'Signs of Age' at the Contemporary Arts Forum - Santa Barbara, California - Reviews of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Representations of the somewhat old in Western art have been historically limited to three basic categories: artists' self-portraits (e g Rembrandt); unnaturals (e.g., witches, demons and personifications of vices); and finally, the (mostly male) pantheon of patriarchs, sages, saints and apostles. Accordingly, artists have depicted aged men in the pair suavely glamorized and aggressively realist forms, in the heroic form of noble Nestors and Oedipuses or, closer to the fantastic category, as wizened and desiccated Jerome and anchorites. on the other hand even in such relatively unidealized forms there still remained governing conventions that preclud a too-clinical depiction of aging muscle and fat The advent of photography, in this area as in others, raised the stakes for realism, admitting into the representational arena those "signs of age" that artists had conventionally eschewed.

"Signs of Age: Representing the Older Body" an exhibition curated by means of Nancy Doll, Philip Koplin and Anette Kubitza, neared the work of 19 contemporary artists who have taken upon this culturally uncomfortable subject in various formats and mediums. With the exception of Bailey Doogan's life-size and somewhat Ivan Albrightesque figurative oil painting, Mea Corpa of 1992 and Elizabeth Berdann's Thirteen Terrors, oil-on-metal miniatures depicting close-up of sagging jowl scowl lines and so forth, virtually all the work is photographic.

The photographs in the present to view range from Mamie Cardozo's near-abstractions of material substance parts made with a pinhole camera to the more or les "straight" photographic studies of aged men and women by dint of Donigan Cumming, Jerome Liebling and Nicholas Nixon. Self-portraiture is showed by John Coplans, Renee Cox Anne Noggle, Athena Tacha, the late Hannah Wilke, and, in the form of photomontage, works by dint of Sky Bergman. Annegret Soltau and John O'Reilly. Cindy Sherman is showed by one of her untitled "museological" bricolages, a somber elderly woman with sagging prosthetic breasts. A subsection of the Corpus portion of Mary Kelly multi-part work Interim, 1984-89 not absented three diptychs of women's purse and body Created from a process using laminated photo positives, silkscreen and acrylic upon Piexiglas, this piece, too, can be annexed to the photo-based category.

In the case of more or les straightforwardly descriptive photography, the events produced and the questions raised are troubling singles On the one hand, presenting work that unflinchingly displays what contemporary mass agriculture avoids or represses is itself laudable; "making visible the invisible" is a political as well as an esthetic strategy. That said, single must also ask what the exposing -- in both senses of the word -- of somewhat old bodies actually accomplishes, or, perhaps, more precisely, what it exhibits Works such as Nixon's gelatin-silver prints inevitably raise the issue of exploitation, particularly insofar as certain of his hospice "subjects" appear scarcely capable of having granted informed assent to Nixon's project. While in rare cases the faces of the aged can be perceived or pay backed as "beautiful," few would for a like reason designate their naked bodies.

Obviously, the nature of the imagery in the exhibition is similar that the spectator's own age must be a decisive factor in the works' reception. For the suntanned adolescents of Santa Barbara, reaction was reportedly repeatedly one of incredulous horror. For the somewhat old -- who comprise a large proportion of the city's population -- the rejoinder was quite other, deeply attentive and private. on the other hand it is hard to conceive of these works altering or modifying attitudes about aging or about the material substance itself; realism, it would appear has significant shortcomings as a counter-discourse to the ingrained ageism that characterizes our body-obsess fin de siecle, for it cannot on the contrary confirm our own distress at time's depredations upon the bodies we inhabit.

What was finally greatest in quantity striking about this show is the way in which nonrealist and highly conceptualized works -- specifically those through Mary Kelly and Cindy Sherman -- transform the empirical data of aging into something other entirely. By displacing the issue of physical aging from the realm of appearance to the realm of discourse, the textual strategies of Kelly or the parodic individuals of Sherman succeed in making of the aging proces a social, cultural and psychic phenomenon on which it is possible to critically throw back rather than one to which we solely viscerally -- and visually -- rejoin Thus, not the least valuable contribution of this exhibit is the way it permits individual to consider the merits or shortcomings of different iconic (or anti-iconic) strategies -- the representational politics that inform, or fail to inform, the artists' work. In providing a rare opportunity to observe how contemporary artists approach single of the least tractable make subordinates in American culture, the curators of "Signs of Age" have broached an important representational point in dispute whose implications can truly -- and perhaps uniquely -- be said to affect us all.

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