Mary Wessel
Since the early 1970s, many feminist artists have chosen
to subvert conventional artistic materials and expectations
to uncover the dark currents of violence and coercion that
they perceive to lie just beneath the smooth surface of
American life. Building upon this tradition in her photographic
series, "Domestic Terror," Mary Wessel creates
an ironic dialogue between that which the camera can "see"
and take a picture of, and more intuitive imagery that
must remain invisible to the camera's eye. The artist takes
very ordinary photographic shots of objects found in the
home: a stove top, a light bulb, a sponge and juxtaposes
them with evocative, nearly abstract, shapes drawn with
chemicals directly on photographic paper—Shapes that
seem to derive from her own subconscious. When the two types
of imagery are put together, the results are psychologically
disquieting and seem to simultaneously show both the surface
of things and what lies underneath.
The bottom photographic panel of "Firemouth,"
for example, shows all four burners of a stove furiously
burning at once—a disturbing image in itself. In the
upper panel floats a crude, spiked calligraphic drawing
that looks like one of the burners - it also resembles a
mouth with teeth, an eye ringed by lashes, or possibly
an iconic vagina or anus. In any case, the artist has successfully
fraught the utmost symbol of domesticity, the hearth, with
a sense of violation and imminent danger by confusing
its portals with those of the human body.
When the man-like tree in "Rooted," threatens
to reach into the opposing frame, where a tiny house appears
to be screaming, Wessel leaves it up to the viewer to complete
the narrative. She has already completed her task -- to
force us to question the coherence of the familiar world.
It's not surprising that Wessel eventually begins to favor
the nightmarish iconography of her drawings over the questionable
"truths" offered by photography. Perhaps the pages
of her surrealist notebook hold a purer direction where,
in the words of the Symbolist painter, Odilon Redon, the
artist may place "the logic of the visible in the service
of the invisible."
Russell Ferguson
At times an artist's frame of reference is so wide, his
choice of material so eclectic, that it's hard to place
him in a single category. With his model observation towers
of wood lathe, trestles over nonexistent canyons and dance
floors for tiny people, Russell Ferguson seems to be designing
small structures for another time and place, a utopian
society, perhaps. The bare simplicity of his materials reminds
us of the organic abstraction of contemporary artists like
Martin Puryear, and also of the radical materials—oriented
architecture of Frank Gehry, with whom Ferguson came in
contact while studying for his Master of Art degree at Yale
University. In the orange thatch roofs, as well as in the
paper scrolls depicting waves and mountains, painted with
Zen-like intensity, one detects an Orientalist's touch.
Yet his acute emotional bond with landscape and with the
quaintness of architectural styles of the past are very
Western and connect him to the Romantic, all—inclusive
vision of American writers like Thomas Wolfe.
Consistent with such eclecticism, Ferguson calls himself
a bricoleur— jack of all trades—and styles his
works as bricolage—things thrown together from whatever
is at hand. Be that as it may, his sculptural installations
approach opera in grandeur and complexity. It is not surprising
that Ferguson created the sets for an original ballet by
Todd Bolender with music ofJim Moberly or that he studied
with world—famous theater and opera set designer Ming
Cho Lee.
In the end, Ferguson's outlook remains utilitarian. He
is an intellectual who, in his own words, prefers to think
"with his hands and eyes." The installations are
Hobbit towns or an engaging perfection, drenched in myth
and romanticism—but built with an engineer's instinct
for form. They are places to be entered and explored, if
not with one's own shoes, then with the footsteps of the
imagination.
Tony Allard and Kristine Diekman
In recent years, performance artists have used intimate
fears and private revelations as a springboard for their
work. In his poetic and multi-layered videotape, Corpse
and Mirror, Tony Allard recalls a period in his childhood
when his father was committed to the madhouse and when he
himself became afraid that, by failing a spelling test,
he would be compelled to join his father. The breakdown
of sanity and family lead to musings on the coherency of
language, for Allard and his collaborator, Kristine Diekman,
are concerned with the complete failure of words to convey
or alter the course of the artist's terrifying childhood.
Madness, after all, is a time when words let us down, when
our most carefully constructed and logical sentences only
cause others to scratch their heads and back away from us.
In his own and his father's case, words -- torn from their
meanings -- failed utterly.
The bearded psychiatrist whom Allard consults in the video
adds little comfort when he replies, "When someone's
in such a disorganized state, just linguistic communication
is not going to work." But how many of us, one asks
oneself, is not presently in a disorganized state? The doctor
does not answer Allard's second question: is his father's
madness encoded in his own genes?
Allard appears throughout the autobiographical video, which
is based on the performance monologue. Often, we don't know
whether he plays himself or his father. We see him laying
down, muttering to himself, then dancing wildly in a barren
snow field, while a mournful solo piano invokes silent films.
Within its chaotic interweaving of memory, nonsense words
and phrases and text (during much of the video, Allard scribbles
directly on the "screen" using a marker), Corpse
and Mirror conveys a universal sense of sadness and
loss. One cannot make peace with one's father after he's
gone (Allard's father died in the institution), because
the path of communication has been cut. One has to invoke
ritual to make closure. This Allard does, near the end of
the video when he improvises a soft-shoe in an empty parking
lot. "I know your feet were cut off," he says.
"I'll do a little dance out here for you, Dad."
James Brinsfield
Until recently, Abstract Expressionism has remained relatively
impervious to the inroads of Postmodernism—its precepts
were too deeply felt, its practitioners too individual to
admit a movement that takes all previous styles as its bedfellows.
From a philosophical point of view, the two art movements
are, in fact, dreadful foes. After improvising hard and
long in the Abstract Expressionist mode, however, James
Brinsfield appears to have moved beyond the gestural painter's
prickly self—centeredness to a cool and inclusive overview.
His goal in these works seems to be the removal of "self"—of
the artist's anguish—from the creative process, and
Brinsfield avoids the distinctive "signature"
of a brush stroke. Instead, the artist pays visual tribute
to a broad range of cooler practitioners of figurative abstraction:
the vibrant Matisse in the later cut—out pictures,
the Swing Era Picasso of Synthetic—Cubist painting
Three Musicians, Calder, Ellsworth Kelly and the
Mondrian of Broadway BoogieWoogie.
Brinsfield composes his works as a jazz musician might,
blending thematic and improvised material in a cool, jazzy
style that's emphasized by their titles: Vague Trip,
To the Swift Go the Steady, Rubber Wrapped in
Onions, Madhouse—titles that also easily
could have adorned jazz compositions from the 1950s by Dizzie
Gillespie, Charlie Mingus or Thelonius Monk. Some of these
compositions, with their cut-out shapes, energetic colors
and synchopated rhythms, even seem visually to resemble
the style of jazz albums from that ear, the birth of "cool"
and of Bebop that also spawned the Ab—Ex painter's
movement. Figuratively speaking, one can almost imagine
the artist hunch his shoulders and raise his instrument
to his lips before he starts to fill one of these small
paper compositions with streams of carefully thought out
tones and images.
It's obvious the artist has not totally removed himself
from the field of the canvas. His humorous art historical
musings, his private thoughts and philosophical meanderings
are evident in paintings like Promiscuity, which
resembles an ethnologist's diagram of human relationships,
or At the Level of Souls, in which an apparent school
of sperm cells swims though an arch that is a self—conscious
womans thigh by Matisse (or perhaps it is one of Ellsworth
Kelly's abstract buttocks). The soul—sperm image repeats
itself often in these paintings and can be taken as the
artist's alter egos—they are on a vague journey, and
a lonely one.
—Peter von Ziegesar is a writer living in New
York City.
