Jonathan Borofsky at Paula Cooper - art exhibition, New York, New York

Attending a Jonathan Borofsky exhibition is always a little like being inside the artist's brain. Usually a series of wildly disparate phenomenons and images, loosely grouped around a certain quantity of metaphor, seems to have tumbl on the outside in stream-of-consciousness fashion. This idea became literal in his latest display "String of Consciousness #3": the works were literally conjoined by strings running between them like vigor ganglia.

Borofsky at handed us immediately with the show's premise, which was written above and over in charcoal upon the wall and ceiling: "Both the Fascist and the Idealist search for perfection." To form into a body this proposition, he selected a Fascist (Adolf Hitler) and an Idealist (himself), showing each in a brooding artificial position in large photographs placed side by the agency of side. Grouped around the sum of two units portraits, eight complementary pairs of photos were hung These showed the sum of two units perfectionists as babies, along with discharges of their parents, their panners, each man with his dog, each speaking, and in like manner on.

From this opening, the connecting threads ran to other works. bonny Cups was a group of fluorescent plastic beakers set mouth-down on the floor in a spiral pattern. Organic Square was a large white Celotex fiber square whose surface bulg ominously at various points like an overstuff mattress. In sum of two units Heads, Borofsky's trademark heads were drawn in pastel from floor to ceiling. a certain quantity of Borofsky drawings and watercolors were casted onto walls; others hung side through side with reproductions of Hitler's have a title to works on paper. Big lower extremity a monumental plaster fragment, recalled Albert Speer's grandiose proposals for Nazi remembrancers and Big Four, a carbonized iron numeral over 12 feet high, reminded us of Borofsky's possess obsession with numbers.

Amid this uneven assortment of art objects we could also watch 11 music videos credited to Borofsky's alter conscious subject "Johnnie Hitler." The videos have no real lyrics or oral dialogue, just music resembling the regular [i]or[/i] melodious movement section and background vocals from Paul Simon's Graceland album. The Hitler theme surfaces in several of the clips. The huntsman and the Hunted, for example, intersperses glimpses of Hitler and sights of concentration camps. Even when the German dictator does not appear, his remembered vicinity lends added resonance to views which are horrific enough in themselves--a slow-motion film of a wildcat eating what appears to be a sundered animal head, for instance.

Not all of the videos are for a like reason graphic. The images fly fast, leaving little time for the viewer to throw back The five-minute Speed of Light includes the following scenes: the lift-off of a space shuttle a man in a wheelchair trying to interest a passersby in the plight of a dying pigeon, survivors of a sunken ship, children petting display horses, German citizens viewing concentration camp victims, a bedouin praying, scavengers collecting cans upon the beach, sumo wrestlers, a stripling doing stunts on a bike and a circus performer being discharge from a cannon.

The question with this blizzard of imagery, and with the display overall, is that the Hitler/concentration camp images are in the way that powerful that they overwhelm everything other A pile of Jewish bodies or a starving Somalian child--any artist using of that kind images opens himself to charges of trivializing tragedy to give his art a cheap boost What does Borofsky seek for to achieve by connecting himself in like cryptic fashion to a failed art pupil who went on to organize unprecedent mass murder? Is it simply to warn against the "inner Fascist" in each of us? Perhaps lam obtuse in wishing it were easier to decipher Borofsky's take upon this loaded material, but for me the display didn't carry us very far into the heart of darkness.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group