Trisha Donnelly - Openings

ArtForum, Summer, 2002 by John Miller

Donnelly belongs to a generation of West Coast artists taken with Bas Jan Ader's paragon of incommunicability, self-mythification, and antidocumentation. Her work, shown at New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art, Le Consortium in Dijon, and Air de Paris, among other venues, may also concern more muted historical tendencies. An untitled video from 1999, for example, collates a gamut of MTV performances by Joey Ramone, Kim Carnes, Weather Girl Izora Rhodes, David Lee Roth, Dionne Warwick, and Iggy Stooge, among others. Donnelly contends that every singer makes a characteristic gesture-or tic-at the song's high point. These she reenacted while jumping on a trampoline, at the peak of a bounce. In slow motion she floats in and out of the frame, beckoning inscrutably. The reconstituted ecstasy is loaded with unconscious affect. Eye Model, shown at Casey Kaplan this year, is a device for historical amnesia. It looks like a sweatband (who said the '80s revival was over?) designed to serve as a sleep mask. The af orementioned serial drawings of nameless green tubes, for their part, play on the notion of the obscene: literally, that which is away from the scene or offstage. The drum pattern/title alludes to Serge Gainsbourg's "Love on the Beat-beat" being a homonym of the French slang for penis (bite). The suturing- or de-suturing-of title and work suggests suspending the patronym and points to an anonymous women's history.

Last year Donnelly took part in Jens Hoffmann's performance series "A Little Bit of History Repeated" at Kunst-Werke Berlin (see Artforum, March 2002), but she seems more preoccupied with unrealized histories than with the past per se. Writing in this magazine, Robert Smithson once claimed that "the ponderous illusions of solidity, the non-existence of things, is what the artist takes for 'materials.'" For Donnelly, this is less a polemic than an actual working method.

John Miller a New York-based artist. writer, and Critic.