Conrad Atkinson at Ronald Feldman - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

From a man whose past work has tackled issues of labor, pollution and craving for food British artist Conrad Atkinson's latest display evidenced anew the union of Conceptual art and politics he's favored since the '70 The exhibition, "Dorothy Gale fittings Emily Bronte in Technicolor," was a farrago of painting, photography and installation pieces, filled with respects both amusing and oblique, to the movies, the pres nuclear power plants and popular immigration policies.

An example of the artist's effort to reveal "culture as the production of meaning," the display aimed to deconstruct the strange bedfellows of entertainment, industry and politics. To this extremity Atkinson defaced the front pages of international newspapers, blotting on the outside headlines and articles with metallic paint, and goos Hollywood's mix of serious business and frivolous entertainment via parodies of the industry trade paper Variety. Atkinson appear to bes purposely to employ shoddy, slapdash techniques. In a manner reminiscent of Situationist strategies, he foregrounds dripping paint, in a raw state lettering and images, blatant kitsch and subversive japes, all in the reliance of disrupting the seamless lies of the tillage industry.

The single consistent trope in Atkinson's diverse display was Otherness, variously evoked by means of the artist's own ethnographic photographs of women's hands painted in the Indian ceremonial phraseology Mehndi, references to the questionable origins of Emily Bronte's hero Heathcliff, and a cheap pink dres decorating the gallery wall, which, turn rounded inside out, displays a tag proclaiming "Made Somewhere other for Someone Else." Ceramic renditions of land mines were arranged upon shelves and turned into kitsch curios with applique kittens, praying hands and corny endearments. These works reassert Atkinson's obsession with the transformation of politics into tillage and suggest the ease with which governmental horrors are forgiven through the citizenry.

For the visitor to this promiscuously far-ranging present to view the task of decoding Atkinson's cryptic allusions to a variety of topics was akin to translating the cloistered jargon of academia into comprehensible articulate utterance One left somewhat mystified as to Atkinson's exact intent and puzzl at the trim audacity of lumping such varied, complicated social issues into single show. The result was a cacophony of random accusation which, ironically, mimicked the dizzying sensory overload of the 20th-century capitalism that Atkinson decries.

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