Buzz Spector at fiction/nonfiction and Laurence Miller - New York, New York

Art in America, March, 1993 by Reagan Upshaw

Buzz Spector's show at fiction/ nonfiction consisted of just three works. Freeze Freud was just what its title promised: an industrial freezer that contains two large blocks of ice, encased in which are the many volumes of Freud's collected works. Each book seems to float separately in the ice, with the lettering on the spine clearly visible. The volumes are arranged in numerical order in three more or less straight rows, but a few volumes are deliberately skewed to break the regularity and add a touch of the artist's hand.

I can think of no other author whose works, shackled in ice, would lend themselves to such irony. initially praised as a liberator of mankind from the grip of hidden neuroses, Freud has in recent years been castigated as a sexist whose theories have been used to justify male dominance and lock women into the same old bondage. What does the ice represent here? Ice may kill or entrap, but it also preserves. Are the books being protected against the ravages of feminist critique? One might even imagine an approving note: the freezer, after all, is where one goes for nourishment.

Recollections (Shells) is a beautifully crafted cabinet with a number of separate compartments arranged in a rectangle around an empty central space. Each compartment contains a shell of the species Xenophora. These curious mollusks camouflage themselves from predators by collecting smaller shells, pebbles or other debris, which they attach to themselves by means of a sticky secretion. In the center of the cabinet Spector has placed a description of these mollusks' habits as well as a quotation from Walter Benjamin: "The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them." Recollections (Shells) functions simultaneously as a ready-made shell collection, a natural history lesson and a lovely work of art. With his comparison of the instinctive protective habits of mollusks and mankind's primal desire to collect objects, Spector wryly but not ungenerously tips his hat in homage to the acquisitive spirit.

In a separate show titled "66 Ruins" at Laurence Miller, Spector exhibited eight collages incorporating antique postcards. These works juxtapose views of European castles and ruins with images of American factories. it was left to the viewer to draw the conclusion: the American industrial sites, symbols of America's might 50 or 100 years ago, are today as decrepit as the remains of earlier European power structures. Other works, like Rust Belt, also play on the motif of vanished industrial glories, testifying to Spector's search for an appropriate image of America's post- industrial age.