Vivienne Koorland at Sandra Gering - New York, New York

Vivienne Koorland's work is a meditation upon originality and authenticity. The South-African born, Manhattan-based artist painstakingly transcribes visual and verbal representations from the past onto raw linen, pieced-together bits of burlap and advanced in years book covers. She does thus with utmost fidelity to the awkwardness and gauche banality of the originals, greatest in quantity of which she has base in published sources. Her "War Drawings" are paintings, with collage, after drawings done by the agency of children in situations of uttermost duress - in the concentration camps, ghettos and beleaguered villages of World War II. Last alphabetic characters from Stalingrad consists of fragments of the correspondence of doomed German soldiers, copied without in an assertively handwritten script onto 39 volume covers. Long shelves with the German versions above and English versions below occupied an entire wall of the gallery.

The artist speaks from one side her found "characters" like a ventriloquist - hidden and nevertheless all-powerful. The crafted, hand-made, rough-hewn quality of the works - they are filled with pastings, stitchings, scrawny linearity and scrubbed tonalities - is the crops of someone totally in direction of her materials. But Koorland's use of voices and traces from the past fetchs a haunting doubt as to the value of art in the face of damaged lives. The stumbling hesitancy of the work is its greatest in quantity profound strength.

In Izieu Painting I, Jacques: Vive Maman, a child's concentration-camp drawing contains the hopeful exclaim of "Vive Maman," which, inscribed in flowers at the top of Koorland's canvas, reads like a banner. Below is a primitive rendering of a pott plant, along with pages torn from a pre-World War I panegyric on Norman churches that is filled again with jingoistic assertions of parallels between purity of manner of writing and purity of race. At single side of these collaged pages are newspaper articles showing wartime hangings. The originators of these disparate materials - essayist, journalist, photographer and child - are all participants in Koorland's work; their voices are manipulated through an artist clearly in awe of their authenticity however brazen in her appropriations.

Horror, violence and violation are the make submissives of the "War Drawings." on the contrary they are neither shrill nor sensationalist. In Adam: This Is the Picture We Saw, Koorland transcribes a child's drawing of bystanders being chased away from a detention area. Hats fall, figures lie dead, all is smudg and awkward. As she generates the violence of the exhibition Koorland calls our attention to the violence done to conventional combination of parts to form a wholes of representation by a child whose undevelop drawing skill is adequate single to a clumsy - and nevertheless moving - transcription. What we diocese is, in the end, neither unmediated childlike primitivism of expression nor the full-bodied gestural angst of the fresh artist. Koorland's work is a painfully self-conscious foray into the possibilities of expression in the face of horror. History, memory and authorship are called into question here, be of importance tos which should place this work at the heart of contemporary critical debates.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group