






This is the first of a series of models and small pieces which I have done over the last
AGNES MARTIN:
"...the black fugatos are strumming the black of the black...Thick strings stutter the finial gutturals.He does not lie there remembering the blue jay, say the jay.His grief is that he mother should feed on him, himself and what he saw,In that distant chamber, a bearded queen..."(Wallace Stevens:Madame La Fleurie)
Space in our time has grown steadily more eccentric, more nest-like than building-like. It is as irrational as Mies or Mondrian was rational. Architecture seems to be attempting its own dis-embodiment, and sculpture a space which makes earlier installation artseem almost classical.If there is some familial resemblance to Conceptual Altar Space or Immersive Assemblage Space, it is a Gothick decade later, with its mutant concerns.
A sculpture of braided horse-hair ensnaring a tide of silk roses punctuated with hyper-alert taxidermied pheasants and plovers, as do the sculptures of Petah Coyne, turns the whitest cubicle into...what? The names which one comes up for it---gesticulative spatial expressionism or Carnival of Souls Rococco--are absurd, but the work is a marvel.
Coyne's work first reminded me (A)of a Victorian relict seen in a great home, a floral arrangement made of the rosettes of braided hair of the female family members and kept under a bell-jar (B) the women's-training- hospital ghost in Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior, which abided by day in a pencil eraser but which by night rolled around on tenacled eye-balls to crush the breath from the sleeping(C) Poe's mystical yearning for Annabel Lee and/or Ligeia(D) Hearses from a horse-drawn time (E) Bernini. It is the sense that the sculpture turns the room on a centrifugal force of its--the sculpture's-- making which brings up Bernini. Coyne's work seems to tilt the room off its armature.
In a Bomb interview with Lynn Tillmann, Coyne spoke admiringly of Miss Havisham in GREAT EXPECTATIONS, the Miss Havisham of the sealed off wedding-banquet chamber,whose wedding cake was colonized with rats and festooned by spiders, who had not changed from her wedding gown in thirty years after being jilted at the altar. This accounts, indirectly, for the sense of her earlier pieces being like brides and their own cast-off bouquets, a synthesis of the wedding and the funeral. Miss Havisham alarms us because in some sense she is buried alive,like Madeline Usher or Persephone. She becomes the death-bride ; the Russian surrealist Tchelitchev referred to her as the White Lady.
The myth of the rape of the bride by the underworld is more central to modernism than is commonly observed. It appears not only in Poe, among the pre-Raphaelites, in poets as different as William Carlos Williams and Rilke, but was critical to the early days of feminism, which attempted many revisions of the myth of Persephone. Obviously, it marked the strong sense among women that they had been seized, captured, and confined--entombed-- in unwanted identities.This is a political truth with an historical dimension, as events in the world testify. It is also a metaphor for the imaginative faculties of the human Psyche under warrant, hence its appearance in Dickens and Poe. This is the Self kidnapped from Ceres, or Mother Nature,by Pluto ("RICHES"), into the airless and artificial mirror realm of cunningly be-jeweled counterfeits. According to Guy Davenport, it is the diagnostic myth of the mental illness of western culture from the nineteenth century on.
This is the vein that Coyne taps. The artists she cites as influences--Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Anne Hamilton--don't form a school or even resemble each other much, but they do outline a geneology.The keen awareness of the abjection of the flesh, the tumnescent neediness and the decay of the body, are Bourgeois' contribution; the de-regulation of minimalism in favor of a willed awkwardness,lopsided eccentricity,is Hesse'--along with her tangled skeins. Ann Hamilton provided both hair-as-metaphor and hair quite literally, as she gave Coyne the horsehair used for her 1993 DIA installation-- those famous stairways covered with hair. What these artists have in common is the will to revise further and further into the intuitional unknown. There is nothing neatly rounded off or pat about any of them.
This is why I don't think Coyne's work is kitsch, as it has been accused of being.Those undulating beds of roses, each with their own separate sigh, animating each otherby implication, over which some fatal candle has dripped, and which are interwoven withthose aforementioned birds and leaping taxidermied squirrels, remind me of a constellation of things without being quite like anything else I've seen. That's a complex response. And formally what keeps it far from cliche is Coyne's feeling for orphaned forms, for fungal shapes and weed shapes,the way twigs are plaited together by the flood which casts them ashore as detritus, by algae, and stumps, and curly willow, by the revival and transmutation of life through the process of decay.Those upsidedown bouquets which are also chandeliers or those biers which appear to rustle are also nests in which souls seem to gather. She calls them her "girls".
CHELSEA | ||
DL. Alvarez | Derek Eller | |
roger anderson | Sarah Meltzer | |
esao Andrews | J Le Vine | |
paolo Arao | Jeff Bailey Gallery | |
assume vivid astral focus* | ||
John Connolly Presents after the wake, an orgy | ||
ali Banisadr | Leslie Tonkonow | |
gary Baseman | The big stories are all fairytales | |
gary Batty | Feature | |
james Barsness* | George Adams | He draws like Rackham; he thinks like Tex Avery |
tony Bechaka | Andre Zarre | |
Berkowitz and Brua | Derek Eller | tables climb walls decked with the soul's laundry |
Tim Bishop | J Le Vine | |
suzzane Bocenagra | Lucas Schoormans | |
Hilary Brace* | Edward Thorpe | Apparitional Whiteness from the Hollow Earth |
alex Brown | Feature | |
jason Brown | Rare | |
jeff Burton | Casey Kaplan | |
dean Byington* | Leslie Tonkonow | an Heir of Richard Dadd |
olaf Breuning | Metro Pictures | |
ingrid calame | James Cohan | |
james casabere + | Paul Kasmin | the de Chirico sublet |
jonathan Callan | Nicole Klagsburn | |
Beth Campbell | Nicole Klagsburn | |
martines Canas | Julie Saul | |
gillian Carnegie | Andrea Rosen | |
nathan carter | Casey Kaplan | |
St Clair Cemin* | Sikkemma Jenkins | |
peter Coffin* | Andrew Kreps | the wreck of the Hegel in the form of crunched stairs |
matthew Collishaw | Bonakdar | |
lia Cook | Nancy Margolis | |
george condo | Luhring Augustine | De Kooning and Saul Steinberg fight over a broad |
petah coyne* | Gallerie Lelong | Miss Havisham and Madeleine Usher discuss Nerval |
andy cvijanovic | Bellwether | |
Inka Essenhigh | 303 | |
tim daly | DFN | |
james Davis | Rare | |
edith derdyuk+ | Haim Chanin | String theory meets Atropos |
leonardo Drew* | Sikkemma Jenkins | |
jeff Elrod+ | Fredericks Freiser | |
jean-michel fauquet | Haim Chanin | Physical stairways to metaphysical oubliettes |
angelo filomeno* | Galerie LeLong | as true (and as artificial) as Chopin or Baudelaire |
roland fisher | Von Lintel | |
roland Flexner* | D'Amelio Terras | Taoist of the profound soap bubble |
Mark Fox* | Larisa Goldston | The Paganini of Scissors shapes a Tornado |
adam Fowler | Margaret Thatcher Projects | |
yuichi higashiona | Boesky | |
Francesca Gabriani | Sarah Meltzer | |
stan Gregory | Sunduram Tagore | |
orly Genger | Larisa Goldston | |
sam Gibbons | Claire Oliver | |
Tomoo Gokita | ATM | |
Anthony Gormley | ||
richard Greaves* | Andrew Edlin | The bigfoot of the Canadian Rockies |
jonah Greensberger | Bellwether | |
stan Gregory | Sunduram Tagore | |
Andreas Gursky | Matthew Marks | |
diana al hadi | Perry Rubinstein | |
Liz Halloran | DCKT | streaks of speed in progress |
trenton doyle Hancock | James Cohan | |
Jutta Haeckel | Hosfelt | |
Jacob el Hanani | Hosfelt | |
Ann Hardy | Bellwether | |
lyle ashton harris | CRG Gallery | |
jeppe Hein | 303 | |
julie heffernan | PPOW | |
kent hendricksen | John Connally | Presents Part of the problem is that my boyfriend dabbles in dark arts |
oliver Herring* | Max Protech | Victor Frankenstein's career in high fashion |
eva Hild | Nancy Margolis | |
julie Hirst | Pavel Zoubok | |
Karsten Hollier | Casey Kaplan | |
timothy Horn* | Hosfelt | the debate of the baroque with the rococo conducted in spun sugar |
jacqueline humphries | Greene Naftali | |
aaron johnson | Stux | |
butt johnson | CRG Gallery | I was in the outhouse when Daddy got raptured |
cassandra c jones | Vanina Holasek Gallery | |
brian Jungen | Casey Kaplan | |
jen kim | Steinberg | |
Ron Klein | Howard Scott | |
jolyn kystosek | Lucas Schoormans | |
Jeff Ladouceur | Zieher Smith | |
rezi van lankveld | Petzel | |
sarah Leahy | Kim Foster | |
Catherine Lee | Galleries Lelong | the disaffection of the great horizon |
wonju lim | Boesky | |
graham little | CRG Gallery | |
donald lipski* | Gallerie Lelong | the charioteer of found objects |
nicola lopez | Caren Golden | |
john maeda+ | Christenrose | So slick it becomes another substance |
Marco Maggi* | Hosfelt | depict the cryptogram and decrypt the pictogram |
frank magnotta | Cohan + Leslie | |
didier Massard | Julie Saul | |
tatsuya Matsushita | Mehr Gallery | |
josiah mc elheny | Andrea Rosen | |
maureen mc quillan | Mc Kenzie | |
jason meadows | Bonakdar | |
sarah Morris | Petzel | |
ron mueck | () | |
james nakes | Paul Kasmin | |
ernesto neto* | Bonakdar | angelic snot sacks |
aaron Noble | Pavel Zoubok | |
ludwika orgozelec | Nancy Margolis Gallery | |
jean michel Othoniel+ | Sikkemma Jenkins | |
gary panter | Clementina | |
james paterson | Bitforms | |
jorge Pardo* | Petzel | |
roxy payne | James Cohan | |
emilio perez | Galerie Lelong | |
diego perone | Casey Kaplan | |
ara Peterson* | James Connally presents | |
jack Pierson+ | Danziger | |
jaume Plensa* | Galerie Lelong Alphabody Fountainface | |
ken price | Matthew Marks | |
matthew ritchie | Andrea Rosen | |
john rappeleye | jeff bailey | Snakes writhe through skulls in desert blanched colors |
mary reilly | DFN Gallery | |
anil reuri | Sundurum tagore | |
matthew ritchie | Andrea Rosen | |
michel angelo roca | ATM | |
jimmy joe roche | Rare | |
betsabee romero | Galerie Ramis Barquet | |
alexander Ross | Boesky | |
victoria Ryan | John Stevenson | |
ursula von rydinguard | Galerie Lelong | Treetrunk Tankards for Fafner and Fasolt |
dennis rudolph | Perry Rubinstein | |
alain saret+ | James Cohan | |
tojkijito Sato | Leslie Tonkonow | |
robert Sagarman | Marguerite Thatcher Projects | |
peter sarkissian | ||
aaron spangler | Rare | |
peter schuyff | Nicole Klagsbrun | |
michelle segre | Derek Eller | the cracquelature of the biomorphic forms found near Oz |
hiroshi senjo | Sunduram Tagore | |
gary simmons | Metro Pictures | |
john stashkevitch | Von Lintel | |
james everett stanley | Freight+Volume | |
simon starling | Casey Kaplan | |
max streicher | Ricco Maresca | |
mark Swanson+ | Bellwether | |
francesca sundsten | Jenkins Johnson Gallery | |
james Surls | Charles Cowles | Old Wild Cowboy Ropes Trickster Tree |
barbara takenaga | Mc Kenzie | |
maki Tamura | Lucas Schoormans | |
whiting tennis | Derek Eller | |
gordon Terry | Jeff Bailey | |
fred tomaselli* | James Cohan | vast worlds from small aspirins |
tam van tran | Cohan + Leslie | |
scott trealeaven+ | James Connally presents The Commedia del Arte meets the Neopolitan Inquisition on toile | |
james Valerio + | George Adams | |
mark dean veca | J le Vine | |
michael velliquette | DCKT Gallery | |
mark wagner | Pavel Zoubok | |
hugh walton | Clementina | |
wayne white | Clementina | |
adam wallacavage | ||
kit white | Andre Zarre | |
wayne white | Clementina | |
terry winters | Matthew Marks | |
mike womack | Zieher Smith | |
c yass | Gallerie Lelong | |
amy yoes | Steinberg | |
jason young | Christenrose | |
Michelle Zapony | Esso | Spook girl sends large postcards |
Rhonda Zwillinger | Pavel Zoubok |