Wild Girls

Exit Art, June 24- August 26, 2006

The premise of the unfortunately titled Wild Girls exhibition is that this group of women is boldly addressing gender issues, jumping off fro the work of their feminist precursors in transformative ways. Their work is touted by the press release as groundbreaking, and as promising a “collective look at the 21^st century woman artist.” The themes proposed are: identity, eroticism, vanity, and mythology—alternately a banal and mystifying interpretative framework. Certainly identity and eroticism are well-worn feminist territory, but I fail to see the exhaustiveness or importance of the categories of vanity and mythology. Or really, the prominence of these themes in the more successful and interesting pieces included in the show. Instead of the “challenging questions” about “everything from gender issues to the mundane aspects of daily life,” the real interest lies in the negotiations of these artists with the past and the changing present.

Certainly the touchstones of the 1970s Women’s Art Movement—craftiness, bodily imagery, etc—are present in the sculptural installations. Emily Keown’s “Eleven Ladies,” consisting of pairs of crochet nipples in red, pink, and purple hues artfully arranged on a glass shelf, takes up from where the “Dinner Party” left off. While the material and imagery is continuous, gone is the explicit sexuality and sense of community and history of Judy Chicago. Instead the installation evokes the commodification of sex, and issues of performance and masquerade replace more essentialist assertions. The “ladies” seem like pasties for sale at an upscale boutique, and in the context of 21^st century hip, young feminism, they recall the “Stitch N’ Bitch” reclamation of knitting, and the d.i.y. sex-positive burlesque movement. They also speak to the current spate of crafty sculptural installation art that defined PS1’s “Greater New York” show. This transmutation of the traditional feminist take on “the body” into a performative problem is echoed in the gilded and bejeweled dildos, “latex pussies”, and leather whips that Jaishri Abichandani arranges into a series of strange snake-ridden alters. This sense of fetish rather than flesh is taken more colloquially in the terracotta assemblages of Simone Leigh, which tread similar ground to a dissimilar effect. Also picking up these threads are Maria Pineres cross-stitched mug shots, and Jennifer Levonian’s delightful stop-action video, “The Figure in the Carpet,” which uses drawings and collage to create a strange retro piece featuring bank robbery and forest escapades. More than anything, these works taken together, seem to reflect this PS1 sensibility, while asserting its ignored feminist provenance.

Dialogues with non-feminist artistic traditions also figure prominently in the show. Alia Farid Abdal creates a series of photographs that twist the iconography of menstrual blood to more minimalist ends. A woman wearing blue underwear stained red is photographed from the waist to the knee against a blue-green tiled wall. Each photograph frames its subject slightly differently in scale and angle, as the tiled grid of the bathroom echoes the gridded arrangement of the photographs themselves. The photographs are crisp, intimate and careful, bringing the sexualized subject into conversation with the minimalist grid, as the very profusion of blood stains recall Rothko more than Schneeman. This embodied, specific route to formal abstraction is picked up by Francisca Benitez’s video of the street shot from the perspective of a skateboarder. The tip of the board against the rectangle of the screen forms the constant abstracted image, but the surfaces traversed change—each creating a specific texture and coinciding sound. This abstract sound-image sync-up is arresting, as are the point of view provided for the spectator, and the redefinition of the modernist flaneur. The field of abstraction is not neutral, it is a shifting, and imagined as a rocky terrain to be traversed. Kate Gilmore’s comments on this issue of movement and process in her sarcastically-titled video “Cakewalk,” which depicts a woman struggling to climb up an incline in roller-skates.

This show is most successful in this question of the relationship of subversion and tradition, rather than the tricky business of identity thematics. The work is characterized most strongly in the prominence of photographs and video, and the relative absence of traditional media (excepting some lovely, though very out of place, paintings by Jenny Dubnau). The resounding statement seems to be that the innovation and inquiry allegedly characterizing the works featured are linked to an embrace of new media. An interesting proposition to be sure. But hardly that wild.

AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion

Supernaturally transported into the future, Queen Elizabeth and her court magician stumble through a dystopian punk vision of England in Jubilee (1977), New Queer Cinema darling Derek Jarman’s early masterpiece. Meanwhile, a troupe of punks lead by nihilistic historian Amyl Nitrate, who paints a pink lightening bolt over the right side of her face, battle fascistic governmental forces and evil record companies. In their decadent teenage lair, a den of sex, violence and philosophy, she reads: “In those days, desires weren't allowed to become reality. So fantasy was substituted for them - films, books, pictures. They called it 'art'. But when your desires become reality, you don't need fantasy any longer, or art.” This anti/pseudo-situationist slogan suggests a progress narrative for any number of outlaw desires, while at the same time cynically imagining the terms of their fulfillment (A proto-argument, perhaps, against the undermining of queer cultural forms by assimilationist politics). Meanwhile, the supernaturally-imported relics of the past wander, lusciously clad, among the rocky cliffs on the outskirts of town, bemused and horrified. But distinctions between the past and the present, tradition and transgression, collapse: the pyromaniac leader of the punk girls is a ringer for the queen, evoking a strange double-ness of the past, a dark unconscious underlying historical memory.

This uncanny clash/coming-together of the past and present emerges in the ghostly chaos of AngloMania, an exhibition that transcends its foundational definitions, operating in a space akin to installation art. Mannequins, decked out in elaborate costumes representing tradition and transgression in British sartorial history, emerge from the wind tunnel of history blank-faced, their multihued hair matted and frozen like styled lumps of sticky frosting. The exhibition forgoes the typical chronological narratives, as well as clear labeling devices unfortunately, in favor of a fragmented approach. Historical costumes are juxtaposed with fashions from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in nine elaborate thematic tableaux installed into the Met’s period rooms. The idea of Englishness put forward by the curators, as articulated in the accompanying brochure, is “poetic, nostalgic, satirical, and above all, theatrical.” Indeed, the vignettes are gorgeous feats of mise-en-scene, which inspire an awe of sartorial achievement while inserting a playful irony into the viewer’s potential stance. The performance of history and historical memory underlies the strength of the exhibition—and, indeed, of the garments themselves—inviting the viewer to actively negotiate their relationship to the objects, and that of the objects to each other.

Anachronism, for Jarman, is not a simple plot device or the object of an easy laugh, but the very syntax of his vision. In Jubilee the dystopian and nostalgic interpenetrate, infecting each other in an orgy of lavish fantasy. The strange disjuncture of time and space effects a queering of narrative and mis-en-scene. The past, and its tragedies and triumphs, is contaminated with the ever-presence of the present, an impulse historical in its very ahistoricity. AngloMania’s trope of lavish, yet somehow grotesque, mannequins evoke an air of anti-history as style. The exhibition, at its most compelling, tells you less about the history of British fashion, and more about the complicated stances we continuously adopt towards history- and the fabulous garments we pose in. And as it turns out, the subject harmonizes wonderfully with this postmodern perspective. Like the Hussein Chalayan’s deconstructed dresses, worn by the servants in the “Upstairs/Downstairs” scene, AngloMania reaches for the flowers in the dustbin of history, and through an endless process of “tradition and transgression” stitches together a suggestive account. In the aforementioned scene, the present cleans up after the past, but also fragments and consumes it.

This care-taking/rag-picking consciousness emerges again in a subsequent tableau, entitled “The Deathbed.” Depicting the ramifications and reverbations of Queen Victoria’s cults of death, an ostentations state bed is attended by a coterie of modern mannequins, bedecked in the designs of Alexander McQueen. These memento mori ensembles seem to relish in morbid excess, when compared to the respectfully plain cut of the costume worn by Queen Victoria also on display. “God save the queen!” cry the Sex Pistols in the last quarter of the 20^th century, “we mean it, man!” (helpfully recited by Johnny Rotten in the accompanying audio guide, which is hilariously bizarre).

In the “English Garden,” eighteenth century floral dresses are paired with Philip Treacy’s orchid hats. The curators stress the contradictory philosophical belief in a natural order and the artifice involved in these “natural” performances. The artificiality undermines any claims to naturalness, as that very naturalness itself decadently overcomes the precarious machinations and treacherous structures of society. One imagines, in the translation of the botanical to the sartorial, a counter narrative of inevitable decay of the cultivated blooms, and the emergence of wildflowers and weeds in the graveyard of history. A vision of decadence that presages the anarchic vision of punk. Indeed, Sid Vicious’s cry of “There is No Future…In England’s dreaming!” echoes throughout the rooms, bouncing off the busy wallpaper, shattering the crystal vases, blowing up the layers of petticoats, and whipping through the top-heavy hairstyles. But this transgressive cry, ultimately, is realized and recognized as tradition.

Clayton Brothers: Wishy Washy

Bellwether, May 18- June 24 3006

Animated by the pulsating and polychromatic canvases of the Clayton Brother’s show is a battle of sartorial (perhaps, social?) sanitation. The figures populating each image are embodied through an elaborate stylized visual vocabulary. This style veers close to the sort of cartoon-y illustration that could easily sell tee-shirts or shoes, but luckily through this paradigm the brothers manage to produce a carnivalesque, rather than commercial, commentary. The exaggerated figurations shift attention from issues of verisimilitude to the complex negotiation between form and content, between narrative and technique. And there is something immensely satisfying when form and content coalesce so tightly and cleverly, and even more so when they push against each other. This tension is produced expertly in this series, as the form given to content—and the content imbued in formalistic devices—highlight their radical distinction as well as their Mobius Strip-like interdependence.

The paintings of Wishy Washy are populated by an array of characters, some strangely colored and others experiencing hirsute transformations. They exist in a strangely abstract space, nominally a Laundromat: messy and expressive artist’s marks such as smears and drips of paint ooze off the figures, as slick geometric abstractions—rays, diamonds, circles, paisley globules, floral loops, linear 3-d constructions—intersect the picture plane. The relationship between the abstract and figurative elements is complex; alternately existing in radical separation, and implicated in an intimate co-production. This correspondence/contradistinction is pushed further by the ever-changing variety of marks and textures employed. A spray paint can in one of the fantastic humanoid’s hands radiates a fine mist of airbrushed paint, while oversized ink droppers corresponds with a different class of mark-making. The interest is created by this variety of marks—impasto, slick, modeled, drippy, and sprayed. This diversity of surface is matched by an equally overwhelming range of palettes, from glaring neons and supersaturated brights, to realistic neutrals and grungy fatigues. These tonal groups are employed sensitively to the canvas; slick neon rays contrast with rough complexly modulated skin tones.

The characters endlessly produce and are produced by the conventions of abstraction figured in each image. The relationship between the abstract elements and the figurative/narrative ones shifts between overlay, penetration, interaction, and production. Geometric diamonds, which exist in purely abstract space, lacking any intelligible interaction with the figurative elements of one canvas reappear in another canvas being physically carted about by another figure. Non-objective configuration of circles that float over groups of people become, elsewhere, tactile objects held in grotesque humanoid hands.

Cleverly modified and faithfully reproduced vintage signs and texts emerge periodically, vaguely referring race relations, social commentary, and artistic programs through the language of Laundromats. An entreaty to “Lysol Yourself” is reinforced by the ever-present figure of bleach. Meanwhile, the cry of “Color for the people” doubles with repeated eyedroppers and spray paint cans manipulated by, and perhaps creating, the figures. An narrative emerges, playfully suggesting a war between the sanitizing effects of banality and the messiness of bohemianism, between conservative cleanliness and artistic production, or on another register, between racial whitewashing and affirmation of diversity, between so-called purity and dynamic exchange. But the model of identity is linked inextricably to the methods and modes of representation; identity is not fixed, static, inherent, but endlessly produced, modified, and transformed. This production is brought to the fore by the aforementioned attention on the tools, acts, and traces of artistic production: the prominence of a variety of marks, the shifting registers of abstraction and figuration, the symbols of paint and product actively engaged by the narrative elements of each image.

In this battle between colors and bleach, dust bunnies and disinfectant, the stakes are surprisingly high. The style and content bring in an element of kitsch and graffiti to “high art”—in fact, they infect it. Corporeal mutations abound, as figures flicker in and out of grotesqueries, hovering in the space between affirmation and disintegration. The promise of the “white cube,” not to mention the godliness of cleanliness, is refigured as a threat, and is under attack by a polymorphous force of playful creation. The colorful cast of characters poses serious questions of social relations and artistic relations, simultaneously and fantastically.