print November 1991

Anne Deleporte

Anne Deleporte’s work converts a simple image into a symbol for the nightmare of state control that we find ourselves increasingly diminished by even in first world countries. The process of getting a passport involves, of course, having one’s picture taken. In Paris, where Deleporte lives, a photograph of the applicant’s face is cropped down to the tightest perimeter, cutting off the neck, hair, and sometimes part of the outer ears. In the end, what you end up with is a picture that eliminates much of what we normally depend upon to identify the individual.

Deleporte does not exhibit these

print October 1991

René Pierre Allain

Without sentimentality or romance, René Pierre Allain’s paintings refer to flags, emblems, and abstracted floor plans of military fortifications. Heavily constructed of plaster, burlap, and steel, they do not speak of glorified testosterone and the stalwart virtues of dominance. Instead, Allain seems to be trying to negate the message of militarism associated with flags and heavy steel the references are clearly not approbatory.

The deflation of these aggressive signs is accomplished through his use of materials. Each thin layer of pigmented plaster is carefully sanded before the next layer is

print September 1991

Bill Komoski

In Bill Komoski’s recent paintings, black configurations jostle like cosmic star bursts in abstract fields. His viewpoint is not bound by the limits of optical perspective, rather, Komoski’s paintings seem to depict the world from a godlike perspective. His is the view from a spacecraft, and indeed, the scattered light in these pictures recalls stellar photographs. From somewhere out in the unknown, a diffused yet powerful light bathes all the pictorial incident in its path, imbuing the paintings with an air of mystery and awe that never seems contrived or flip.

The impenetrable surface of these

print May 1991

Lewis Baltz

Lewis Baltz’s photographs are disquieting in their combination of espoused politics and Minimalist cool. This comes across more clearly in the work in the retrospective at P.S. 1, than it does in the more recent work shown at Castelli Graphics. The works at P.S. I employ a detached Minimalist perspective to depict a world of escalating ecological abuse that one would expect to elicit horror. The images themselves are clear enough; plowed-up topsoil can only hint at its former lushness, and details of tract housing evidence the cost to all those who must pay too dear an ecological (and esthetic)

print May 1991

Nancy Spero

Nancy Spero represents the historical nightmare that constitutes women’s relationship to culture. Her representations of victims of medieval torture, Nazi sadism, and sexual abuse are hand-printed and collaged onto empty white backgrounds next to pornographic images, prehistoric female running figures, and defiantly vulgar women; it’s the story of power struggles played out on the bodies of women.

Spero adopts the role of the loud-mouthed raconteur, telling this tale of horror that others would like to ignore. Here, ten pieces combined to form an installation of sorts. Various colored and textured

print March 1991

Ted Serios

In a world in which every dark corner has been exposed to merciless scientific scrutiny, we yearn for evidence of a different reality. We crave the outrageous—we want to defy reason, explanation, and categorization. In short, we need romance, and photographs of something that our logic tells us is impossible or unbelievable satisfies this thirst.

Although as yet unchronicled on the Phil Donahue show, Ted Serios has attempted to answer this need for decades (he is now 72). A self-defined alcoholic living out of a pickup truck with his canine companion, somewhere in Colorado, Serios provides the

print February 1991

Victor Burgin

Photographs borrowed from advertising, movies, or political propaganda that have become part of our collective consciousness are, nevertheless, subject to the porousness and inexactitude of the individual memory. Scenes from Hollywood movies overlap with childhood memories, which in turn are confused with adult reflections and psychological interpretations of early experiences. One never sees an image solely within a given context; it always combines with memories of other images and experiences.

Victor Burgin exploits this fact in a new body of work that alludes to the 1958 musical South Pacific

print January 1991

Tracy Grayson

Painting, of late, has been alternately despised and romanticized, hauled out of the closet and trumpeted as the savior for lost souls in one instant, only to be debased as a corrupt songster for unethical powers in the next. Is the practice capable of sustaining genuine emotion or simply generating more kitsch?

Tracy Grayson walks this fine line and in the process gives us some of the best of both worlds. All ten of the paintings in his show are images of idyllic picture-postcard mountain scenes, standardized as 60-by-60-inch oils on wood. Like the Heidi-land fantasies that flitter in the minds

print December 1990

Deborah Kass

Deborah Kass’ paintings appropriate subject matter from other 20th-century artists, pop culture, and literature. Although diverse, none of the sources are particularly novel. Some of the paintings, in which thinly stained backgrounds in decorator colors are overlaid with the black outline of an exposed and willingly-available-for-abuse female nude, harken disconcertingly back to David Salle. Other works incorporating white drips on empty expanses of black quote Jackson Pollock’s transcendental abstraction directly. Still others are derived from cartoons, naively painted kitschy landscapes, and

print November 1990

Barbara Steinman

Montreal-based artist Barbara Steinman employs photography and video in installations that address the epistemological concerns around iconographic representation. A specially constructed room on the third floor of the museum provided the site for her recent installation. Upon entering, one was immediately confronted with a life-sized photograph of a Renaissance Madonna and child. An abrupt 90-degree turn led into a small antechamber on the far wall of which hung an identical image, somewhat obscured by its variegated Plexiglas surface. Diffused light and subdued sound emanated from behind a

print October 1990

Robert Morris

Robert Morris has been a reliable monitor of the art world’s pulse for 25 years. At one moment in the ’60s, he wanted the work of art to be perceived as an object in its brute materiality. Soon, however, in rhythm with the mutating taste of the time, he moved on to a less macho brand of art-making employing felt and a range of strategies aimed at dematerializing the art object. The ’80s saw another shift in Morris’ approach, again in sync with the tempo of the moment, to the grandiose historical mode in which he continues to work today.

Darkly monochromatic, cryptlike, and partially filled with

print September 1990

Ted Stamm

Until his death in 1984, Ted Stamm practiced a fairly rigorous kind of reductive abstraction: always painting in hard-edged black, and almost always on substantial-sized shaped canvases. Emphatically flat, and painted with a severity of purpose, Stamm’s canvases constitute the epitome of surface elegance; solid masses interact with one another to compose subtle statements of material fact. Regardless of the vehemence or oddity of the shapes, the pieces themselves pose no threat and reveal no vulnerability. Even in the small framed drawings inflected with visible markings, the theme remains one

Dena Shottenkirk