Dramatically Different

 
Dramatically Different
Flash Art, Milano, March - April 1998, p. 81

"Dramatically Different" is an exhibition that takes its name from a beauty cream made by Clinique. This should signal to the viewer that this group exhibition of over twenty artists is about surface appearance and beauty. More specifically, I believe what curator Eric Troncy had in mind was a show in which the individual efficacy of each art work, through its outward beauty and allure would undermine any totalizing themes imposed by a curator or viewer. Due to their power to seduce in highly individual ways, each object would remain dramatically different . This is not a new idea. In fact, it had a great appeal for a few New York based curators in the mid and late 80s, among them Collins & Millazo, Robert Nickas, and above all Christian Leigh. While these distinctly 80s personalities insisted on a greater role for themselves as "authors" then does Troncy, they all assert the power of art to communicate for itself, while seeing themselves as conductors of an orchestra of cross pollination. It is ultimately a defense of subjectivity, a faith in the individual voice to speak and be heard amidst the cacophony. As for literal cacophony, there is none. "Dramatically Different" does not contain a single video projection or installation/environment; it is an exhibition of static images and objects.

      This reliance on traditional forms of representation (painting, sculpture, photography) is a pleasant change in this decade of art presented as an adjunct to various service industries. The viewer is reminded that temporal space is not the only space left in which to communicate. Each work speaks and we listen, moving through the space synthetically connecting strands of meaning when and where they are to be found. Animation is thus located in our experience of art, in the fluid exchange between the works sensual, didactic, and discursive elements, and not necessarily literally in the art itself. Swetlana Heger & Plamen Dejanov created a miniature example of the show's concerns with their piece, Still Life (Plenty Objects of Desire) in which Eames furniture sits on a plastic platform with other cultural objects of desire, including a painting by Elizabeth Peyton. Here we see an essentialized vision of a collector's home, a private vision of acquisition spurned by desire. The perfect counterpoint to the didactic institution and its exhibitions designed to eradicate difference in the quest for meaning. A room filled with pink and purple rocket ships by Sylvie Fleury, and huge polyurethane blobs by César presents, perhaps, the farthest the exhibition goes in grouping objects with no thematic relation other than visual ones; in this case a colorful and punchy bluntness. In another room however, thematic links are too well spelled out; two Haim Steinbach, a Jeff Koons, a Larry Montello, and Katarina Fritsch is just too much commodity critique/celebration for one exhibition these days. But, in a room with Fleury's photographs of fashion magazine covers juxtaposed with On Kawara's The Today Series of Date Paintings, we see a more subtle curatorial hand. Both images chart time, one through novel difference, the other through an act of meditative recording. Both create bold images of a very different quality and content. Both speak, to us and to each other. It is these conversations and connections that "Dramatically Different" is ultimately about.

Owen Drolet