists are spindly, doodly sketches of interlocking couples. These are sensual and personable enough but Ms. Phelps is hardly the new Egon Schiele. At the base of each page are arcane, colored bar codes thatapparently register cash flow and credits/debits incurred, recalling her pre-Sapphic preoccupations. So much for measuring out one’s life in coffee spoons. Still, a precarious balance of anal retention and erotic release lends this whole project an endearing and welcome charm.
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“Erwartung/Expectancy,” Dana Birnbaum’s installation at the Jewish Museum, was a work originally commissioned in 1995 as an outdoor project by the Vienna Kunsthalle. A plexi screen is coated with a blown-up reproduction of one of Arnold Schönberg’s watercolorsenvisioning a stageset for his revolutionary “monodram” of that title. Onto this textured support, Ms. Birnbaum projects images of a woman with flowing red locks in a period dress, whose poses that have all the drama and circumstance of an L.L. Bean catalogue.

Accompanying each shot are stage directions and lines, in English, from Marie Pappenheim’s libretto. The soundtrack sounds like digitally messed around fragments of Schönberg’s score, slowed down and with the voice edited out. In the darkened room, fragments of image bounce back upon the walls in further attempts at ambiguous distortion. While curatorial wall text makes big claims for the feminist radicality of this venture, in truth it seems there is little a video installation artist appropriating Schoenberg can do that’s more expressive or weird than the audacious a-tonality of the original.

The composer’s watercolor will feature in the Jewish Museum’s upcoming and much anticipated exhibition, Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider, which opens October 24. Even as a teaser for it, this piece is frankly presumptuous and inconsequential.

This article first appeared in the New York Sun, September 11, 2003

The post Janine Antoni at Luhring Augustine, Danica Phelps at LFL Gallery, Dara Birnbaum at The Jewish Museum appeared first on artcritical.