Richard Artschwager at Mary Boone - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Art in America, Feb, 1995 by Nancy Princenthal

For the first three weeks of Artschwager's nearly two-month show, the gallery's front room was occupied by oddly shaped, well-carpentered wooden boxes: customized containers for works that may not actually exist. A skeptic might call this just another spin on artists' packaging, or an empty hand skillfully played by an artist not worried that anyone will call his bluff.

But Artschwager tips his hand. The crates' protrusions hint at the inner presence of the odd lectern or prie-dieu or coffee table. Throughout Artschwager's career he has shown a nearmonastic devotion to testing the real against the fake. There have been faux photographs, faux wood-grain Formica and, as here, faux function--seemingly utilitarian objects made in the absence of (prior) need. In Marxism, this is condemned as the production of desire; Artschwager calls it "beauty through abridgement," the practice of omitting "something useful so the rest is heightened." In other words, the ellipses of his work belong less to the prosaic texts of culture theory than the poetics of Surrealism.

After a month the crates, diminished in number, drifted to the gallery's smaller back room, and the front room was given over to the display of painting: five photo-based grisailles in acrylic on Celotex, framed and divided into panels by painted wood borders and accented with Formica insets. They represent Artschwager's latest variation on materials he's used for 30 years. The subjects are familiar, too, though the examples are new. A building complex under demolition, caught mid-crumple, is an oozy reprise of the "destruction" paintings he made in the early 70s. There are also posh interiors--a double-height, balconied living area, a thick-carpeted hotel hallway--which have gone slightly haywire, with ceilings dissolving into sunlight and occasional furnishings caught in mirrored replication. For all their digressive wit, these are very moody paintings. The smallest, a vertical diptych of a house reflected in a lake, is as limpid an image of melancholy as the detonated housing project is of despair, the latter's facade looking more dissolved in tears than blasted by industrial explosives.

Artschwager's double-barreled installation could be seen as a theatrical riff on voguish analyses of exhibition practices and, in the tradition of the "blps," an advanced exercise in discernment. But having passed his 70th birthday, he may be less gripped by late-breaking news of simulated image-worlds and the institutions that mediate them than by the longer story lines of classical tragedy and farce. This drama in two acts had elements of both.