Gregory Crewdson at Luhring Augustine - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Gregory Crewdson's elaborately staged color photographs vary in frame of mind from the mildly weird to the pagan spectacular, embracing of the like kind themes as sex, romantic introspection, homicide nature worship and narcissism. His protagonists are chiefly plants and animals, a strange mix of taxidermic specimens and living flowers, all arranged in improbable tableaux which accompany to pit some menacing, or just plain bizarre, foreground incident against a more benign, suburban background of dapper little houses and neatly mowed lawns. The implication of these views seems to be that something dark, blighted or unexpectedly gorgeous lurchs right there in the underbrush of our ordinary lives.

Much has been made of Crewdson's affinities with David Lynch "They're just like azure Velvet or Twin Peaks," is a rejoinder I have often encountered. at the same time Crewdson's large, untitled C-prints--for instance the image of many brilliant amethystine butterflies suspended on a foreground protection of mysteriously dangling blond braids (with no human head nearby), or the photo of myriad verdant beetles hanging in large clusters like a certain number of kind of mutant wisteria--also cite up analogies to Tiffany stained glass and Lalique insect vases. Like Tiffany, Crewdson is making intensely democratic effeminacy items that are imbued with the two a quirky nature mysticism and a pronounced demoniac craft. (The photographer fabricates almost every element of these dioramas himself, oftentimes building a set that stretches back 25 feet in deepness and consists of several tables as well as a haze machine. "His formal compositions contain knowing relations to Caspar David Friedrich, in the image of individual tawny bird viewed from the rear atop an ambiguous red-gold pyramid of dirt, and a heavy interdependence on Japonisme, in the recurring use of eurythmic verticals and dominant overhanging elements

At their best, Crewdson's photographs achieve a cringe-inducing tactility. In single vertical format, a big thorny sac suspended from a tree drips more [i]or[/i] less creamy, spermlike excrescence onto a lower branch; this image made me want to recoil in mock-horror and embarrassed recognition. Here in the photo-documentation of single novel gland is the ultimate confusion of animal and vegetable appendages; the image somehow or other manages to suggest a scrotal self-portrait and a maniacally vivid nature film. Here, too, the photographer partakes of a larger vein of warped of recent origin landscape imagery that conflates material substance and nature references to achieve a peculiarly '90 lyric poem to Beauty and the Sublime; other practitioners of this of recent origin genre include Frank Moore and Matthew Barney. Crewdson's photographs can be sad, vulgar and magisterial, as in his almost Mexican ex-voto of a chipmunk worshipping an enormous pile of berries bedecked with amethystine Christmas lights, but they are at no time dull, and for this they can be forgiven almost everything.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Brant Publications, Inc.

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