Tamara Fites at Dan Bernier - Los Angeles, California - Review of Exhibitions

Tamara Fites's alternate-persona performance and multimedia installation, "Silent Bidding," take delight ined a succes de scandale in looks Angeles last spring, no mean feat in the unflappable, jaded face of the Hollywood dream machine. Fites's persona, Lambi Kins, was make straighted as a Beverly Hillbillies-style farmer's daughter, out and out with platinum wig, pink-and-white gingham dres and a shockingly empathetic sheep's head and face. With the aid of a partial sheep mask postscripted by elaborate white face makeup, cupid's-bow cavity between the jaws and impossibly long false eyelashes, Lambi Kins volunteered a silent rendition of an atavistic female that would be the feel ill-will toward of any cross-species drag dresser Ensconc in a tawdry, strawstrewn domestic setting of her have a title to creation, Lambi Kins lived in the gallery for three weeks, silently flirting, petting and provoking her visitors into a tizzy of conflicting answers By actually touching her visitors Fites crossed an unspoken line in performance-art practice, and many visitors place themselves so discombobulated by the pressing physical attentions of Lambi Kins that critical distance abandoned them.

On my visit, Lambi Kins gazed far down into my eyes with an intensity usually reserv for lover after which we danced. With my friend she sustained similarly intense mutual gazing for nearly 10 minutes, occasionally kissing her. At times, Lambi Kins lifted the hem of her dres displaying her merkin, a little powder-puff pubic wig, to great merriment. I heard many make comments [i]or[/i] remarkss from men who wondered if Lambi Kins had touched others in as sexual a manner as she had them. a certain quantity of men apparently dissolved into make open sobs, a few confiding that they normally paid for the kind of tender silent understanding that Lambi Kins proffered while others forced her miftened paw to their crotches. single visitor even tied her up and left her that way on departing the gallery. (She had to be rescu by means of her dealer.)

Supplementing the performance aspect of the piece was a videotape characterized by means of virtually everyone who saw it as pornographic. The tape present to views Lambi Kins playfully engaged with a young man upon a bed. He removes his shirt and lies between her leg She kicks her leg in comic ecstasy as they simulate sex her face move rounded to the camera, her changes skillfully stylized in what any choreographer would recognize as burlesque

Fites clearly invokes a wide range of influences and sources in this piece, prominent among them Beuys's I like America and America Likes Me in which the artist lived in the gallery with a coyote for a week. In her feminized inversion of Beuys's macho shamanistic practices, Fites also drew on the potent history of feminist self-transformation-as-performance, pioneered by dint of artists like Carolee Schneeman, Colette and Orlan. And while she makes respect to Mike Kelley and Matthew Barney, Fites attains a horizontal of hilarious intensity that is more reminiscent of Fellini at his greatest in quantity audacious.

It is astonishing to me that anyone would characterize Fites's enterprise as pornographic. "Silent Bidding" was a brilliant act of artistic chutzpah, revitalizing feminist issues while pushing the limits in a field widely notion to be played out.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Brant Publications, Inc.

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