"The Argument Drawings" at Wynn Kramarsky - collaborative works by Janet Cohen, Keith Frank and Jon Ippolito - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Each of the collaborative works by means of Janet Cohen, Keith Frank and Jon Ippolito in "The Argument Drawings" consists of a large sheet of graph paper upon which sentences are neatly alphabetic charactered below diagrams made up of dynamically linked dots. Multiple sentence-and-diagram pairings are arranged in a grid, and the number of dots and lines increases in each successive unit.

Each determination is a thrust or parry in a contentious on the contrary civilized three-person discussion, color-coded cerulean for Cohen, red for Frank, verdant for Ippolito. The topics are mainly serious, such as: the two-party political a whole the usefulness of stereotypes, the danger of Bill Gates, the impossibility of distinguishing art you think is historically important from art you like. Here's a typical opening succession Red: "Organized religion is antithetical to a freethinking society." Green: "Disorganized religion might not be." Blue: "Some organized religions can exist in a freethinking society." Red: "Freethinking restrains adherence to an established doctrine." The diagrams' color-coded dots show the relative positions of the statements, more [i]or[/i] less close and some widely diverging. In this instance, the first three dots are not true far apart, but then R by dint of refusing to qualify his assertion, distances himself. Discussions are recorded by the agency of hand; the three participants decide on the dots' positions; Ippolito does the final lettering. Each work is labeled "Agree to Disagree," dated, and signed by the agency of the players.

The grids consist of as many as 25 text-and-diagram units, on the contrary one work has only a single statement. sky-colored asserts: "Arguments need not extreme point in consensus." Apparently everyone agreed, and that extreme pointed the discussion. That's funny, and for a like reason are a few of the topics, similar as "Raisins are gross." The whole throw out impresses with its cleverness as abundant as its order, and individual gets a sense of the participants' pleasure in this deliberate and self-conscious private performance.

The visual rendering of the proces a sociological mapping, could be considered to exhibit a postmodern concern with analysis more than sensation. Translating action into notation isn't new--Schoenberg is said to have made a musical composition from a tennis match and '60 Conceptualists of the like kind as Mel Bochner explored similar territory. however there's something of-the-moment about this fascination, from Morgan O'Hara's obliterates that represent hand movements of musicians, public speakers, etc (seen freshly at Gracie Mansion and The Drawing Room) to various text-based drawings. Maybe contemporary irony encourages of the like kind cerebral delineations. Cohen, Frank and Ippolito, through choosing a word-based action that they perform themselves, can provide not just analysis on the other hand documentation, thus allowing viewers a faculty of perception of sharing the experience.

In Kramarsky's entrance and back galleries, Cohen showed a related throw out that has engaged her since 1991 "Estimating Pitch Location" consisted of 162 drawings of thick congeries of numbers written in r or black, which show her guess of where pitches cros the strike baldric in baseball games she has watched upon television.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

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