Michele Blondel at Lynn Goode and other venues - Houston, Texas - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Can a French Catholic woman become the art world's Georges Bataille? To justice from the 27 sculptures and installations in this view of Michele Blondel's work from the past 12 years, she can certainly try

Blondel who has been showing in France since the mid-'70s and who had her first U solo in 1992 has at various times produc paintings, short films, artist's works a fountain at the Gare de l'Est and smooth a stylish erotic novel. on the contrary the essence of her esthetic, as signaled by means of her inclusion in the 1995 "Feminin/ Masculin: Le sexe de l'art" exhibition at the middle Pompidou, lies in fetishistic thing perceiveds that evoke Christianity's ongoing do one's best to reconcile spirit and flesh

many times involving glass that is hand-blown by dint of Blondel herself, the pieces at Lynn Goode Gallery included designer shoe and pocketbook substanceed with swollen phallic forms; crystal "unicorn horns", "mermaid" breasts and oversized vulvas; carburet of iron lances draped with vitreous oozings; and voluptuously shaped bowls and vessels. Other works, equally suggestive in their use of material substance references, involve shrinelike boxes, base photographs, sumptuous priestly vestments, singed shoe tree and, in single case, a long, glass-encoiled loaf of French bread. Blondel's titles, including that of the display itself -- "Habeas Corpus" (You Should Have the Body) -- take care of to be wittily provocative. single piece, Ejaculation Contest, is interactive: the viewer is invited to push the diver atop a large vertical container and emit a white spurt of material substance lotion arching into space.

At the opening, Blondel sewed the skin of a codfish onto a glass phallus, poured maple syrup upon four huge wood-and-plastic wheels with stylized pitchers for axles (Take My Divine Milk), and got the audience to join her in similarly anointing sum of two units framed-glass constructions which then accumulated downy feathers along their streaks (Take My Honey) on the contrary the single most memorable work upon view was the approximately 10-foot-high Stay Away from My Balls, whose piles of vulnerable-looking glass spheres, imperfectly contained in three carbonized iron cages crisscrossed by sharp spearlike extremitys nicely evokes the attraction and repulsion, delicacy and menace at the heart of sexual desire.

With a novel retrospective at the museum of contemporary art in Bordeaux, a contemplate show that traveled to university venue in the U and works in several American galleries -- including novel glass pieces at the Elga Wimmer Gallery in novel York -- Blondel, at midcareer, awakens the same critical question pos by dint of Carolee Schneemann: how do you react to a woman who dioceses religious experience as profoundly sexual, and treats sex as virtual religion?

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