Cheryl Donegan at Elizabeth Koury - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Cheryl Donegan is an impostor and a tease, a come-on artist and a flirt. She plays with herself in public and is unashamed. For this - her first solo display anywhere - Donegan, 32, made five short video vignettes (the longest is 11 minutes, the shortest is individual minute and 14 seconds) in which she performs certain preordained tasks that are metaphors for (and push fun at) painting, art history, the material part and sex - sometimes simultaneously.

In MilkDream, a woman (the artist, who appears in all the tapes) stands against a papered wall. She is make straighted in white shorts and a white polo shirt. A cylindrical plastic nip bottle, suspended by string attached to her belt, dangles phalluslike between her leg After a small in number seconds a folksy, droning ballad begins to play and Donegan starts rocking back and forth. After several dipping thrusts she catches the swinging cylinder between her thighs, pinchs it and squirts watery azure paint against the wall in Pollock-like drips and spatters. She at no time uses her hands (Donegan likes to make masterships and stick to them). When the ditty ends she stops and the tape fades to haze. The piece is farcical playful, a little bit poignant, and subversive. upon top of that I can report feeling embarrassed at the familiar masculine fixation upon phallic creativity and gently slapped for it.

Donegan is a guileless artist - what you diocese is pretty much what you earn - and you "get" her work fairly fast, which is one as well as the other good and bad. Good because these days directness is nearest to godliness, plus it's great to walk into a gallery and diocese nonboring video. Bad because sometimes the tapes are essentially one-liners or just plain "schtick." In Sunflower, for example, the artist wears a van Gogh-like straw hat and another of those strap-on spray-paint devices. Here she spins around and sprays a circle of gold-colored paint; then she falls lifeless to the mould for the duration of the tape. Too obvious.

on the contrary when Donegan's on she's really profitable In Gracefulphatsheba - the best work in the exhibit - we see only the artist's head, wrapped in a turban (she gazes like David's Marat), bobbing around, cobralike, licking, kissing and orally engulfing a banana stuck in a perforation on the side of an orange cleanser container, itself suspended and dangling from a string. This is of high temperature stuff. Wild Arabic music plays in the background and you have feeling as if you're in a Middle Eastern porno theater. Donegan's gaze and size contributes much to the work. Small and androgynous, she's a bonny pixie.

Donegan not ever looks at the camera, is always casual and not at any time vamps it up. She owes a apportionment to artists like William Wegman, Bruce Nauman, Lynda Benglis and Carolee Schneeman, and also to novel feminist performance. Donegan makes paintings, too. upon 11-by-14-inch monochrome grounds she places handprints and then transforms them into birds, horses, elephants; the best individual is of Karl Marx. These keep to be too cute. The tapes are better; their futility and earnestness is touching. She's individual of the most interesting real young artists working at the flash I think she's just a pace away from something really good

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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