Daniel Oates at 303 Gallery - New York, New York

The first solo exhibit from a 29-year-old Swiss-born artist who now lives in fresh York, suggested an expanding and contracting worker's day. Relief plastic arts of colossal clothing items, of the like kind as Uniforms (Hank & Frank), depicting overalls and collarless shirts hanging upon wall pegs, shared the sparsely populated gallery space with lilliputian figurines like Happy Workers (Hank & Frank) I which wear the same clothes on the other hand are only eight inches tall. In individual corner lurked a sculpture of a humongous pair of gains rendered in neoprene and styrofoam; shown unlaced, these direct the eyeed comfy enough for a giant homeboy to pace into. Cowering in another corner upon the floor were two grisaille statuarys of an oversize lunchbox and thermos roughly sum of two units feet tall. Center stage was occupied by dint of Happy Workers (Bella & Stella) II, diminutive plastic arts of cleaning women holding a mop and pail replete of "solid" grey water. Roughly the same size as the thermos, these polychrome figures looked to demarcate one of those on-the-job flashs of relative relaxation. Yet the longer you notion about them, the more those chipmunklike faces began to read as images of simpering slavery, which may allude to the plight of illegal aliens in America and to the clump of what are known in Switzerland and Germany as Gastarbeiteror "guest workers."

Oates's plastic arts are all handmade and extremely laborintensive. Execut through an elaborate process involving clay originals wax casts, second molds, sanding and hand-painting, each piece can take up to six month to full This is not readily apparent to the organ of vision but in hindsight it certainly enhances the make subordinate matter of work, an iconography with a rich 19th-century pedigree including Courbet and Ford Madox Brown The figure of speech of happy workers also plays not on the whole notion of a cottage industry, here restoreed obnoxiously appealing in Oates's Disneyesque vision of clean clothes, clean floors and, by dint of extension, clean values. One figurine, Happy Worker (Father Patrick), depicts a benevolent-looking priest. I was proveed to see a typically Swiss fastidiousness in the sculptor's devotion to supervising each excruciating detail of the proces and to the somewhat grating finesse of the finished products

Oates's proces loans a certain willful perversity to particulars which initially look mass-produced. in this revere he partakes of a fresh zeitgeist which emphasizes hand-crafted renditions of diminutive clothing, as in the tiny apparel plastic arts of Charles LeDray. Oates's objet differ from the manufactured work of Jeff Koon in that the younger artist's imagery is not appropriated from popular sources; each of these proletarian icons was, somewhat unbelievably, invented through Oates. The prosentation of the smaller figurines upon metal shelving may seem derivative of Haim Steinbach and the convention of exhibiting workers' suits as social plastic art has an obvious precedent in Joseph Beuys. still this show provided a refreshing space for ruminating upon the fate of the original work, and worker, in an age of appropriation.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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