RE-ENGENDERED

Afterimage, Nov, 2000 by Roberto Tejada

Fertilitate

by Caroline Koebel

Cornershop

Buffalo, New York

April 15-May 31, 2000

Pupspindanceslow

by Caroline Koebel

Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Art

Buffalo, New York

March 17-July 31, 2000

"Pupspindanceslow," a recent multi-media installation by Caroline Koebel, was on public display at the Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Art's (CEPA) Window on Main Street, the heart of downtown Buffalo's theater district, where it hardly went unnoticed by playgoers at night and corporate wage-earners by day, not to mention the entranced scrutiny of school children on urban field trips. The work, in part, made reference to the original use of the building as a commercial storefront, but with a timely view of commodity culture as seen through the looking glass of sexual difference. The art-historical sampling--Marchel Duchamp and the debris of 1970s pop culture--combined to create a mawkish retro-look or mood-ring sensory experience. Together the installation managed to fashion a kinetic space where female adolescent psychology and cultural kitsch were entwined when underscored, in the words of the artist herself, by those "marketplace-driven conceptions of sexual desire and romantic expectation." [1]

Glittering behind the curved glass of the facing window displays was a silver-a-go-go surface that lined the entire base and walls of the installation. The faux-metallic 3-D pattern pointed to the moment when pop-art began to inform the post-hippie modernity of interior design. At the far rear of the facing showcases, two video monitors randomly alternated between rhythmically manipulated frames of Duchamp's 1927 film Anemic Cinema--with its hypnotic spirals alluding to the swoon of vision as caught up in the lure of the medium itself--and blunt head-on shots of standard French poodles staring straight at the viewer as they undergo fastidious grooming. Below, a series of embedded turntables spinned incessantly; on top of each vinyl LP stood a white plastic poodle, each identical on its axis, whirling to the elastic garbled tunes of Air Supply's "I'm All Out of Love," Johnny Mathis's "You Light Up My Life" and Captain and Tenille's "I Never Wanted."

Diego Rivera once referred to the capitalist appeal of window displays as a "perversity of reflections." What we see behind the showcase is forever in a troubled relation to the mirror image we see reflected, no matter how faintly, in the mediating layer that separates us from the coveted object of desire; ultimately, the two reflections are collapsed altogether. Reflection, self-identity, desire and recurrence are explicit themes in this work. In her artist's statement Koebel situates this piece at a specific interval of female development: that "awkward and vulnerable time of pre- and early adolescence (roughly 11 to 13), when the awareness of the existence of codes of sexuality and romance is sharp while the self confidence (and experience) entailed in determining one's unique navigations through these codes is not."

Physically detained between the two showcases--they are alike but not identical--the viewer is inevitably caught in a time-lag mirror-play that mimics the warped acrostic suggested by the words "anemic cinema." The display teems with innuendo and visual quips: the video poodles and their mass-produced counterparts, together with the record players and Duchampian spirals, create an environment engendered by the unlikely, or not-so-unlikely encounter between a dog kennel, a toy store, a sock hop and a psychiatric ward, as imagined in a juvenile nightmare. The domestic, the hygienic, the identical, the sexual, the different and the aesthetic are all thereby conflated in references to grooming, romantic pathos, pulchritude and window-dressed delirium. The Duchampian spirals and the rotating turntable, in their mesmerizing glee or anxiety of loop and repetition, perform what the artist identifies as "the capitalist ordering of the social": a perpetuation that "hardly skips a beat in the face of any . . . attempt on the part of the individual." This is one of the unsettled and unsettling questions Koebel's installation poses: To what degree can there be self-resolution if representation itself is often feeble or ineffective in the flow of the mercantile phantasmagoria it critiques as its object of inquiry?

One of the spirals in Duchamp's original film featured the following pseudo-advertisement: "Among our idle hardware items we recommend a faucet that stops running when no one's listening." [2] In keeping with the anemic aestheticism underlined by Duchamp and as remixed by Koebel, toward the end of the CEPA run many of the turntables had gone awry--with a poodle casualty or two--a fact I would like to read, despite evidence to the contrary, as an optimistic assertion concerning the degree to which self-means may be incidental, or at least as impossible to represent as the title-slippage in-between "pup spin" and "pups pin" or "dance slow" and "dances low." Koebel, in keeping with the performative coyness of the piece itself, remarked, "Working on this installation made the artist first happy then sad."