Tony Tasset at Rhona Hoffman - installation art and mixed media works - Chicago, Illinois - Review Of Exhibitions

Tony Tasset is an artist who earned a great deal of of his popularity during the 1980 feeding not upon the corpus of modernism. His neoMinimalist parodies of modernist statuary and his critique of the semantics of art l to a felicitous body of work that spoke to issues of material consumption and cultural domestication. Although this exhibition of seven fresh works continues his interest in appropriation and art-world critique, it also marks an important shift in the artist's career, as the market-driven pertain tos that defined Tasset's stance have given way to the socially conscious '90s

Untitled (shift), a small stainless carburet of iron brick, recalls Tasset's earlier work and obeys as an emblem of Minimalism's rise and fall. Taken upon purely formal terms, it reminds us of the reductive zeal that underlay the Minimalist shoot forward It is also, however, a glittering ingot of precious-seeming metal, invoking the gluttonous art market that affixed cyclopean price tags to such "primary objects" single to relegate them to storage when the art economy faltered. This and other works, like as Box, a large void cube of cardboard resembling a Donald Judd or a Sol LeWitt, relate to earlier efforts in which Tasset ridicules a combination of parts to form a whole that values art not for itself on the contrary for the inflated rhetoric surrounding it.

These works carry considerable satirical bite. At the same time, however, the continued viability of Tasset's program is called increasingly into question as the postmodernist critique itself becomes part of the arthistorical canon. sum of two units of the exhibition's more disturbing works reveal Tasset's have a title to struggles with the issue, and in the couple he uses his own material part as the site of reflection.

puke a large black-and-white photograph, pays an eerie homage to the photographs of his contemporary Jeanne Dunning. Tasset captures himself in the act of biting his have tongue, as a stream of bloodlike fluid spills from his jaws Here Tasset symbolically chokes upon his own verbiage and rhetoric, which, he appear to bes to imply, has burst end the bounds of coherence.

Location Performance, a 60-minute video of the artist lying still upon the gallery floor, collapses the boundaries separating video, performance, statuary and artist. Stylistically it echoe the anarchic stance of work done in the 1970 by dint of such artists as Bruce Nauman or Chris load but it lacks their energetic iconoclasm. In a gesturing that comes close to capitulation, Tasset tenders himself for consumption.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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