print October 1993

DIGGING FREUD: FROM CALIFORNIA TO GERMANY

If postmodernity is postmarked (like the repressed according to Freud) “made in Germany” (SE 19:236), then California is its address, and techno-future."
Laurence A. Rickels, The Case of California, 1991

Laurence A. Rickels is one of the few theorists today who is able to think technology through psychoanalysis and vice versa; this assignment is crucial, because both technology and psychoanalysis are everywhere. With California as the site of this encounter, Rickels takes Freud to the beach and California to the couch, picking up, in many ways, where the Frankfurt School left off—cut short (

print December 1992

OPENINGS: BEVERLY SEMMES

THE DIVA IS A WOMAN who is larger than life and therefore does not exist as much as she insists (as Jacques Lacan would say) on taking up more space, monopolizing everyone’s attention, and acting out great loves and great betrayals. We believe in her suffering and her passion; she demands nothing less. The greatest of divas, like Maria Callas, understand betrayal: they understand that becoming a woman is not only impossible, it is never enough. There is always another woman to replace them; in Callas’ case it was Jackie Kennedy. But Callas struggled against the inevitability of her failure; she

print April 1992

“Just Pathetic”

The pathetic is opposed to the sublime in this show, and according to its own predictions, it fails. The pathetic fails because it cannot stand up to the intensity of the sublime; it is in love with its own failure. “Just Pathetic” tries to show us that today failure becomes, paradoxically, success. Failure is more interesting than success simply because it is more variable and multiple, and the works in this show do, to a great degree, demonstrate this point. Visually, it is a very strong show that includes fine pieces by Georg Herold, Jeffrey Vallance, and Chris Burden.

This, however, makes

print Summer 1991

Henry Flynt

SAMO^© appeared as a cryptic message scrawled across the sides of buildings and trucks in downtown Manhattan as the ’70s drew to a close, and Henry Flynt photographed the graffiti because it must have moved him somehow. Eleven years later, after the rise and fall of the ’80s art boom and the death of SAMO^©’s primary creator, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Flynt’s images function as documents of a moment in recent art history.

Straight photography is quite a leap for Flynt. Based on difficult principles of mathematics and optics, the work of this early Conceptual artist is known for its stubborn obscurity.

print April 1991

Graham Durward

Graham Durward’s work is intense, and intensity possesses an integrity all its own. This artist does not flinch at the spectacle of consciousness deteriorating into flesh, though it does not make for pretty pictures. In its acutely internalized quality, much of Durward’s writing is reminiscent of Antonin Artaud’s. The painful scrawls and scribblings, the bad spelling, the penciled-in corrections in his collages, all give the otherwise baroque text an appealingly gritty feel.

Durward keeps coming back to a few obsessive moments. He writes, “I cannot conceive of anything except in terms of my own

print April 1991

Piero Manzoni

Acting out in ways that were simultaneously infantile and sublime, Piero Manzoni consistently transformed his intensity and self-destructive passion into rigorous and elegant work. It is fitting that he packaged his feces in tidy little canisters labeled, aptly enough, "Merda d’artista’ (Artist’s shit, 1961). These little obscenities are gifts to the world—packaged rage.

Reexamining his oeuvre today, 28 years after his death at the age of 30, it becomes clear that the integrity of Manzoni’s practice lies in his passionate engagement with form. Form is the site of all esthetic radicality, and, in

print March 1991

Nancy Barton and Michael Glass

We all have our pet “bad objects,” whipping posts that we condemn in order to make ourselves feel better. In this show Nancy Barton and Michael Glass explore the complex psychic mechanisms by which these scapegoats are designated, showing how the ego produces a denigrated object in order to maintain a fantasy of unity and coherence. “Bad objects” all serve the same purpose—the consolidation of power for a dominant group; thus racism, misogyny, and homophobia can be understood as different manifestations of this psychic mechanism. By presenting a white woman and a black man figuratively and

print February 1991

Gretchen Faust

Gretchen Faust wants her work to encourage what she has described as “the active reinterpretation of the function of mythology in terms of anarchical ontology.” It’s quite a mouthful, and whatever precisely Faust has in mind here, one thing is certain: despite good intentions, there is little that is anarchic about this show. When Faust gave away numbered shovels last year, the action constituted a catchy gesture of potlatch, and she did manage to upset certain routes of exchange. As a rule, however, Faust’s high-toned discourse vainly attempts to compensate for her project’s lack of visual and

print December 1990

Larry Clark

The more mainstream culture tries to eliminate the heart of darkness—the particular brand of bleakness, emptiness, and senseless violence—at the core of the American experience, the more tenaciously it takes hold of us. Larry Clark has frequently lived on the edge, and his entire body of work bears powerful testimony to the fact that the path of rigor and passion often takes the artist through violence and addiction so that he or she may reach a kind of lucidity and a state of compassion.

This show provides a welcome overview of Clark’s work, but the presentation of the pieces was confusing and

print December 1990

Pat Steir

Pat Steir’s waterfall paintings dance masterfully on the line between figuration and abstraction. Steir has been obsessed with water as figure or trope for some time now, but these new waterfall paintings represent a great leap forward from the series she showed last year. The master is the one who does without doing, and Steir has certainly found a way of putting paint on canvas by adhering to this Taoist discipline. It takes control, however, to really let go, and Steir has given in to the medium so that she can reach the point of feeling the similarity between paint and the water she depicts.

print November 1990

Donald Baechler

Distinguished by their idiosyncratic infantilism and the richness of their surfaces, the compositions Donald Baechler exhibited at Paul Kasmin last spring reveal the artist as a master of the sloppy line, the crazy shape, and the deranged dot. Baechler uses collage, ink, gesso, flashe, coffee, and pencil on paper to create these masterfully messy compositions, which interpolate the flattened-out schizophrenic space of his larger works with a new delicacy and concision.

Two compositions, each entitled Crowds (all works 1990), are the strongest in this show. In one, primitive heads made up of a

print September 1990

Larry Johnson

Larry Johnson avoids the posteverything trap of solipsistic obscurity by tuning into the voices of the American vernacular. Common language, like common sense, can be rather strange, and Johnson capitalizes on this fact, taking the fragments of contemporary American consciousness we can all hear as his subject matter.

Johnson designs and edits these voices into a radically condensed form as paintings; in the space of a few lines, a slice of mutating consciousness is powerfully fixed. The new texts are more intensely psychodramatic than the ones in his previous show, and their authenticity ups

Catherine Liu