print September 1992

Jim Shaw/Benjamin Weissman

A self-reflexive, 45-panel, comic-strip-style narrative, Horror A Vacui, 1992, Jim Shaw and Benjamin Weissman’s recent collaboration, explores Western materialist culture’s fear and exploitation of the vacuum or void. Despite the best efforts of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, et al. to deconstruct Cartesian binaries built on presence and absence, capitalism, through the compensatory commodity form, has an intrinsic stake in perpetuating libidinal desires predicated on fulfilling a primal lack. Desire’s constant deferral, reinforced by the Freudian death drive and Oedipus complex

print Summer 1992

Gerhard Merz

Gerhard Merz has built a reputation in recent years with a series of site-specific installations that attempt to realize the utopian Modernist dream of a formalism that fuses art and architecture in a seamless, nonutilitarian whole. While this seems at first glance to be a hopelessly nostalgic yearning for the “total” art epitomized by the art-for-art’s-sake movements of the early 20th century, Merz introduces enough contradictory elements to create a visually provocative, if theoretically futile work.

Archipittura, 1992, Merz’s recent installation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, was a

print April 1992

“Helter Skelter”

In “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s,” Paul Schimmel’s first major statement as MoCA’s new Chief Curator, he seems to have deliberately thrown the gauntlet in the face of traditional curatorial taboos. He has mounted a regional survey (read, “provincialism”); appended a historically dated title (Charles Manson, the Beatles, the ’60s); and has had the audacity to define the trends of the ’90s though the decade has barely begun. Despite this outward bravura, however, Schimmel’s main intent is more scholarly: a desire to invert the common conception of Los Angeles as “La-La Land”—the city that

print March 1992

Fandra Chang

In recent years, Los Angeles nonrepresentational painters have begun to carve out a niche for themselves as deconstructors of traditional Modernist formalism. Instead of exploiting metaphysical oppositions such as center/margin, inside/outside, work/frame, and this/that, these artists favor a more differentiated approach, in which supplemental elements such as edge and surround supplant the usual dominant paradigms through endless slippage and deferral. In an impressive solo debut, Fandra Chang firmly aligns herself with this group in a series of mixed-media works that deliberately play on fluid,

print February 1992

Jeff Wall

In painting, the tableau has traditionally been used to freeze a continuum of action into that exact, pregnant moment in which past and present come together to predetermine an inexorable future. It is a technique most commonly used in grandiose history painting (David’s The Oath of the Horatii, 1784, or The Death of Socrates, 1787) but also in smaller-scale genre works, such as Jean-Baptise Greuze’s overwrought family dramas. Most important, however, is the tableau’s innate overdetermination: its stagy mannerisms defamiliarize its formal machinations as much as they suck us into its narrative.

print December 1991

Shigeo Toya

With their chain-sawed, charred surfaces and serial arrangements in blocklike masses, Shigeo Toya’s wood sculptures suggest a Japanese variation on Western Minimalism; it is as if works by Carl Andre and Donald Judd were suddenly imbued with a Zen-like “primal spirit.” However, instead of constructing sculpture from the inside out, so that material mass and volume are emptied out in favor of a skeletal space-as-mass, Toya’s guiding paradigm is archaeological. He excavates from the outside in, interpenetrating the material so that, by analogy, he inserts himself into its center. Toya himself

print November 1991

Constance Mallinson

Constance Mallinson is concerned with the mediation of landscape painting by photography, specifically the idealized, picturesque vista commonly associated with National Geographic and Life magazines. During the ’80s her explorations took the form of large grids of small landscape vignettes appropriated from photographic sources and then restructured to form larger pictographic panoramas. Such arrangements forced us to recognize our view of the landscape as a received, ideological doxa, in which nature is not only framed for the delectation of monocular perspective but also made safe, via notions

print October 1991

Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith’s sculptures and installations focus on the body, specifically what “civilized” society has proscribed as taboo: sex, death, disease, and their various excretions. Given the hegemony of the far right in the ongoing struggles for abortion rights and the financing of AIDS research, it is not surprising that many artists have made the body their current cause célèbre. However, with trendy post-Conceptualists citing Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Georges Bataille (and, by extension, the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch) as their theoretical gurus, it’s important to

print Summer 1991

Chris Kraus

In Chris Kraus’ first film, In Order to Pass, 1982, one of the actors/participants suddenly asks the question, “What would happen if there were just plain flow between symbols?” The obvious answer is that the symbols would disappear as concrete anchors of received meaning, leaving us with a web of vectors, switching stations, and durations. This is perhaps an appropriate description of Kraus’ oeuvre as a whole, for one can discern in her films a gradual development away from dialectical relationships based on traditional binary oppositions, toward an interest in syntagmatic and metonymic fluidity:

print May 1991

Diana Thater

The title of Diana Thater’s latest video installation, Dogs and Other Philosophers, 1991, refers to Thomas Hardy’s meditation on “the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise.” In Hardy’s novel, Far From the Madding Crowd, 1874, from which the phrase was lifted, logical conclusions are disclosed as tragically wrongheaded; in fact, the earnest young sheepdog pursues his flock so diligently that he ends up herding them over the

print April 1991

Robert Millar

Robert Millar’s environments seem a hybrid of “California Light and Space” and “finish fetish” esthetics, filtered through the antithetical post-Minimalist predilections for material integrity and situationist ephemerality. This view is partly a result of his obvious interest in the mutual contingencies of light, form, and space as perceptual signifiers. Closer acquaintance reveals a strategy more aligned with what disciples of Gilles Deleuze would call “multiplicity and proliferation.” In this case, specificities—this material object in this space—do not remain constant but are perpetually

print March 1991

Alan Saret

Alan Saret is usually associated with the so-called post-Minimalist generation of sculptors that emerged in the mid to late ’60s and included Lynda Benglis, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Keith Sonnier, Eva Hesse, and Richard Tuttle. Whereas the Minimalists explored the contingent relationship of fixed objects to surrounding space, this younger group tended to eschew objecthood in favor of ephemerality. Instead of permanent objects in gestaltlike relationships to fixed spaces, they produced transient works that could be set up according to written instructions, taken down, packed away, and

Colin Gardner