Erika Rothenberg’s mordant wit is shameless and almost totally lacking in subtlety. She knows the strategies of modern advertising and mass communal signage by rote, and she employs them in her relentless attack. Refusing to let her mask slip for so much as a moment, Rothenberg offers her audience no respite. Like the fetid procedures of American social discourse she parodies, her approach knows no hesitation or remorse. Rothenberg sees America as a land of importunity—the home of the quick and the deadpan—and she knows that her tactics must be adequate to a human comedy of such tragic breadth

Willie Cole forages through detritus in the form of abandoned household appliances and recombines their parts into totems with unexpected anthropomorphic power. His is an art of recognition, rehabilitation, and revelation; implied in his recastings is a commentary on the ineluctible presence of the human image in virtually everything made by man, including, ironically, the remnants of throw-away culture. Cole looks at a telephone and sees an intriguing sign for the human face, looks at junked blowdryers and imagines an evocative mask; he stacks and reassembles irons and their cords into animated