2005

From the catalog BONDS OF LOVE by Chris Kraus

Exhibition curated by Lisa Kirk at John Connelly Presents

All the work in this show is based on experience. This commonality seems more important than the obvious fact that the artists involved are all female. Drawn from various cities and two or three generations, the artists selected by Lisa Kirk are all somehow committed to infilitrating, exposing, various cultures and customs. Often their own. "Political" isn't the point. Neither is "personal." (Disheartening fact that the art world's response to the larger world's crisis is a guilty retreat to recycled expository 'political' art. Since when is a prissy assemblage of data 'political'? We suffer already from too much information … so much more interesting to go out for a walk, turn off the computer.) For these works to be made, the artist, it seems, had to be there. One thing leads to another. Art here functions as anthropology, in its most Utopian form.

Sometimes (in the case of Laura Anderson Barbata's astonishing media projects in the Amazon regions of Venezuela), the work doubles as social anthropology, in a postmodern James Clifford-esque sense. Traveling between the US and remote South American Amazon regions for the past 14 years, Laura Barbata's projects are based on time shared between herself and the residents. Often the works are proposed by local community leaders. In her account of Barbata's first trip to a remote settlement called Platanal, the curator Ilona Katzew recounts how Barbata decided to teach villagers how to make their own paper when she noticed the lack of supplies at the school. An astonishing journey ensued. Barbata's canoe became stuck. "The length of the trip, the harshness of the sun, and the continuous noise of a motor attached to the canoe induced a state of torpor …" As a consequence of these difficult conditions, Barbata experienced a heightened sense of understanding/connection to that place. She later studied the craft of canoe-making, and these forms would eventually enter work.

Objects here function as artifacts: they're only part of the work, and would never exist were it not for the social and personal journeys involved. Thinking about the relation between abstract finance and the visceral, human experience of slavery, the media installation artist Camille Norment staged a show (Auction, The Bank, 1997) in a vacated Manhattan bank. Directed by blinking lights at the teller's windows, viewers approached chilling displays of fetishized artifacts: fraying rope, human teeth. Tribal fetish, commodity fetish. Objects invested with weight. What stories do they contain?

In the case of Marilyn Minter's delirious dreams of consumption, where lazy-eyed mouths feast on sharp-focused baubles and pearls, a more devious, personal form of anthropology is practiced. I'm not talking about autobiography: but rather, a willingness to try things on, to implicate oneself in the process. Minter is not the subject of her highly-staged studio portraits Bluer Tears, Vomit, and Jawbreaker, but she isn't exactly outside of the frame, either. Minter documents the splendors and miseries of feminity's signifiers as an insider. Beautifully composed and wholly ambivalent, her images probe and disfigure. As the critic Deborah Ripley has noted, her work draws a parallel between glamour and trauma. Impossible to reach this conflation were she not an insider. Like Anais Nin and Pauline Reage's erotic heroine, O, Minter thrives on the tension between her aestheticized subjects and her own dispassionate gaze. Liquid lips, beads of Evian sweat, crystal beads connected by wire.

In her book Bonds of Love (Pantheon, 1988) the psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin mounted a powerful argument towards reciprocity. Benjamin argued that gender-proscribed roles of dominance and submission between men and women cheated both parties of the greater experience of recognition and inter-dependence, from which any real intimacy (not to mention a complete sense of one's self) is borne. Benjamin finds the basis for these estranged burlesque roles in psychoanalysis' adherence to Freud's Oedpial model. So long as the mother, in her passivity, represents an oceanic, infantile state from which the boy must rebel, he achieves "masculinity" only through dominance. Why is the maternal role absent of all subjectivity? All parties, she says, are fated to lose because it's impossible, within these polarities, for either party to truly 'be with' the other, travel outside of themselves.

The world that young Janey steps into in Laura Parnes' God Guts and Guns (2005) reeks of power, control. Everything here is contaminated. On the heels of archival footage of American hostages freed after the 1979 Iranian "crisis," Janey (brilliantly played by the young actress Stephanie Vella) sits alone in a classroom, bound, spread-legged and blind-folded. The slightly dissheveled hippie sadist professor (shades of Herbert Marcuse?) who is her teacher has Janey repeat certain phrases in English.

To want Janey

To buy Janey

To own Janey

To beat Janey up

To know Janey

He speaks with a slight German accent. Janey complies.

"Now Janey," he asks, "what grade should I give you for this?" Janey tightens her face in a mask. "What grade should I give you?" "Grades," Janey counters, "are bullshit."

Parnes' text is derived from the early writings of Kathy Acker, and though she's of a younger generation than Acker, Parnes has all of punk's proto-attitudes down. Tricked out in a blue wig, fishnet tights and a dog collar, Parnes' Janey sweetly epitomizes punk's call and response with authority, its genius to wholly internalize and feed back a general sense of futility.

Teacher smirks as he summons Janey to the front of the room. "Janey," he asks, holding her essay as if it were dog shit, "is this – autobiography?" "It's not about me," Janey patiently pouts with enormous red lips. She turns her back to the teacher. She's not wearing a blouse underneath her school uniform jumper. The left strap is twisted. "It's about the world."

Written almost three decades ago, Acker's hilarious pointed exchange sums up the confusion about experience-based work that exists to this day in art criticism. Indeed, a great deal of the work by some of the artists Kirk chose for this show has been misdefined as "autobiography." As if subjectivity itself (should it be female) was, by definition, solipsistic.

It's not about me, it's about the world, Benjamin says. "Interestingly," Benjamin writes, "when we do succeed in reaching [an] enhanced state of awareness, it is often in a context of sharpened awareness of others – of their unique particularity and independent existence."

While putting together this show, Lisa Kirk wondered how it might be read against the provocative "boys only" shows (Boys Gone Wild by Scott Hug/Michael Magnan and Today's Man, organized by John Connelly) mounted here at this gallery. Both shows appropriate media images that conflate fashion and war and expose the American empire's quest for global dominion. Clearly this is serious stuff, to be viewed at arm's length. What, wonders Kirk, will viewers make of the curious … seepage … that occurs in the Bonds of Love show between (mediatized) culture and (human) nature? "Everything they do is mediated," Parnes says of the characters in her earlier video No is Yes. "I feel that's the way we live our lives now. There is no immediate primal experience. To try to recapture that is ridiculous and impossible." (interview with Jude Taillichet, Very Magazine, Spring 1998).


Maria Pineres uses needlepoint craft to probe media culture's fixation with athleticized bodies. Her pillows sport perfect throw-away bodies, inspired by pictures from 1970s porn, rendered in dyed cotton floss. The deliberateness entailed in this action wittily imbues the airbrushed flat images with texture and form. Hunched over her needlework, Pineres trumps the disposible flow of commercial porn culture. Her pillows are one person's attempt to stop time. Through her work, the bodies once again become tactile. This mindless memorialism brings them to life.

Kati Heck is similarly concerned with the idealized, athletic body. As a German-born artist living in Belgium, she is quick to see parallels between idealized physical culture and fascism. Recent works – Sind wir per du (2004), Hatte Hande (2005), Fleish und Blut (2005) are paint and oil stick renderings of idealized masculine forms – sportif politicians, heroic young soldiers – met with cartoonish catostrophe. A sleeping or dead young soldier lies prone, a garland of flowers draped over his chest. The upper part of his torso is realistically rendered. The bottom's an oil-stick outline. Pastel-colored doodles arise from his crotch. The trim technocrat in Hatte Hande (2005) smiles. He's naked except for one shoe and one sock. Her Muskeltube photographs (2004) show grinning aerobics instructors, bodies coated in blackface, strutting their stuff. One recent work – Heia Oder Bube Druck Mich – explictly makes the Nazi connection. Composed of found early 20th century black and white photographs, the three panels show two brave German beauties playfully vanquishing the womanish cringing male Jew.

Heck manipulates her lycra-clad early 21st century figures as an insider. Bodies are all these people possess. Without culture, community, history, their physical selves are the only thing her subjects know or seem sure of. Heck is able to parody their blank vanities brilliantly. She's one of them too.

Goody B. Wiseman's sculptural roses, planted throughout the gallery, suggest similar methods of seepage. Excerpted from a larger installation, Cautionary Tales (2004), which channeled violent historical hauntings in remote Nova Scotia, they are markers of blood. She uses sculpture to probe the emotional presence behind certain artifacts, just as her earlier text-based works seek to discern an emotion that's missing from language. Wiseman questions whether these forms – the roses, the words – can ever contain human experience. Like the imagist poets, Wiseman cares more about what's left out of the picture than what stays inside. And like Marilyn Minter, she is both present, and not, in this work. She acts as a spy.

"On the surface," sneers Janey's professor, "it is very clever. If you look underneath, it is nothing." "I want to believe in something," Janey protest, "but – " "Goo goo," he intones, like a koan. "Goo goo?" "You speak like a baby. In this class you will learn to speak like an adult." "I'll speak any way I want," Janey declares, "because no one's going to listen."

Our deepest desires, writes Benjamin, become implicated in control and submission. There's no escape. And so are "bonds of love" forged. Oblique, compromised.

–Chris Kraus