Maureen Connor at the Alternative Museum and P.P.O.W - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Art in America, April, 1995 by Nancy Princenthal

These two exhibitions helped explain why Maureen Connor's work has become so important to current explorations of sexuality's social construction. At the Alternative Museum, a survey of her sculpture included work dating back to the late '70s, and a new video installation was shown at P.P.O.W. The two shows more than justify the strength of Connor's following.

Excursions into territory of deepest intimacy, having mostly to do with eating and sex, never tax the self-possession of Connor's work; in fact, the sculpture's icy propriety is precisely what makes it most edgy. The early folded--linen sculptures--vaguely vaginal and phallic forms based on fancy napkin-folding techniques--are a case in point. Frostily elegant even when slightly yellowed with age, these wall-hung and freestanding arrangements of ruff led and gathered, ribbed, pleated and fluted organdy introduce Connor's ongoing fascination with disorders of composure.

In later work, similar neurotic symptoms are expressed more floridly, in fully figurative, and often very funny, mixed-medium sculptures. Among her wittiest works are the sculptures of 1990 in which black-net lingerie is stretched over a variety of metal armatures. Thinner Than You reduces the female waist to the thickness of a metal dress stand, around which a net body stocking is chokingly twisted. The predatory, vaguely arachnoid silhouette of No Way Out results from a body stocking stretched over a set of long-limbed metal pincers; in Wishing Well, the body stocking drops in a single swoop to a foot loaded with pennies. Some of these sculptures also play with the representation of obesity and pregnancy, with big, round convex mirrors stuffed inside the black netting.

The Alternative Museum show pointed to the work that has followed in two pieces that include little video monitors. Taste Two (1992) is an altered white bathroom scale displayed on a white shag bath mat, in which the numbers indicating body weight are displaced by a tiny video loop showing a woman compulsively eating mounds of food; sometimes the food looks like it's going out rather than in. Help Yourself (1 994) conceals a videotape inside a black metal Kleenex dispenser; here the image is of a couple dancing cheek to cheek, a la Hollywood.

This is where Dancing Lessons (1995), a flawlessly produced video installation shown at P.P.O.W., takes off. Two 41/2-minute loops are played on monitors angled toward each other in a blond wood console with a speaker grille as big as a Buick; the little wooden shelf between the monitors resembles a miniature dance floor. The video follows a group of well-scrubbed preteens--students of the exclusive Fieldston School in Riverdale, N.Y.--through a class in ballroom dancing. Their efforts are intercut, in seamless fades, with short takes from various filmed examples of the real thing: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers; dance scenes from Gone with the Wind, The King and I, The Conformist; something Disney; something pornographic.

As the professionals glide effortlessly from screen to screen, they trade places with the gaggle of privileged preadolescents, who shuffle with anxious determination through the fox-trot. The students are perfectly dressed though poorly matched--the boys too short or chubby and the girls too many, by one. The single wallflower for the first dance is the only visible participant of color. Mary Janes and anklets mix with pumps and nylons, bare shoulders and pearls with Peter Pan collars. But the teacher's instructions are simplicity itself: slow, slow, quick quick; boys lead, girls--"ladies"--do "just the opposite." It helps to think of Dancing Lessons as the flip side to Nan Goldin's Ballad of Sexual Dependency or Larry Clark's Teenage Lust: Connor's view of the mating game is equally dark, affectionate, comic and ruthless.