Orshi Drozdik at Tom Cugliani - installation art - New York, New York - Review Of Exhibitions

The visitor to Orshi Drozdik's exhibition, "Medical Erotic," was stand over againsted by an unpainted Hydrocal cast of a bare female figure reclining on a platform overlayed by red fabric. At the figure's feet lay a silver platter engraved with the words, "My dearest, You are afraid of your body's limitlessness." Pearls were scattered upon the platter. To the right of the figure were 10 other silver plates, each mountained on a rod a brace of feet high and each engraved with a be fond of letter, written in the same voice, that began "My dearest" and extremityed anonymously "your love." Another engraved plate was high hilled next to a butcher's knife stuck in the wall. Across the gallery hung photographs of anatomical moulds of the female pubic area, breasts, uterus and ovaries.

upon the back wall Drozdik placed seven photos that were the genesis of the installation. As an accompanying body explains, while visiting a medical museum in Vienna in 1984 the artist came across a life-sized wax original of a woman's body with the chest split make open and the lungs pulled aside to reveal the internal organs. The figure wore an incongruous flaxen wig and a strand of pearls, and it repos not upon a stainless steel table on the other hand on a tasseled coverlet resembling a bedspread. The figure's organ of sights were closed and its head arched back like a woman in ecstasy. Drozdik worn out two hours studying the original and made some photographs. Eight years later, she incorporated the photos into her hold meditation and made a Hydrocal cast of her be in possession of body--in a less suggestive position--to face the gallery visitor.

The motives behind the wig and pearls for the Vienna wax pattern were obscure. Was it an attempt to give the pitiful figure a certain quantity of dignity, much as people attempt to beautify plane the poorest figure in its coffin? Or did the decoration and the arched neck pander to the sadomasochistic desires, however far down hidden, of its patriarchal makers? Certainly Drozdik replyed to the latter scenario. although the identity of the alphabetic character writer remains ambiguous, the language of the platters is the elaborated too much prose of romantic pulp fiction, here given a definite s & M bent; for example, "I dream of you honing and sharpening your instrument till it becomes imperceptible. And then, piercing into my skin, into my muscle and fat into my silence." It is not a surgeon's scalpel on the other hand a butcher's knife that pierces the gallery wall.

In the positioning of the platters, the artist wants to involve the viewer in the erotic encounter: the viewer must bend above to read the words and will diocese his or her face mirrored in the silver's surface. on the other hand the obsessive nature of the words is counteracted by means of the coolness of the white Hydrocal figure lying nearest to them. It is obviously an inanimate cast, unlike the wax protoplast which even in photographs is lifelike enough to induce a frisson of appalled fascination. Drozdik plays with obsession and would draw the viewer into it white at the same time keeping an emotional distance. Whether the intent is ironic or just unresolv in the extremity it is unsatisfying.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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