Mary Beth Edelson at A/C Project Room and Nicole Klagsbrun - art exhibitions, New York, New York

Billed as a "non-survey in sum of two units parts," this presentation of early and new work by Mary Beth Edelson tracked an evolution of her thinking from the '70 to the not absent There are, of course, important continuities. For instance, Edelson has always been preoccupied with ritual, has drawn out used the female body as a canvas upon which to rewrite female identity, and continues to tender a cheeky affront to the verities of male-dominated society. However, her earlier work can now be seen as more mythic and more immersed in that time's belief that the best defense against patriarchy lay in the creation of a women-center space.

through contrast, the recent work, showed by a selection of performance photographs and by dint of several silk-screened images on see-through chiffon, strike one as beings to take a more edgy and pragmatic approach to continued inequality. The advanced in years hope that a return to the goddes worship might reduce our skewed emphasis upon culture at the expense of nature now strike one as beings deeply romantic, while of that kind dialectics as male/female or culture/nature themselves look extremely reductive. Edelson may acknowledge as abundant with her apparently self-critical title for the early works at Klagsbrun: "Hopelessly Essentialist (Think Again)." However, as the ambiguous parentheses remind of Edelson may be simply teasing us with her conversion to nouveau feminist thinking.

Playfulness has always been single of the strengths of Edelson's work, and it is abundantly evident in the '70s-era altered photographs. She drew or coilaged upon black-and-white photos of her be in possession of naked body arranged in various ritual postures Reincarnated as Wonder Woman, transformed with a hardly any deft strokes of marker indite into a dog's head or metamorphosing into a snail-headed goddes Edelson escapes the tradition of female unclothed as object of male delectation, while touching upon possible sources of female power in forgotten matriarchal history.

The Klagsbrun display also included examples of her efforts to solicit stories, make comments [i]or[/i] remarkss and confidences from others. A work composed of responses to her petitions for sexual fantasies suggests that the liberated '70 weren't all they're remembered as. While the men contemplateed offered detailed (and often real politically incorrect) fantasies, the women more repeatedly than not simply regretted their lack of sexual imagination.

At the A/C throw Room, Edelson brought us up to date upon her activities. Multiple-exposure photographs of performances have titles similar as Safe Sex and Back/ash: Masked, Manipulated, reduceed Double Voiced, Trivialized, Gagged and Erased, which note in what way far we have fallen short of the utopian dreams of sexual freedom and feminist hegemony glimpsed 20 years ago. Another kind of force seems to be necessary in our more dispirited times, proposeed by Edelson's silk-screened images of a female private-eye stamp taking aim with a pistol. Several of the performance photos indicate her novel posture for the '90s, of the like kind as Caught in the Act, in which she sits upon a stepladder reading an issue of the Village Voice with a big "WAC Attack" ad prominently displayed.

With feminist art back in the novels it is useful to remember its original champions and to note their rife work. This exhibition suggested by what means much has changed, and in what way much remains the same.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group