Phalanges
Aaron Birk
"PHALANGES," an exhibition of small works by seventeen artists, opened on February 13th in twin gallery spaces at lower Manhattan’s center of chic commerce. Not thirty-six hours before the greatest single day of protest in global history, ravenous twenty-something hipsters drained Sapporo beer and popped cheese cubes among the wartime collections of curator David Adamo. Typically defined as finger bones, phalanges also denotes an alignment of wills, originating in the overlapping shields and spears of ancient military formations, developed by Phillip II of Macedonia. Unlike Aegean conquerors, however, Adamo’s artists appeal to a more unifying sense of socio-subjective cause. Rooted in political dissent, their work bears brute witness to a century of unchecked xenophobia in the United States and Europe. A preference for so-called "cheap" materials takes shape in gallons of tempura paint, duct tape, plastic cameras and sweatshirt fur. Irony and hope collide in what appears to be a new genre: the political self-portrait. While artists personalize world events, an emerging biophilia takes shape in sunflower seeds, ostrich eggs, great white sharks and derelict farms. Not every phalanx holds it own, however; some projects appear grossly under worked while others are bound to a forced irony.
Upon entering 450 Broadway, patrons may trip over a series of floor-mounted mongrel terriers, as David Kennedy-Cutler’s fuzzy gypsum sculptures strain against red leashes in varying degrees of doggy resistance. The rearing toys eerily foreshadowed the NYPD’s equestrian club and kenneled crowds of February 15’s peace protest, only two days to follow. All leashes lead to a point on the wall; a single force restraining multiple bodies, bred down from wild beasts to squealing play things. Kennedy-Cutler’s allegory borders on manifesto. Is this the Pooch’s revolution? If enough doggies haul will the dog-walker fall?
More explicit reports of government oppression roil in Mark Lepson’s checkerboard collage, YESTERDAY, TOMORROW. Cropped news fragments such as "Bosnia Crisis" and "Spying by FBI" are interwoven with silk-screened photographs of a New York detention center, where scores of "terrorist" suspects have been rounded up and stripped of their rights. Filtered through Lepson’s visual process, global atrocities enter a scrambled space, vexing the viewer and drowning in kaleidoscopic bytes.
Melora Kuhn also adopts a helpless tone in two portraits of a young girl, the second of which bears the tracing of a gas mask. Kuhn offers hope, however, in the faintness of her mask; the potential for gas has not yet been realized.
We find further investigations of massacre in the kraslice works of Tereza Mazur, who’s painted eggs tell fairy tales of Russian firing squads, legless soldiers, and a Romanian grandmother in the ruins of her house. Mazur deploys a heavy-handed symbolism, which is more than justified, however, by her experience as a Czech refugee.
TEXAS DEATH ROW, Anitra Haendel’s mug shot portrait of a living female inmate, bears the patina of an old-time WANTED poster; Her new-prisoner-old-problem dialectic recalls former Governor George Ryan’s recent pardoning of Illinois’ death-row inmates, a move that may herald the demise of Capital Punishment. Haendel’s GREAT WHITE emerges from the darkness in a 6-inch canvas. A classic movie monster, the shark has come to represent this country’s Fear of the Other, though Haendel casts a sympathetic light on the beast’s silver eye, softening the teeth and exposing in its mouth a pink interior.
At 473 Broadway, James Tomon launches twin appeals to a boyish nostalgia for war in the golden age of flight. His paintings of a 1924 Bristol Lucifer and a 1928 De Havilland DH60 account for the romanticism of allied military campaigns, though bi-plane dogfights were far a field from the common soldier’s experience of WWI’s stagnant trenches and mustard gas. Tomon also paints a triad of Nazi bird-of-prey medallions, a fetish, perhaps, for old-time fascism.
"At present we have the worst politicians in office possible," explains Becket Bowes, who’s suspended figurines of Gandhi and Mother Theresa return to Earth with parachutes made from their own garments. "One of the best foreign diplomats I can imagine is Gandhi. On Saturday you protest an inevitable war. We’re bound to fail but we have to put our muscle into it." Indeed, Bowes’ twentieth century heroes cast a liberating spell on the viewer below. Incarnations of the Non-Violent, these descending figures propose the survival of civil justice.
Carla Repice descends to the streets with Seed Belt, a strap-on device that spreads bird-seed with the turn of a crank. She plans to pull her stunt on the steps of the Board of Education this Spring, inviting thousands of city birds, trained by a week of synchronized feedings. The question remains: will her guerrilla display make a Mary Poppins call for improved education, or rain Hitchcock on the unsuspecting crowd?
On another front (and back and butt) Jessica Segall ‘embodies’ the auto-politic in DO YOU LIKE RUBENS, a triad of oil paintings attempting to redefine the female nude. Combining Rubens’ baroque Venus with three porn models from the 1950s, Segall layers old on older in stark monochromes of sepia and white. In one painting a model smiles as she lowers her underwear for an indifferent Venus. In another, a pair of hands are all we see of the cunnilingus she appears to be ignoring. Segall’s work strips the nude of ornament, offering in its place a more just dessert.
Other works of note are Eli Joseph-Hunter’s photographic flip-books which show unwrapping of American cheese and the brushing of teeth, Christopher Saunders’ blurred snapshot paintings of his grandfather’s lost farm, Emily Orling’s bottles and tubes stolen from horseshoe crabs on Coney Island, and Erika de Vries’ video installation of a plastic windmill to the tune of "Little Birdie Sing Me Your Song."
David Adamo’s phalangic friends remain flexible, though at times wanting in clarity. Missing was the curator’s own world-of-miniature, which coffins tiny business-men and seats old ladies on rat vertebrae. Perhaps we oughta protest for a comeback.
