Gregory Crewdson at Luhring Augustine - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Art in America, June, 1995 by Brooks Adams

Gregory Crewdson's elaborately staged color photographs vary in mood from the mildly weird to the pagan spectacular, embracing such themes as sex, romantic introspection, murder, nature worship and narcissism. His protagonists are mostly plants and animals, a strange mix of taxidermic specimens and living flowers, all arranged in improbable tableaux which tend to pit some menacing, or just plain bizarre, foreground incident against a more benign, suburban background of pert little houses and neatly mowed lawns. The implication of these scenes seems to be that something dark, blighted or unexpectedly gorgeous lurks right there in the underbrush of our ordinary lives.

Much has been made of Crewdson's affinities with David Lynch. "They're just like Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks," is a response I have often encountered. Yet Crewdson's large, untitled C-prints--for instance the image of many brilliant blue butterflies suspended on a foreground screen of mysteriously dangling blond braids (with no human head nearby), or the photo of myriad green beetles hanging in large clusters like some kind of mutant wisteria--also summon up analogies to Tiffany stained glass and Lalique insect vases. Like Tiffany, Crewdson is making intensely democratic luxury items that are imbued with both a quirky nature mysticism and a pronounced demoniac craft. (The photographer constructs almost every element of these dioramas himself, often building a set that stretches back 25 feet in depth and consists of several tables as well as a fog machine. "His formal compositions contain knowing references to Caspar David Friedrich, in the image of one tawny bird viewed from the rear atop an ambiguous red-gold pyramid of dirt, and a heavy dependence on Japonisme, in the recurring use of eurythmic verticals and dominant overhanging elements.

At their best, Crewdson's photographs achieve a cringe-inducing tactility. In one vertical format, a big thorny sac suspended from a tree drips some creamy, spermlike excrescence onto a lower branch; this image made me want to recoil in mock-horror and embarrassed recognition. Here in the photo-documentation of one novel gland is the ultimate confusion of animal and vegetable appendages; the image somehow manages to suggest a scrotal self-portrait and a maniacally vivid nature film. Here, too, the photographer partakes of a larger vein of warped new landscape imagery that conflates body and nature references to achieve a peculiarly '90s ode to Beauty and the Sublime; other practitioners of this new genre include Frank Moore and Matthew Barney. Crewdson's photographs can be sad, vulgar and magisterial, as in his almost Mexican ex-voto of a chipmunk worshipping an enormous pile of berries bedecked with blue Christmas lights, but they are never dull, and for this they can be forgiven almost everything.