Keith Boadwee at Ace - Los Angeles, California - Review of Exhibitions

Art in America, Oct, 1995 by Alisa Tager

It's difficult to imagine any situation in "polite company" where talk of anal secretions is appropriate. But for Keith Boadwee, his derriere is the realm of art, or, more accurately, it is the means of fabrication of his art. Boadwee makes "butthole paintings": using enema bags, he injects himself full of egg tempera paint. Then he aims his body so that the paint goes where he wants it. Sometimes he sits down alongside a horizontal canvas; at other times he stands the canvas, climbs a ladder and, perched atop the stretcher, allows the paint to run down. All this is documented in two videos played continuously during the exhibition that show him walking naked through his studio and diligently applying paint. The videos include sounds, which are intermittently distracting, disturbing and funny.

Alongside the videos were four 5-by-4-foot Duraflex prints. These are photographic stills of the artist in action that recall photos of Jackson Pollock at work. They capture the painting gesture in detail, registering the moment the paint hits the canvas. They are reminiscent, as well, of documentary photographs of Hermann Nitsch's "Orgiastic Rituals," but whereas the participants in Nitsch's performances were covered in blood, Boadwee is covered in paint, His method recalls Shigeko Kubota's 1965 Vagina Painting at the Perpetual Fluxfest in New York: the artist, wearing a dress, attached a paintbrush to her underwear and squatted over a canvas, trailing red paint and redefining Action painting as a feminine/ feminist undertaking. There is also a Danish artist, Peter Bonde, who spits paint from his mouth onto the canvas [A.i.A., Feb. '95]. The choice of bodily orifices provides a distinct set of metaphors.

The artist's expression in the videos and photographs is always stern and concentrated. Indeed, the intestinal fortitude that produced 50 canvases (in three sizes: 2 1/2 by 2 feet, 4 by 4 feet, 6 by 6 feet) is impressive. The styles are quite varied, ranging from stripes to polka dots to monochromatic fields. Some paintings are more interesting than others. They tend to be rather decorative and pleasant to look at, but none really holds up to rigorous esthetic scrutiny.

This exhibition, a provocative combination of performance art, painting, installation and photographic documentation, is typical of Boadwee's varied production, which is always outre in some way. Freud might have something to say about the artist's good-natured butt love, but I don't know what. Boadwee's project is intelligent and irritating, repulsive and appealing. In a difficult balance, his multifaceted presentation sustains the uneasy alliances.