Daniel Oates at 303 Gallery - New York, New York

Art in America, March, 1993 by Brooks Adams

The first solo show, from a 29-year-old Swiss-born artist who now lives in New York, suggested an expanding and contracting worker's day. Relief sculptures of colossal clothing items, such as Uniforms (Hank & Frank), depicting overalls and collarless shirts hanging on wall pegs, shared the sparsely populated gallery space with lilliputian figurines like Happy Workers (Hank & Frank) I which wear the same clothes but are only eight inches tall. In one corner lurked a sculpture of a humongous pair of boots rendered in neoprene and styrofoam; shown unlaced, these looked comfy enough for a giant homeboy to step into. Cowering in another corner on the floor were two grisaille sculptures of an oversize lunchbox and thermos roughly two feet tall. Center stage was occupied by Happy Workers (Bella & Stella) II, diminutive sculptures of cleaning women holding a mop and pail full of "solid" grey water. Roughly the same size as the thermos, these polychrome figures seemed to demarcate one of those on-the-job moments of relative relaxation. Yet the longer you thought about them, the more those chipmunklike faces began to read as images of simpering slavery, which may allude to the plight of illegal aliens in America and to the group of what are known in Switzerland and Germany as Gastarbeiteror "guest workers."

Oates's sculptures are all handmade and extremely laborintensive. Executed by an elaborate process involving clay models, wax casts, second molds, sanding and hand-painting, each piece can take up to six months to complete. This is not readily apparent to the eye, but in hindsight it certainly enhances the subject matter of work, an iconography with a rich 19th-century pedigree including Courbet and Ford Madox Brown. The trope of happy workers also plays off the whole notion of a cottage industry, here rendered obnoxiously appealing in Oates's Disneyesque vision of clean clothes, clean floors and, by extension, clean values. One figurine, Happy Worker (Father Patrick), depicts a benevolent-looking priest. I was tempted to see a typically Swiss fastidiousness in the sculptor's devotion to supervising every excruciating detail of the process and to the somewhat grating finesse of the finished products.

Oates's process lends a certain willful perversity to objects which initially look mass-produced. in this respect, he partakes of a new zeitgeist which emphasizes hand-crafted renditions of diminutive clothing, as in the tiny apparel sculptures of Charles LeDray. Oates's objets differ from the manufactured work of Jeff Koons in that the younger artist's imagery is not appropriated from popular sources; each of these proletarian icons was, somewhat unbelievably, invented by Oates. The prosentation of the smaller figurines on metal shelving may seem derivative of Haim Steinbach and the convention of exhibiting workers' suits as social sculpture has an obvious precedent in Joseph Beuys. Yet this show provided a refreshing space for ruminating on the fate of the original work, and worker, in an age of appropriation.