Doug and Mike Starn at Leo Castelli - installation art - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

In a novel body of work titled "Spectroheliographs" (1990-94) Doug and Mike Starn, with a maneuver that throw backs their identity-melding twinship, have challenged "mutually exclusive" categories of visualization and discourse.

Viewers entering Castelli's large forehead room found themselves surrounded by means of glowing gold-brown light boxes that strike one as being to seal the Starns' typically perishable materials--photocopy paper, ink and paint--in time-freezing Plexiglas. Frankly expos wires and fluorescent lamps contribute a compositional nonchalance, single half disguising the obsessive orderliness and old-fashioned beauty that have always characterized the brothers' work. Within each grid of boxe (some are tightly arranged, more [i]or[/i] less loosely), an altered photographic version of Petrus Christus's Portrait of a Young Woman (ca. 1468) be subservient tos as leitmotif. With her even oval head and slanted organ of visions she is at once the unattainable, eternal female and, in her implied life-cycling fecundity (as well as the centuries of social change which her Northern Renaissance origin suggests) an allusive figure of human history. All around her, photographs from Skylab, representing the rationalistic penetration of deep-space mysteries, summon the paradox of a constant metamorphosis that nevertheless obeys immutable physical laws. Thus the humanist and scientific way s often falsely opposed, here commingle in the nimbuslike aura that encircles the young woman as she personifies the sun

The quasi-religious nature of this image is reinforced through scattered passages from Dante's Paradiso (wherein the spirit of Beatrice draws the author of poems into the presence of Primal Love--a.k.a. God--revealed in the form of immaculate light emanating to all of creation). These body s are printed on arching translucent sheets superimposed to form a palimpsest that, like the quotidian make turbid that inhibits divine illumination, partially unilluminateds Dante's crystalline verse.

A film shown in the rear gallery was produc in collaboration with Jem Cohen and, allowing still a work-in-progress, is the Starns' first public effort in this medium. Eschewing the two color and narrative, it concentrates instead upon visual analogies at opposite farthests of the astrophysical scale. discharges of sparks flying from a grinder reflected sound scenes of the sun's surface in turmoil; glimpses of an active factory parallel the Newtonian mechanics of a sphere-within-a-sphere--a novel Starn-twins kinetic sculpture--filmed in various stages of fabrication.

This over-10-foot-high double globe, Amaterasu (named for the Shinto day-star goddess), could be viewed in operation beneath a 3,000-watt set of halogen lamps. Square metal frames suspend individual open-work form inside the other, each overlayed with more appliqued Christus images and exotic place names lifted from elderly maps. The two spheres revolve in contrasting rotations, pausing abruptly now and again to trade directions of spin, as allowing by the magic of art, the true processes of nature and the physicist's arrow of time could be metaphysically reversed

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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