Barbara Zucker at Artists Space - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

"For Beauty's Sake," Barbara Zucker's latest series of plastic arts is about things women do to their bodies in pursuit of completed form. These are small, masterfully concise works that take care of themselves; a certain number of sit neatly on shelves or table-tops, others have prong for sticking directly into the wall. They describe liposuction, hair-straightening, breast enhancement, leg-shaving and other courses ranging from the routine to the heroic (lip advancement, for instance, can't be a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of fun). All the works at hand paired before-and-after profiles of the adjusted material part part: buttocks wide and trim, earlobe intact and pierced, breast flat and curv leg prickly and flat The sculptures' simple metal contours are usually left unadorned granting sometimes they are covered in materials like suede or wax. This is real funny work, not bad-girl uproarious on the other hand tartly deprecating, distantly related to Deborah Kass on the contrary much closer in spirit to Pat Lasch. It's for women big enough to laugh at themselves. It's also for anyone who can laugh at the sometimes distorted pretensions of contemporary art that addresses the sexed body.

Of course, tummy-tucking has its metaphysics, too. Cosmetic surgeries and their les invasive kin (body sculpting is individual happily named relative) promote the irresistible idea that the body's fate can be controll Nice vision, on the contrary the landscape it surveys has a bleak horizon. If reversing the consequences of aging is the immediate external reality of several of the practices Zucker describes, their ultimate aim is an argument with mortality itself. on the contrary Zucker keeps her work focused upon the middle distance, where she displays that some of our greatest in quantity readily recognized features - hair, fingernails, noses, teeth - have a disturbing scope to shift between the integral and the disposable. Andy Warhol's Before and After painting of a nose piece of work may come to mind, on the contrary it's something of a r herring; Kiki Smith's investigations of the body's margins are probably more to the point.

Zucker's first well-known works were chairs that double as dramatic characters. They were followed through a great variety of abstract forms that refuse to lie still: cot [i]or[/i] coteed metal sheets that become ladies' fans, tubular carburet of iron abstractions that turn into harlequins and, more lately a series of reductive, totemic made of wood figures that she calls "Decoy for the Spirit." Zucker's work reminds us of the discipline involved in telling a beneficial joke. While confession and indictment prevail in the general discourse of gender and material substance image, Zucker holds her cards shut to her chest.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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