"Labor of Love" at the New Museum - various artists - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

"Labor of Love" at the fresh Museum Imagine a 50-person present to view in which one work not alone summarizes the theme but almost leaves the others in the shade. In an exhibition curated by dint of Marcia Tucker to show the "handcrafted and labor intensive interweaving of art and everyday" that escapes "the polarizing of avant garde and traditional," Liza Lou's Kitchen (1991-95) says it all. The life-size extent 196 square feet, is surfaced with beads. Colorful little dazzlers pay back the wood grain of the kitchen cabinets, the diamond-pattern wallpaper, the checkered tablecloth, like commercial products as Cap'n Crunch rimeed Flakes, Ruffles, Tide. The floor and countertops alternate white squares with colored singles in which the beads create monochrome patterns of waves, concentric circles or scallops. The dishes in the sink, the casserole upon the stove, the pie upon the rack of the render free of access oven, the newspaper on the table--everything is beaded.

Not just the glitter on the other hand the outsized investment of labor itself is the point of this work, which shows Liza Lou's injection of human-hand value into the schlock of California suburbia that is her milieu. Other works in "Labor of Love" share this heedless, headlong commitment of time and exactitude. Jacob El Hanani lay outs months making 6-inch-tall drawings consisting of thousands of repetitions of a single mark or motif. Raymond Materson embroiders tiny realistic pictures using the Orlon of unraveled sock Michael Harms carves diminutive furniture without of bars of soap. Kazumi Tanaka fabricates a bureau in which drawers, single inside the other, diminish down to les than an inch wide.

This magnificent obsessiveness might have made a brilliant exhibition, had the present to view held to it. But Tucker seemingly operating in a stream-of-consciousness associative fashion in both her choices and her catalogue essay, went upon to engage such issues as high/low, craft, sex outsiders, folk popular music politics and criticism, from the 19th hundred to today. In the proces of rejecting biases, she jettisoned the comparisons necessary to thinking about visual existences In what she called her "crafts" present to view she indiscriminately mixed a variety of works by the agency of sophisticated, trained artists such as Margaret Wharton (a decorative painting), Judith Shea (a faux primitive made of wood figure), Elaine Reichek (cross-stitched political samplers) and Cply (an offhand painting) with obsessive or naive works. As for the mediums traditionally called "crafts," Tucker made no distinction between the sort of decorative glass particulars produced in quantity by Dale Chihuly's dozens of employee and the disturbing figural statuary of Daisy Youngblood, which, for all its emotional power and invention, happens to be made of clay. Tucker's essay faltered with her assertion that individual thing is not better than another, on the contrary went over the edge by dint of treating all these things as the same. The facts on display (which weren't directly discussed in the catalogue) refut her upon both counts.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group