Lisa Bowman at Thomas Solomon's Garage - photography exhibition; Los Angeles, California

Art in America, Sept, 1993 by Michael Duncan

Photomontage often seems predicated on naughtiness. One of its earliest 19th-century forms was the novelty postcard - placing the cutout head of a general or a politican on a toddler's body, for example. Employing the same mixture of iconoclasm and audacity, New York-based artist Lisa Bowman has discovered a fresh group of photographs ripe for appropriation: classic cheesecake and pornography shots. The 48 montages in this, her first solo show, obtain most of their impact from the juxtaposition of '50s textbook and children's-book illustrations and a choice selection of porn images from the same period. Undaunted by her lurid source material, Bowman welds the no-holds-barred esthetic of post-punk feminism to the inherent ludicrousness of outdated porn. She relishes, in particular, the peculiar comic appeal of gay male porn, which can blithely ignore questions of gender-based exploitation. In Towel-boy Bowman politely covers up a sleazy nude with a cutout towel, placed not around his waist but over his head. Tatoo-boy dumbly squats for the camera in the altogether, his skin completely ornamented with cutout snakes and protozoa.

Bowman's treatment of sex is uninhibited but edgy. Much in the spirit of the new "Riot Grrls" of rock music, she demands sexual frankness yet refuses to be in thrall to it. In Eyes, two headless, entwined female bodies are covered with cutout eyes. As these eyes watch us watching them, the twisted morality of porn is spun around until it becomes a Moebius strip of desire.

Less interesting are pieces that rely on the kitsch of '50s white-bread culture, imagery all too familiar from the government documentaries chronicled in the 1982 film The Atomic Cafe and countless campy film clips on MTV. Happily, Bowman included a few works in which she applied paint to photographic images transferred onto clear rubber acetate. Through hands-on interaction with these images, she invests herself more personally in the work and transcends the blunt obviousness of some of the simpler montages. Blue Movie is a painted-on photo of an orgy which emulates the cool, distanced raunch of similar work by Larry Clark and Richard Prince. With these layered, moody pieces Bowman moves formally beyond the campiness of her pornographic source material and into more impressionistic, atmospheric, sexier terrain.