The return of the red-brick alternative

Art in America, Jan, 1998 by Eleanor Heartney

For P.S. 1, Blocher has decided to explore the American obsession with sports. She wants to ask members of an American sports team questions about art and beauty. Unfortunately, she was not prepared for the protective cocoon that surrounds athletes in the U.S. Having sent formal letters and inquiries to various teams prior to her departure from France, she has just discovered that these have been completely ignored. In response to her persistent phone calls, she has rather miraculously received a nibble of interest from the manager of the Buffalo Bills football team, but has been informed that time is too short as they are currently in training.

When I see her several weeks later, she is still struggling to break through the iron public-relations curtain. "I'm learning a lot about American culture and its divisions," she says with a touch of resignation. Among the things she has learned is that being an artist holds no special privileges in the United States. She has been called naive, told "you are no Andy Warhol." One publicist has admitted the real reason for the resistance: "What you are doing is quite dangerous -- you are interfering with their images, and their images are one of their most valuable assets."

At the press opening, she tells me she has been forced to postpone her athlete project. However, she is optimistic that she will be able to interview the Buffalo Bills in the near future and has a commitment from P.S. 1 to show the video when it is completed.

Meanwhile, she will show a work she completed in Honolulu last year in which she asked volunteers intimate questions about sex. We sit in her comfortable womblike room on a carpet of fabric scraps and watch the video. Subjects look straight at the camera and make unsettling confessions -- a young woman, asked what she would change about herself, goes into a startlingly graphic description of her dense body hair. A young man, asked to describe the clitoris, begins confidently with a science-class description and then abruptly falters, confessing sheepishly, "Well, I don't have one."

Blocher notes a cultural difference: French subjects, faced with a video camera, will stand stiffly but answer the question, while Americans are totally at ease around the camera, but freeze when questioned about sex.

In one of my tours through the building, I come upon Matt Mullican and his assistants surveying the old boiler room where he will sink a set of metal grates into the dirt floor. The patterns on the grates will evoke an aspect of the complex metaphysical system Mullican has been elaborating for many years via drawings, banners, sculptures and electronic media. Heiss has confided to me that she wants Mullican to go maximal with this space -- to include drawings and other works along with the sunken grates. Mullican is obviously thinking the other way. He will play his simple forms off the sculptural presence of the massive old boiler.

In excavating the dirt floor, he has unearthed a set of curving drain pipes. Struck by their metaphorical and physical similarity to his own graphic symbols, he wants to make them the conceptual center of the piece. "The pipes will be the capital, the rest will be suburbs," he remarks.