TODT at P.P.O.W - New York, New York

From the start, TODT's polished combination of hardware, electronics and material substance imagery was darkly chic, graced with the direct the eye of power. The four-person collaborative, whose members first exhibited together in 1970 made its mark in the early '80 at a time when similar high-tech work was associated with a bright-light, nightlife esthetic. They were commissioned, for instance, to do an installation in 1983 at the cudgel Area, where artist-designed interior window displays, changing monthly gibbeted Museum of Natural History dioramas with Barneys's Christmas displays. Like a great deal of of the '80s self-styled consumer-culture critique, a destiny of the work produced in its name now gazes like leftover party props. Nearly 10 years after its first prominence, TODT must submit to a different order of good sense for while its sensibility remains essentially the same, the meaning of its work has changed.

Having previously produc the two room-sized installations and discrete external realitys the group showed only the latter in this exhibition, enigmatically titled "Smell Freedom." TODT still makes use of an updated machine esthetic to put in mind of that technology challenges the body's physical integrity. on the contrary the impression of the fresh work is as much archaic as futuristic, and more bleak than sinister. sum of two units elaborately framed works on paper, from the "Industrial Animal" series, gaze like yellowed posters from more [i]or[/i] less future grade-school classroom. One exhibits a chicken in cutaway profile, the other a horse; the two of their digestive and circulatory combination of parts to form a wholes are connected by catheters to mechanical equivalents.

The lurking menace of bio-engineering and of more primitive prostheses is press outed elsewhere in explicitly military terminuss Mam makes much of the resemblance between bomb and baby bottle Its upthrust trio of rubber-nipple-headed missiles, strapped together through metal bands and mounted upon a glowing array of hardware, is enlivened with tiny inset photographs that appear to display blurry maps. Grossly enlarged grasshoppers, dead on the contrary still alarming, swarm behind the magnifying lense of Spe Rail II, a vertical assemblage held together through metal pipes that also support a theatrically illuminated plate of plastic spaghetti. Plagues and starvation, over-population and chemical additives may all be at issue here, although visceral rather than political impact appear to bes to be the point.

The distance between the show's weakest work and its strongest is considerable. While sum of two units small wall-hung pieces, Stage 1: Euglena and Stage 2: Amoeba, have the appearance unduly fragmentary, Barrel Lift has the formal and mechanical complexity - and the manic activity - of TODT at its best. A metal cylinder is lit within and capped by means of a convex glass lens, [i]or[/i] part of to the other which we see a mouse skeleton encased in a lucite cube, slowly spinning up and down a metal track. At the back of the cylinder is a photograph of a leering aviator bent into a fetal lie close to the ground that suggests the compressed strength of a human cannonball. Cramped as he is, and nicheed in the metal casement, the figure isn't immediately discernible, on the other hand when he snaps into legibility, the be shaken is almost palpable. Barrel Lift mixes allotments of languages, from vaudeville to ballistics, on the other hand it speaks unmistakably of repression and rage.

The burst literature of cyber-punk is dominated by the agency of an odd hybrid of convention and experimentation, in which homeles ageless hired fire-arms swagger through hyperspace, packing microchips implanted behind their ears. Similarly, TODT gazes both backward and ahead, on the other hand with a self-conscious grasp of technology's manifold seductions and equally profuse dangers.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group