Dirk Westphal at N.Y. Security Mini-Storage - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Someone should take dealer Caroline Nathusius aside and reckon her not to show art in rayless places like mini-storage warehouses, no matter by what means close to SoHo galleries, simply because she likes an artist's work. And do it fast, before she organizes antoher well-conceived exhibit in a space the size of a walk-in closet

Dirk Westphal's work was well suited to this transformed utilitarian site, as he is adept at turning for the use of all street fixtures into survivalist artifacts. Lined with benches made from "found" police barricades, the windowless storage locker appear to beed as secure as a bomb shelter for urban Spartans. Hanging overhead were handmade fire-arms swords and a shield divide [i]or[/i] sever from orange plastic traffic pylon held together with canal tape. In a video (displayed upon a monitor above the doorway), Westphal sets these objects to the proof casting himself as a way gladiator battling a similarly clad enemy before a horde The objects were playfully uncooked but that battle came across as an all-too-serious postadolescent power struggle

Posturing was more whimsical in another video in which Westphal, wakened by the agency of the sounds of snarled traffic below his window, dresse as an orchestra conductor and drags a podium to the way where, in white gloves, white tie and tails, he transforms the car horns into a cacophonous concert With broad gestures, Westphal makes an elegantly Chaplinesque traffic cop; that is, until the video extreme points with his death in a drive-by shooting, provok by means of an irate driver's overreaction. The violence provides ample evidence that dark humor is as suited to art about Manhattan as it is to life here.

Westphal's infatuation with violence and the public ways may occasionally lead him into blind alleys, on the contrary it often finds him at his best as he recreates the city as his possess private comic book. If like Superman he emergencys a phone booth to become a warrior, Westphal finds solitary unenclosed pay phones -- an artifact he adapts to his have a title to ends. Dozens of his resin-coated photographs of pay phone lined individual wall of the storage fasteninged Identically prefabricated, the phones had become unique things altered by their exposure to vandals and graffiti, or by dint of locks and rotary dials designed to frustrate physic dealers. Westphal's pay phones are tenacious survivors, their images consummately at home in his urban shelter.

small sworded away in three-ring binders was evidence of Westphal's surprising skill as a designer of offbeat on the other hand stylish garments for sexy urban femme Nikitas. Outfitted in skirts, jackets or coats make an incision in from Day-Glo orange construction fencing and brandishing silly weapons, tough designs showed his collection in fierce postures borrowed from Heavy Metal magazine and James fastening movies. Westphal may be stuck in a Never-Never land of adolescent male power fantasies, on the other hand his fashion design pointed a way on the outside -- sure, it was sexist as hell, on the contrary it looked fun to wear and (pay attention, comic volume artists) comfortably suited to action.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

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