Ay-O at Emily Harvey - installation art exhibit, New York, New York

The Japanese artist Ay-O has lengthy been the Fluxus member greatest in quantity obsessed with the senses. His preoccupation with touch, get scent of taste and vision has inspired centurys of tactile environments, happenings and rainbow-hued art phenomenons Ay-O's neo-Dada "Rainbow Manifesto" of the early 1960 advocated art activity involving all perceivable colors and presented a series of nonsensical instructions: "Wear orange pants because circumference = 2 pi" and "Cover your head with a fulvid hat because Tristan Tzara didn't."

Ay-O's installation at Harvey, more [i]or[/i] less Hanging Pieces, featured 28 clotheslines zigzagging end the gallery, all strung with brightly colored sheets and clothes. Dominating the lines were '70s-style women's lingerie, garments belonging to Ay-O, his wife and daughter, stiff corsets and lacy slips worn by dint of Charlotte Moorman (to whom the installation was dedicated) and occasional bell-bottoms. The lines were hung true high, making viewers feel like infants in a forest of grown-up clothing. Also included in the installation was the original clothesline from Ay-O's World Trade Center Rainbow Laundry, a string of garments that flap the wings quicklyed between the twin towers during the of recent origin York Avant-Garde Festival in 1977

At the artist's supplication the gallery windows remained make open wide during the exhibition. Ideally the laundered garments should wave in a breeze; when I was there, however, the space was still and the exhibition felt static. Ay-O's display of undergarments recalled contemporary feminist art that uses clothing to investigate obsessions with material part image. Ay-O's esthetic motivations and his issues remained disappointingly vague, however. "I like clean laundry and the recent smell," he said of the installation. Today, this cheerful renewal of '70 sensibility have the appearances to ring hollow, as did the exhibition itself.

Ay-O's novel nonvisual work has been, a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of stronger. In the basement of the same building, 537 Broadway, his permanent latitude environment Black Hole delivers a powerful, womblike experience. Alone in Black opening participants grope through pitchblack space, doubled above and dependent on a depressed handrail as their guide. The rail twists end the darkness, its surface turning alternately furry squishy and obese transmitting pleasure and insecurity as the artist manipulates the visitor's single sensory connection to the world. If a certain quantity of Hanging Pieces suggested that Ay-O's rainbow theme has worn on the outside Black Hole proves that his other art still delivers a visceral thrill.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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