print January 1982

Vanalyne Green

Vanalyne Green’s latest performance, a 30-minute-long piece about job alienation and sexual discrimination entitled This Is Where I Work, took place in lower Manhattan in the lobby of the Federal Hall Building on Wall Street. Green transplanted organizing and consciousness-raising techniques developed by feminist artists like Judy Chicago and Suzanne Lacy in Southern California (where she lived until recently) and used them with a New York audience composed, in large measure, of white-collar workers from the financial district. She attracted a large number of people on lunch breaks by stationing

print November 1981

Wendy Clarke

Since 1977, Wendy Clarke has made over 800 videotapes (some in color, but most in black-and-white) of people talking about their feelings on love. An edited selection of these “Love Tapes,” each a three-minute monologue by a person sitting alone before a camera, was on view at MoMA.

In Clarke’s recordings, men and women from various age, ethnic, and societal groups display romanticism and cynicism, hope and despair; some tell of specific relationships, others discuss various kinds of love, and still others speak about love in social or even metaphysical terms. Several people present during my

print October 1981

Robert Ashley

Music Word Fire And I Would Do It Again (Coo-Coo): The Lessons is a 30-minute TV program by Robert Ashley that was broadcast on WNET-TV Channel 13’s “Video/Film Review” on June 28, 1981, and stereo simulcast on WNYC 93.9 FM. Designed and edited by John Sanborn (video director in collaboration with Ashley)—Kit Fitzgerald, and Carlota Schoolman, with music production by Peter Gordon, The Lessons is part of Ashley’s Perfect Lives (Private Parts), an opera for television commissioned and produced by the Kitchen.

The program consists of four seven-minute segments, all of them variations on the theme

print October 1981

Paul Zelevansky

Paul Zelevansky’s The Case for the Burial of Ancestors: Book 1 is the first of three books that will chronicle the history of a fictional people called the Hegemonians (who resemble the Hebrews of the Old Testament). This is not their first appearance in Zelevansky’s work; over the past few years he has recorded their culture in performances, installation works, artifacts, and in an earlier volume entitled The Book of Takes. The Case books are his attempt to pare his mythic civilization down to its essentials—to contain it within “a portable case . . . which travels easily,” and which will allow

print Summer 1981

Mary Fish

During the past few months I’ve seen a steady stream of vital, spiritual art in the galleries. The latest addition to this list is Mary Fish’s “Morphological/Mythological: A Meditation on Plant Systems and the Tarot.”

The works—all but one of which were drawings on gessoed paper with silver-point, ink, and egg tempera—grew from two ongoing rituals in Fish’s daily life. The first, which she calls the “Ritual of Watching,” involves the observation and documentation of the cyclical growth patterns of flowers in her garden; the second, the “Ritual of Knowing,” consists of regular readings of the

print May 1981

Michael Kirby

Photoanalysis: A Structuralist Play is a re-creation, in book form, of a play by Michael Kirby, first performed in November, 1976. Kirby, who is best-known for his involvement with Happenings and avant-garde theater since the late ’60s, chose a dramatic format in which three actors—a man and two women, positioned respectively in the center and on the two sides of the performance space—spoke directly to the audience and illustrated their words with a series of black-and-white slides projected onto screens behind them. The actors spoke alternately, each showing slides that related to his or her

print May 1981

Rita Myers

Since the mid ’70s, Rita Myers has been integrating sound, videotapes and sculptural forms into installations that probe the intangible aspects of the tangible world. Investigation/Observations, 1975, for instance, re-created an ordinary room that nonetheless was imbued with mystery when cited as the scene of an unspecified crime; Barricade to Blue, 1977, featured two female actors in an installation that examined the complex emotional knots underlying human identity and relationships. In her latest work, Dancing In The Land Where Children Are The Light, Myers extended her explorations of the

print April 1981

Eric Bogosian

Men Inside was a 45-minute solo performance by Eric Bogosian, whose work has for several years been concerned with male/female sexual relations. Gender was the central theme in his most recent piece, which was composed of 15 short monologues describing desires, attitudes, actions and self-images of 12 male characters.

Bogosian used no elaborate set, only a raised platform with a chair and a few other props on it. The artist was dressed in a simple sweater, suit and tie. Working with gesture, body language, voice, light and occasionally music to which he would dance, Bogosian transformed himself

print April 1981

Elaine Reichek

For several years, Elaine Reichek has been creating multi-media art about the tradition of “women’s work.” In a series of two-panel wall pieces begun in 1979, Reichek juxtaposed a child’s knitted garment with a schematic translation of the knitting instructions, which were also handwritten in a separate book. By illustrating the ways in which patterns—visual, verbal and operational—underlie even the most mundane family affairs, these concept-oriented works emphasized the manifold ways in which rational systems of thought link art and life as well as the intellectual and intimate aspects of

print March 1981

Sandy Skoglund

For the past year and a half, Sandy Skoglund has been creating fantasy environments and using them as backdrops for photographed dramas. These large color pictures often depict one or two people trapped in spaces that have been overrun by common objects or domestic animals. Skoglund’s latest extravaganza, Revenge of the Goldfish, is a 30- by 40-inch Cibachrome print, which was exhibited together with the “stage set” that it depicts.

Skoglund’s wit, energy and imagination were evident in the 18-by 18-foot installation: a scale model of a rather nondescript bedroom, its furnishings and walls painted

print March 1981

Roger Welch

Roger Welch is best known for works in which he uses photography or film to examine how images shape our perceptions of the world. Drive In, a film and sculpture installation curated by Leandro Katz, focused on the myths that surround popular film. A 18-by 6-foot model of a Rolls Royce, made of twigs and branches tied together, faced a screen—a sheet draped across two large sticks—that stood in a corner of the room. Onto this screen Welch projected a continuous stream of movie shorts: theater announcements, junk food advertisements and previews for six films from the mid-1950s. The installation

print March 1981

Leandro Katz

I’ve always felt that the tower room at the Clocktower has a ritualistic, almost sacrosanct feeling. Because of this, it was the perfect setting for Leandro Katz’s “Lunar Alphabet Series.” The show consisted primarily of two 100-by 90-inch panels, each of which included 72 black-and-white photographs arranged in a grid format, and one 60-by 5-foot roll of black paper covered with line drawings in white oil pastel. The subject matter of both the photographs and the drawings was the same: the face of the moon during the various phases of its monthly cycle.

At first glance, the pictures seemed to

Shelley Rice