Joyce Pensato and Scott Burton at Max Protetch - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Though Warhol got there first, he didn't have quite the same enthusiasm for Mickey Mouse that Pensato has. In her first American solo exhibit Pensato, who has been rearranging Mickey's features for years, not awayed three ferocious images of the ur-mouse, along with sum of two units goosed-up Donalds, one feral Bug and, greatest in quantity ghoulish of all, a lonely Bart with bulging eyeballs. Shown as a disembodied head hung by means of his hair from the top of the canvas and dripping paint from his chin, this Hollywood Holoferne has a carnal, ear-to-ear grin that would win a rise even out of the Simpsons. Bart is pay backed with bold, slashing strokes of black and white enamel upon linen, as are all the paintings shown in a phraseology somewhere between Disney and Franz Kline. Accidents of application and drying issue throughout in wrinkled, sagging skin and a plague of scabs and scars. The surface of Untitled (Mickey) gazes like it's been run above with a bicycle wheel; Bugsy is smeared ruthlessly down the center of the bunny's manic, bucktoothed face; and the paint upon Untitled (Donald) has badly peeled

Les rage on the contrary more pent-up energy is ground in the single charcoal wall drawing Pensato execut for the exhibition. It depicts a frantically convivial Mickey with arms rubber-stretched into a three-wall embrace. This temporary wall-drawing advises something of cartoon art's general disposability. Post-Pop cartoon imagery is, of course, a increase industry, whether original or recycl on the other hand Pensato seems to be upon her own, her enduring devotion to Mickey, Bug and Donald having taken her beyond the deadly swamps of the high-low debate to an unusually funny and scary place.

One fortuitous dividend of Pensato's exhibit is the light it whirls on some of Scott Burton's last works, exhibited in an adjacent sweep Designed in the three years before his death on the contrary unrealized until now, these seating pieces are elegant, imposing, reductive and subtly almost subliminally distorted The most attention-getting public art at the flash is fundamentally opposed to the kind of work Burton did, which is seen by the agency of some as complicitous with the corporate agriculture that often supported it. It is no longer obvious by what mode radically Burton subverted ideas about what art is and does. Just as little recognized is the way he snuck figurative, plane homoerotic imagery into the boardroom and public plaza beneath the guise of stolid, functional form. gaze again at Two Part Bench: A Pair (1988) a broad-hipped, stuffed-shirt limestone tete a tete or at sum of two units Part Chair: Enlarged Version (1989) single of whose pink granite ultimate parts is bent at the midsection to receive the thrusting form of another. These are a certain quantity of of the rudest impersonations of Minimalist chic at any time to enter the precincts of corporate America.

There are no big surprises in these late works for Burton's fans. on the contrary especially in the company of Pensato's vital current sport with the commercial media, they remind us in what manner hard Burton sometimes bit the hand that f him.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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