Robert Boyd at Schroeder Romero - New York - Art exhibits - Review

Art in America, July, 2003 by Calvin Reid

Robert Boyd's "The Virgin Collection" was an impressive multidisciplinary exhibition combining costumery, objects, photography, video and performance. In works concerned with history, fascist power, homophobia, social suppression and alienation, Boyd lampoons an array of traditional symbols that ostensibly project masculinity, femininity and purity.

The centerpiece of this fascinating installation was an elaborate, vaguely ominous white wedding gown. Boyd wore the outfit in a video and in the opening performance at the gallery. It's a quirky garment with a conical headdress and mask, elegant full-length skirt and a top emblazoned with a comical and mysterious crest marked with the image of two crossed hammers--their heads "kissing"--and a lightning bolt. This oddball graphic appeared on many of the other artifacts on display, among them champagne flutes and photos that parody Gap ads--underscoring the way corporate marketing is the latest embodiment of popular presumptions about sex, gender and power. The show also included large photos of Boyd in costume, photos of wedding cakes, and silver knives.

The crest logo--as well as the gown and the installation overall--refer to a variety of elements transposed from the history of the Inquisition and a hodgepodge of more recent, and pop-cultural, sources. The crest's hammers, associated with Masons and the Marxist working class, were once misappropriated, according to Boyd, by a racist 1980s neo-Nazi rock band. Boyd uses the lightning bolt, taken from Marilyn Manson's Antichrist Superstar album cover, to signal the "danger" of having signs of masculine power in a loving embrace. Boyd complicates the symbol of the "wedding" dress with his puckish alterations. Its conical headdress resembles Ku Klux Klan regalia, although this is not the artist's source. He based the gown on the religious outfits of the Nazarenos, a Spanish secret society of the 1700s, which came to his attention during a 1998 trip through Spain. The Nazarenos' costume came in turn from the dress of humiliated prisoners during the Inquisition.

Boyd's exhibition produced a series of inadvertent meanings and botched interpretations, effectively documenting how one historical group after another borrows and distorts the meanings of sets of symbols. He plays dress-up in an effort to celebrate drag and its knack for ironic social critique. The result was an intricate visual history of mixed messages (and mixed emotions) inflicted on a public that decides for itself whatever it is that they may mean.