Rachel Lachowicz at Fawbush - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Rachel Lachowicz has won considerable attention with her dull feminist parodies of Minimalist and Post-Minimalist art. She has pay backed Richard Serra's House of Cards and Carl Andre's Magnesium and Zinc in lipstick, for example. And she has carried on the outside a sardonic recapitulation of Yve Klein's Anthropometries in a performance called R Not cerulean in which she directed undressed male models smeared with r lipstick. In her third solo exhibit in New York, this Cal Arts-trained, observes Angeles-based artist showed five works, greatest in quantity involving familiar objects that are slightly altered and recast in the "feminine" materials of lipstick, face pulverized substance and eye shadow.

In Anagram, six austerely geometrical r chairs are aligned horizontally against the gallery wall in a self-conscious reprise of Donald Judd's "specific objects" by dint of using lipstick with wood and rubber to put together the chairs, and by giving an atypical arclike bend to the back of individual chair, Lachowicz asserts her feminine/feminist nearness Replicant makes the same point more aggressively on the other hand to weaker effect. In this work, sum of two units vertical abstract panels of the same size hang side by the agency of side. Thin aluminum bands divide their nearly identical surfaces into diamond-shaped module that are colored with three different shades of r and pink, created from a mixture of acrylic and lipstick. These pictures deliver over to Minimalist geometry and seriality, and also to the sum of two units photographs placed above the gallery's forehead desk. One shows a film still of Sean Young as Rachel, the almost-human cyborg in Blade Runner; the other is a faked still of Rachel Lachowicz masquerading as Rachel the replicant. With the photos, as with the paintings, the underlying message is the significance of minimal difference: almost on the contrary not quite the same.

The dilemma inherent in Lachowicz's re-creations is illustrated by dint of Originals. This group of five 20-inch-square photographs is paired with The finished Raincoat--a vase-shaped, vinyl-and-fabric object striped with vertical bands of white, black and yellow--which recalls Allan McCollum's "Perfect Vehicles." The photographs not absent the following: Lachowicz's copy of a gown designed by means of Ellsworth Kelly, her variation upon Kelly's color chart using organ of sight shadow, an all-yellow version of The finished Raincoat, an evening dress whose fabric features a Kelly-esque 1 and a metallic dress variegateed with small color-chart patterns. The intermingled respects to fashion, Kelly and McCollum advise that Lachowicz is trying to give a novel turn to the argument that formal variation in art is limit up with market operations. What at no time becomes clear, though, is the way she wishes to unite this critique to the domain of sex In the current works, it remains a tantalizing stagger how commodity logic and sexual difference tend hitherward to be entangled in the work of art.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Brant Publications, Inc.

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