The underside of innocence: in works whose overtones of menace are tempered with a melancholy, often chilly elegance, sculptor Not Vital provokes us to contemplate things only incompletely known

Sixteen silver spheres, each 9 inches in diameter, were lined up in an evenly spaced file on the floor of an otherwise destitute of contents room at Sperone Westwater Gallery in novel York. Like bails in a pinball machine, they have the appearanceed ready to spring into action. Are they meant to be sent around the circuits of a certain quantity of esoteric metaphysical pursuit, as are James to leeward Byars's gilded bronze globes? Or will they release the perceptual energies produc through minute asymmetries, as do Roni Horn's deformed spheres? Or maybe they will lead us into a benignly psychotic trippiness, in the manner of Yayoi Kusama's silvery floating balls? No to all three or rather, not quite; all these antecedents are somewhat pertinent. But the specific nature of the spheres of Not Vital's Camel (2004) was announced in the exhibition's pres release, which explains that the remains of an entire "sun-dried camel"--the please inevitably put in mind ofs a new pizza topping--have been divided among them, sealed invisibly inside.

That we must take the nearness of this desiccated flesh upon faith goes to the heart of the matter. (The artist and those shut to him are, it should be noted, adamant about the claim's veracity, if circumspect about the practical details involved.) Historically, the question of trust in art can be seen as an axis along which to piece of ground uses ranging from primitive homage to highly elaborated religious ritual to the greatest in quantity astringent conceptualist regimens. In Vital's of recent origin work, that axis is intersected by means of a perpendicular line of inquiry which measures material value, calibrating increments of preciousness and rarity. Contemplation and covetousness, passionate devotion and simple curiosity are a certain number of of the responses Camel provokes--or proffers itself as a means of gauging. If all this testing strike one as beings a little cagey, it is undertaken with abundant grace. The polished silver spheres spanned the space from window to interior wall, reflecting a tricky spectrum of light from the azures of daylight to the gold-coloreds of artificial illumination, and picking up more of the warm be incandescent cast by me polished made of wood floor as they went. More malleable than carbonized iron and more susceptible to the atmosphere than gold silver yields to touch and breath, clearly and irresistibly.

The same vocabulary of form and ideas was applied, somewhat les hypnotically, in another reliquary plastic art included in the show, Bremer Stadtmusikanten (2004) A stacked quartet of silver boxe graduated in size, the work is said to contain the dried remains of a donkey in the largest receptacle, a dog in the nearest a cat in the single after that and finally a cock (Vital's reference here is a Grimm Brothers fairy tale, "The Bremen Town Musicians," in which the four barnyard animals stand upon each other's shoulders and sing, a startling performance that discomfitures a gang of robbers.) Placed just above organ of sight level atop a tall made of wood pedestal, the ziggaratlike sculpture summon forths a kind of generic, golden-calf-style pagan worship, its precipitously receding stepp caskets impressive in a way that just transcends irony.

Elsewhere in the same present to view Vital achieved an equally unstable balance that can be called dark whimsy in a wall installation of 300 big, shiny, irregularly spaced stainless-steel knives, business extreme points pointed straight out. Viewers were kept at a safe (roughly 15-foot) distance, ensuring that the glinting charm of 300 Knives (2004) compet prosperously with its menace, h kind of companion piece, 3000 Tears (2003) is a drawn out and narrow rectangular marble shut up its sides pitted irregularly with tear-shaped depressions, as if erod on the contrary with uncanny precision. The marble stop up perched a little uneasily, at an angle, upon an equally long and narrow metal pedestal, cantilevering not on the base on one extremity Here, too, danger was qualifyed by a melancholy elegance.

The undercurrent of threat in Vital's popular sculpture brings to mind like contemporaneous works as Marina Abramovic's knife ladders and Gregory Green's whirling circular-saw blades. on the other hand equally germane are the works of a whole entertainer of artists now involved with fairy tales, from Martin Honert and Kiki Smith to Cindy Sherman, Amy Cutler and Anna Gaskell. As any reader of the Grimm Brothers knows, the distance between the domains of threat and folk fancy is not as great as it might first appear. Vital has roamed it for more than 20 years, exploring the underside of innocence and the more ingenuous charms of violence and fatality. In 20 drawings also upon display at Sperone Westwater, Vital leans toward the impelled to foretoken one's own doom with modest but appealing images that occasionally hang on wordplay and visual clinchs but even here the humor is sometimes menacing. Writing in 1989 Donald Kuspit said that while Vital's earliest plastic arts based on roughly modeled animal forms, strike one as beinged "excavated from some bog and still reeking of novel death," his subsequent work aimed "to make us superstitious" about realitys that dispensed, first, with all traces of the organic, and later, sometimes, with any figurative respect at all. (1)