Maureen Mullarkey at First Street - painting and drawing - New York, New York - Review Of Exhibitions

Mullarkey, artist and cultural journalist for The Nation, the of recent origin York Times and Commonweal, titled her next to the first New York show "Gender in the Crucible." All the paintings and drawings were derived from images of the of recent origin York Gay Pride March held each June. If gender ever were in the alchemist's crucible--site of strange and astonishing transformings--it's at that event, with its assortment of drag queen transvestites, strong bull dykes with their femme companions, and good-old-fashioned business-suited queers

Mullarkey appears to approach the march and its participants almost as Margaret Mead faceed her aboriginals--as explorer, educator and reporter. The figures are angular, precise, non-naturalistic and not awayed in what seem to be bright colors toned down. Not to her esthetic credit, however, are her doleful-eyed, elastic-bodied, Tarot-like "Gothic" renderings of say, a naked, star-titted Button Vendor or an unpleasantly fleshy drag queen dripping with fake pearls and little other She tends to enhance the intentionally freakish by the agency of making it seem unwittingly freakish.

A latent anthroposociologist, Mullarkey occasionally presents candid, easily read drawings that undertake a far more serious grappling with the issues. In single a young man edges on the outside of a room in an effort to escape the haranguings of a woman, presumably his mother. In another, a father and young daughter have the appearance to have given up upon trying to communicate. The father reclines in a chair, all elegance and issue face turned almost cruisingly toward the viewer.

This delving into sexual politics appear to bes a highly fashionable art-world strategy. You'd think the artist couldn't proceed wrong. Attitudinally, she hasn't, with her "ain't we got fun?" watch tempered, it must be said, by means of a certain eloquent conveyance of sympathy for societal deviance. single wants to like, or at least be able to bespeak her well-intentioned opus. But maybe it isn't in the way that well-intentioned in its ennobling of its make submissives at their most ungainly and self-mocking. In the extremity the paintings struck me as abortive. Mullarkey's men and women strike one as being frozen forever in their gay misery. In the grip of the lowest forms of campiness, her long-faced reveler appear to be mighty dolorous. And who can blame them?

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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