Liz-N-Val at Tribes

Art in America, Dec, 2004 by Sarah Valdez

Crackpots or visionaries, art partners Liz-N-Val have spent more than two decades as fixtures on the international art scene. The duo, one of whose "public art projects" involved taking a "pet canvas named Woof" on walks in Berlin, New York and Paris, remained true to (oddball) character in "Space Travelers," their latest exhibition. The show contained a lot of individual pieces that loosely cohered as an installation--rather like a low-tech planetarium. It looked as though Liz-N-Val did not sleep until they had made use of every bit of the space--floorboards, ceiling, heating pipes and an upright piano that, along with a cluttered bookshelf, simply came along with the gallery.

Cotton balls stood out as a primary medium. Shaped into masses and cloudlike forms dangling from the ceiling, the delicate, mundane white fluff, moving almost imperceptibly as slight, random breezes wafted through the gallery, cast shadows on the walls. Liz-N-Val also incorporated plastic children's toys, the best being a pair of little airplanes that appeared to have crashed into one corner, their noses stuck into holes punched in the walls. Caution! (2003) consisted of a plastic toy hand reaching upward through a cotton-ball cloud affixed to a vertical pipe; fake blood and guts dripped from its severed wrist. A mixed-medium sculpture, Junior Pissing (2004), involved a cluster of unidentifiable white gloop--another cloud, of sorts--protruding from the wall. Atop this perched a small, pink, naked plastic boy, peeing. In Sublime Cuisine (2004), a rocket trailing cotton balls in its wake seemed to have flown through a frying pan that hung from the ceiling.

As proprietors of the MuseuM of Abstractrealism (occasionally known as the MuseuM of Truth-N-Beauty, open by appointment only), Liz-N-Val have long been fascinated by the play between the representational and the real. Along these lines, a snippet of yellow plastic reading "WET PAINT" hung discreetly across an obscure corner of the gallery, doing what Liz-N-Val do best: making people wonder. Quite without irony, Liz-N-Val remain committed to the idea that art can and should be at once magical and truthful--as Liz once described it, "the go-go dancer's dream of the meditative state."