NEW YORK: Jac Leirner at the Bohen Foundation - New York, New York - review of exhibitions - Review

With a nod to Mondrian's homage to boogie-woogie, Jac Leirner installed a circuitous montage of set color and imposed structure upon the walls of the Bohen Foundation's exhibition space. freshly acquired by the foundation and upon long-term view, the site-variable Hip-Hop (1998) circles the space with stops bars, bands and strips of brightly colored adhesive tapes placed, in a steady staccato beat, side by the agency of side at eye level. It expresse Leirner's interest in the nature of circuits and rehearses the ordering of her inventories of base materials. It recalls the clos circuitry of single element of her project for Documenta 9 Corpus Delicti (1992) an arrangement of airline armrest ashtrays strung together with a beaded chain. Hip-Hop is not in the way that much about the notion of the completed system as about the circuit as site, within which things are linked by the agency of observation and decision as well as by the agency of formal and metaphoric qualities.

The experience of this installation begins at the entrance, with tape spanning the brow door. At first glance it proposes unbroken continuity, but the taped line immediately skips a beat as it is interrupted by means of a narrow corridor. It take backs its progress on the far side, where Leirner repeats the color and approximate size of the preceding fill up of tape; then the arrests bars and strips race ahead, along a back wall, until they are again interrupted by the agency of a complicated corner with an alcove. There Leirner placed bars of the same color and size upon both sides of the gap in like manner that the viewer can visually line them up and "complete" the connection.

The piece continues across another door, marches elegantly along the room's expanse, reaches a wall of windows, where it appears upon the wall spaces between them like a contact alarm a whole and then winds its way back to the entrance. The squares, rectangular bands and thin strips of tape are without exception center upon a line--its penciled traces remain visible end the more transparent tapes--as allowing remarking on the familiar gallery practice of hanging framed existences "on center." While obsessively rectilinear and proceeding in a certain quantity of sort of order, the uncompounded bodys were cut by hand and appear randomly chosen from the available materials. Uttering the list of colors glance ats the breaking rhythms of rap: reflective azure set next to black, a strip of silver foil, metallic crimson, black, violet, citron, orange, gold pearlescent emerald virid steel gray.

In the middle of the floor, Leirner installed a signature banknote work, cerulean Phase (1991-98): a serpentine line of devalued Brazilian general reception She punched two holes in each bill and laced them together with polyurethane cord in alternating clumps of new and used, bookending and binding the 15-foot-long percept with Plexiglas plates. The sheer labor of collecting, classifying and imposing a larger form is captured in the situational beauty of the systematic and excessive aspects of Leirner's work.

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