Buzz Spector at Cristinerose - Brief Article

In the late 1970s, Buzz Spector began using books as both conceptual and sculptural units in his work. He would tear, paint, cut and even freeze books--not violently but with precision and tenderness. In this show, Spector continued his obsession with books, using photography to condense their bulk to two dimensions.

Mostly the photos showed temporary "sculptures"--arrangements of books in which Spector balanced formal structure and poetic reference. All 10 photographic works in the show were composed of 20-by-24-inch Polaroids, singly or as multiple-print compositions. With their fine detail, exquisite color and shallow depth of field, the photos displayed a lusciousness and style reminiscent of illustrations in food magazines.

Following the maxim "you are what you read," Spector presented a six-panel portrait of himself nude (though only seen from the waist up) amid towering piles of books. The work's title, My Fiction (2000), describes the books in the photo (the novels and short-story collections in Spector's library) and, with gentle humor, questions the idea of self-representation or photography as truth.

In two other works, Spector stacked books he owns that are about or by Ann Hamilton and Christian Boltanski to create homages to these artists. In both cases, the spines of the books were turned away so that you couldn't see the titles, only note the thickness or thinness of the volumes. Set before plain backgrounds, the configuration of the stack carried the expressive weight. The Hamilton books were stacked in a feminine "V," while the Boltanski stack was an enigmatic cipher.

In Freeze Freud (2001), Spector revisited a work of the same name from 1992 in which he used a glass-walled freezer to display the 24 volumes of Freud's collected works embedded in ice. Here, four Polaroids did the trick. At odds with the metaphor of photo-documentation (and ice) as preservatives for an unstable sculpture was the photographs' hothouse visuality. The ice blocks in which the dark, frost-obscured volumes had been imprisoned were tinted by a pink backdrop, creating a composition that looked like an abstract painting of questionable taste. This work was paradigmatic of the show and Spector's work in general in its insistence that visual art (and visuality) involves a semiotic act of reading. The buttery tones and rich colors of the photography coupled with Spector's wit and intelligence made this exhibition a pleasurable read, indeed.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
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