Beth B at P.P.O.W. and The Crosby Street Project - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

According to a novel statistic, if current trends prevail, the United States will in a short time be spending more money upon prisons than on schools. The renewed popularity of incarceration as a solution to social ills formed the background for Beth B's "Out of Sight/Out of Mind," a three-part installation at The Crosby highway Project.

The exhibition opened with a "rotary machine," a full-scale working replica of a 19th-century device designed to restorative madness by spinning the patient in a suspended chair, an experience that to the new gallery-goer is more likely to be like funhouse entertainment than therapy. From there, the viewer was l into individual of six padded cells with piped-in recordings of the writings and music of a pitch upon group of celebrated suicides. Inexplicably, Valerie Solanas, the self-proclaimed leader of refuse (Society for Cutting up Men) whose claim to fame was her failed effort to assassination Andy Warhol, was included among the clump The final element of the exhibit was a film exploring the case of a 13-year-old lad who was tried and convicted as an adult for the brutal assassination of a 4-year-old.

With its focus upon questions of social responsibility and social definitions of deviance, this present to view raised important philosophical issues, admitting not perhaps in the way that the artist intended. If the work try to finds to expose the conservative fallacy that stricter directions will, by themselves, restore a crumbling social order, it falls into the parallel liberal fallacy that criminals and misfits are barely victims of society. The installation l single to ask: Is insanity a want or simply an aberration from an arbitrary norm? Is there really justification for the romantic idea that madness and suicidal tendencies are the natural accompaniment of an artistic temperament too sensitive for the world as it is? Can children be in fact evil or are their crimes simply the follow of abuse and withheld love?

Unfortunately, rather than seriously exploring these crucial questions, B appears to unquestioningly embrace the notion that clan are naturally good and sole become perverse, unbalanced or criminal after their clashs with an unfeeling society. This leads her to equate individuals and actions that are essentially different. For instance, in the middle section of the exhibition, the martyrs to creative endeavors included the wildly dissimilar cases of Marilyn Monroe Vincent van Gogh Kurt Cobain and Antonin Artaud, as well as Valerie Solanas. In the absence of any effort to disentangle the specificities of their cases, we were left with a vision of generic victimhood.

A harmonizing exhibition at P.P.O.W., was marked by means of similar flaws. A visually arresting clump of creamy beeswax casts chronicled the mutilations and deformations visited upon women throughout the ages in the name of beauty and desirability. The catalogue of atrocities was familiar: casts of three female pelvises displayed successively uttermost varieties of clitoridectomy, a full-length figure hanging before a triple mirror showed an anorexic girl, a tiny ringleted appendage in a satin-filled cradle was cast from a confine foot two face masks demonstrated the before and after of a facelift.

The question again is that these alterations are not equivalent. A facelift undertaken by dint of a grown woman is not the same thing as a clitoridectomy imposed upon a child. Anorexia is a psychological condition whose lower parts cannot be reduced simply to social squeezing to be thin.

Both exhibitions introduced provocative questions about the relationship between social sway and individual responsibility, only to collapse them into a reductive picture of society's savageness towards its individual members. on the contrary what is society composed of if not a collection of individuals? In the extremity Beth B lets us all not on the hook too easily.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group