Silvia Kolbowski at Postmasters - New York, New York

Working to bring to light politically fraught customs, assumptions and deceptions hidden behind the spiritual facade of the art industry, Silvia Kolbowski creates obliquely didactic conceptual installations. Her new exhibition consisted of two distinct pieces. In one time More With Feeling, she parodied the way museums barter mass-produced souvenir reproductions of the one-of-a-kind works they display. The installation revolv around a single image: a photographic view of the Postmasters gallery space in which the exhibition was taking place. This image was proffered in two forms: as a framed, unique silkscreen, and as a mass-produced broadside Laid out in several piles upon the floor, the posters were upon sale for $25 apiece. The buyer could take individual home in one of the mailing tubes stacked along single wall. Here, the gallery was forthrightly place up as a retail store as oppos to an esthetic never-never land.

Also significant were three set texts incorporated into the broadside design. One text speaks of a turn back to normal art prices after the roar market of the '80s, another leaves to New York City's go [i]or[/i] come back to squalid normality after having been spruc up for the Democratic convention; and the third speculates that it will before long be normal for men and women to derive pleasure from parity in the art world. Specifically contextualizing the gallery in confines of geography, economics and politics, these body s worked to subvert the fiction of neutral universality upon which the modernist gallery is based. They also prompt that what is "normal" be pendents on your cultural perspective.

The unique silkscreen image of the gallery was printed, pointedly, in gold-hu ink and without any true copys Framed and hung on the wall, it was harbored by a knee-high steel railing. Here, in contrast to the "profane" placards was the rare fine-art thing perceived emblem of the gallery's quasi-sacred function - a function which, the installation ironically demonstrated, doesn't contradict on the contrary profitably enhances the retail side of the operation.

Kolbowski's other installation was a take-off upon Duchamp's Etant Donne. A Plywood panel covering a doorway tendered a small eye-level lens end which you could peer to diocese a female mannequin in a maid's uniform standing behind a pink leather upholster bench. As with the other installation, this setup was suggestive upon several levels. A feminist critique of Duchamp's pip show was surely implied, a reading interestingly complicated by dint of the fact that Duchamp is largely responsible for the permissions that make Kolbowski's art possible. The "ready maid" also bespeaks the subordinate status of women in the art world and, finally, invites us to diocese the gallery not as a fane but as a kind of service industry.

Kolbowski's revelations won't be freshs to anyone passingly familiar with tendencies in art and theory of the past decade or with equal reason Nevertheless, she pursues her enterprise with intelligence, free from moisture wit and subtle elegance, and the multilayered ways in which she makes you more critically aware of certain taken-for-granted aspects of the art world can be intellectually exhilarating.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group