APPENNINES
A group, a line, actually, of determinedly, even aggressively unlifelike mannequins are arrayed, or lined up, against a ghastly backdrop of what is meant to be a Hawaiian sunset. The mannequins, male and female alike, have “breasts,” and a disturbing, large sign, ANOTHER NAIL IN THE COFFIN OF BOURGEOIS GENDER ROLES, in magenta neon or something glowing, shines upon them. The mannequins appear to be dressed, or partially dressed — depending on how each mannequin is situated as a “radical construct”—as investment bankers, venture capitalists, bond traders, arbitragers, and cocksuckers, each “construct” attended by a “wife,” “husband,” “lover,” or “partner,” appropriately dressed for daily tasks and plain fun. Music plays continually on a loop (?), to the annoyance of the gallery visitors; and although this music is extremely bad, it must be noted that it is not precisely music, but world music, and its infirm quality a mocking comment on inverse canon formation. One mannequin, whose “breasts” are quite enormous, seems to have an equally enormous “erection” in its tight Tonetti briefs, although the flashing strobe lights that accompany the passionate if off-key strains of a “white-bread” version of a classic Venezuelan fanfanzanga, may well be responsible for a “bulge” that is really not there, but is an optical illusion. The noise in the gallery space is so loud as to be painful and disorienting, and this may account for the lewd, even depraved acts visited upon the mannequins by ironic and rebellious iconoclasts at virtually all hours. Such acts have come to be called, by their perpetrators and would-be perpetrators, “rudiments of gesture.”
ARCHIMEDES
Piles of wet clothing, puddles of dirty, soapy water, and a tarnished crown of false, or fool’s gold, set the tone for this installation, one which slowly and almost imperceptibly turns from the innocuous to the eerily disturbing, as the vast floor of the converted gymnasium, which serves as the gallery’s exhibition space, accommodates, insistently and obsessively, more piles of clothing, more puddles of water, more cheap-jack crowns. It is only when the eye refuses to be mesmerized by neurotic uniformity and repetition that the floor space between these strangely iconic and wholly sterile elements of a useless formalism is seen to contain cluttered configurations of miniature, varicolored, metallic spheres, cylinders, fulcrums, circles, conoids, spheroids, ovoids, and ingeniously designed sand-reckoners. These familiar geometrical shapes function as footnotes or marginalia, of course. The floor is bathed in a cold, aqueous, silvery light, which has the uncanny effect of making these simple conjugations of things (and what is more “thinglike” than laundry, wet floors, “Coney Island” headgear?) into noble, if threatening, constructions. The entire installation suggests to the viewer willing to connect with its sublunary symbolism a world — our own world, perhaps — and the number of grains of sand in their trillions upon trillions that it would take to completely fill it. An extraordinarily compelling architecture of delights, this, by the Grupo Archimedes, rich with the unspoken and unrevealed.
Eureka Downtown, through June 15th
ARISTOTELES
Two copulative verbs, large, and by nature rough, converge upon a blushing noun, which tries, gamely, to hold its skirts down in the blustery wind blowing hard toward the famed copse of eucalyptus trees imported from the Pulitzer Bank, sadly fished out long, long ago, by fascists of foreign persuasions, mostly Norwegians, drunk, and foul with innocent-whale blubber. A dreadnought hovers nearby, fly agape, yet he seems, at first glance, to be slipping edgewise toward the empty booth in the diner. The diner is a perfect replica of an authentic copy reconstructed from the edges of the dreams of those who know what real rock-and-roll is, and, more importantly, what it used to be. The entire tableau, if one may be forgiven such an evangelistic word, seems to present a kind of “truth”—and, surely, the place cards have no reason to lie, to paraphrase the professor. In his latest book on seemingly inconsequential (“yet alarmingly labile,” as he notes on more than one occasion) and neglected things, he plumbs the depths of the notably banal, as this word was understood in Victorian London, and comes to many conclusions about British comestibles. Be that as it may, the tableau keeps turning, twisting, changing, metamorphosing, and so on and so forth, over and over, in subtle homage to various geniuses of dramaturgy, post-Aristoteles, e.g.: Inigo Jones, Bob Jones, Bill Jones, Henry Jones, “Dem” Bones, August Strindberg, Irving Thalberg, Hank Greenberg, Mrs. Goldberg, “Bob” Altman, B. Altman, Bergdorf Goodman, “Noodles” Goodman, Aristotle, Richard Tottel, Dr. Fell, and others too numerous to name. But now the noun succumbs to the crass importunings of the verbs and their lusty rods* hold sway! A card appears from out of a haze of bluish smoke and on the card is lettered, “Handlome il al handlome doel,” yet another trope of the colonized mind. In the careless iconography of the streets, this phrase may mean that [she] is in the process “of getting [her] ashes hauled.” There is, finally, a somewhat banjaxed and vafunculed series of half-hearted alarums before Bottom enters and puts out the lights, much to the annoyance of the person hired to perform this act. This, too, is to be considered part of the shifting, flexible, ceaselessly variegated piece. “So we beat off,” a volunteer demigod chuckles softly, as he leans on the windowsill to gaze at the traffic far below in the gathering summer dusk, headlights gleaming off the wet, shining streets, reading his index card with admirable precision and a degree of panache, even.
*The phrase, “lusty rods,” may be added to the performance piece at the discretion of those who have the money, as always; but it should be made clear that the phrase is being employed with the understanding that it is ideally understood as an unconscious sexual reference, like “candy,” “jelly jelly,” “pussyfoot,” or “bingo.”
CARPATHIANS
Most serious gallery-goers of the seventies pretend to remember Moss Kuth, one of the earliest practitioners — some would say the avatar — of Exoconceptualism. This, his first exhibition in almost fifteen years, gathers well-known, to some revered, devices, and what the artist calls “plannings,” those strangely occulted, iconoclastic conglomerates that heralded the end of the stasis imposed upon the art of the fifties and sixties by market-corrupted confections of pop art, op art, numero art, subway art, and the moribund rigidities of a humorless politico-expressionism. There are included, too, some recent, surprisingly sunny (though no less pointed) constructions. Moss and his wife, Magda, have been living quietly in their small farmhouse in Provence, venturing only as far as Paris once or twice a year to stock up on books, visit the galleries, and spend a convivial evening or two with such old ghosts as Matisse, Picasso, and Gris, “quarreling,” as Magda smilingly puts it, “the night away.” In the large and breathtaking photo by Dan Ray that dominates the gallery’s south wall, Moss, Magda, and their Irish wolfhound, Lummox, are revealed, all three dressed in hip, severe black, amid the prize-winning roses that have endeared Magda to the world of horticulture, as that word is grotesquely understood in the very seat of Gallic culture. The show itself is simple, austere, elegant: a collection of letters from friends and enemies; wide-ranging commentary — favorable, vicious, perceptive, stupid, toadying — on certain passages in the letters, from over twenty years’ worth of Kuthian studies and criticism; the criticism, in full, itself; Kuth’s remarks on the studies, the criticism, and the commentary on the commentary on the letters; a jumbled display of Kuth’s tattered notebooks, containing alternative commentary on the commentary on the letters; a blank notebook, its pages fanned out, provocatively perched upon a ream of cheap white paper; and a small black-and-white snapshot of Magda, playfully sucking Moss off under the pines at Yaddo, often called “the Yaddo pines.” Located at the extreme edges of the display are letters from both Kuth and Magda to each other, stained with what appears to be dog shit, agreeing with all the negative commentary on Kuth’s work, and wholly composed in crude, ungrammatical, trite, and shrewdly misspelled English, an English, as Magda has impishly noted, “that is hours all own.”