Dirk Westphal at N.Y. Security Mini-Storage - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Art in America, Oct, 1997 by Grady T. Turner

Someone should take dealer Caroline Nathusius aside and tell her not to show art in obscure places like mini-storage warehouses, no matter how close to SoHo galleries, simply because she likes an artist's work. And do it fast, before she organizes antoher well-conceived show in a space the size of a walk-in closet.

Dirk Westphal's work was well suited to this transformed utilitarian site, as he is adept at turning common street fixtures into survivalist artifacts. Lined with benches made from "found" police barricades, the windowless storage locker seemed as secure as a bomb shelter for urban Spartans. Hanging overhead were handmade guns, swords and a shield cut from orange plastic traffic pylons held together with duct tape. In a video (displayed on a monitor above the doorway), Westphal puts these objects to the test casting himself as a street gladiator battling a similarly clad enemy before a crowd. The objects were playfully crude, but that battle came across as an all-too-serious postadolescent power struggle.

Posturing was more whimsical in another video in which Westphal, wakened by the sounds of snarled traffic below his window, dresses as an orchestra conductor and drags a podium to the street, where, in white gloves, white tie and tails, he transforms the car horns into a cacophonous symphony. With broad gestures, Westphal makes an elegantly Chaplinesque traffic cop; that is, until the video ends with his death in a drive-by shooting, provoked by an irate driver's overreaction. The violence provides ample evidence that dark humor is as suited to art about Manhattan as it is to life here.

Westphal's infatuation with violence and the streets may occasionally lead him into blind alleys, but it often finds him at his best as he recreates the city as his own private comic book. If like Superman he needs a phone booth to become a warrior, Westphal finds only unenclosed pay phones -- an artifact he adapts to his own ends. Dozens of his resin-coated photographs of pay phones lined one wall of the storage locked. Identically prefabricated, the phones had become unique objects, altered by their exposure to vandals and graffiti, or by locks and rotary dials designed to frustrate drug dealers. Westphal's pay phones are tenacious survivors, their images perfectly at home in his urban shelter.

Tucked away in three-ring binders was evidence of Westphal's surprising skill as a designer of offbeat but stylish garments for sexy urban femmes Nikitas. Outfitted in skirts, jackets or coats cut from Day-Glo orange construction fencing and brandishing silly weapons, tough models showed his collection in fierce poses borrowed from Heavy Metal magazine and James Bond movies. Westphal may be stuck in a Never-Never land of adolescent male power fantasies, but his fashion design pointed a way out -- sure, it was sexist as hell, but it looked fun to wear and (pay attention, comic book artists) comfortably suited to action.