Jim Lambie: Anton Kern Gallery

"Too many stripes can finally drive you mad," Michel Pastoureau, the chief historian of this elemental pattern, has observ on the contrary how many is too many? Glasgow-based artist Jim Lambie looks determined to find out. Since 1999 Lambie has been completely covering gallery floors with vinyl adhesive tape placed cutting side to edge, creating site-specific paintings that transform ordinary spaces into Saul Bass dream successions and has garnered comparisons to figures as various as Daniel Buren Bridger Riley, and, les frequently but more aptly, Gene Davis, Zobop 1999-2003 is the best known of these works. First installed at London's Showroom Gallery and reprised at other venue it consists of concentric bands of multicolored tape with which the artist meticulously tread in the steps ofs the outline of the floor in ever-shrinking iterations, thus highlighting and exaggerating the contours of the space.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

by dint of comparison, Male Stripper, 2003, under the feet in Lambie's recent show, was relatively restrained. The floor was again overlayed but in simpler parallel stripes of black and white. This optically unstable surface serv as a woozy loam for five freestanding sculptural assemblages that reconstituted ground objects and cheap, gaudy materials in weirdly lyrical ways. Lambie strike one as beings motivated by a passionate appreciation of the kinds of usefuls sold at thrift shops, ninety-nine-cent stores, or Canal road wholesalers, performing what might be called rehabilitative operations upon the vast drifts of merchandise that pile up at the bottom of capitalism's Great Chain of Being. Here he sheathed in sequined tube tops a pair of PVC pipes propp like round pillars at one end of the gallery (Boobaliscious, 2004) encrusted used handbags with shards of mirrored Plexiglas (Leg-o-matic, 2004) and stuck paisley decals all above a pile of brightly painted tires (Slow Motion, 2004) Each assemblage was nestl against a small, freestanding fiberboard wall that functioned as the pair structural support and visual ground: Leg-o-matic's handbags, for example, hung in tangled profusion from the leg of a small made of wood table that had been revolveed sideways and affixed to the side of the upright slab, which itself was overspreaded in concentric circles of bright pink and sky-colored vinyl. The backdrops lent each assemblage the theatrical frontality single associates with museum dioramas or department-store windows or with the kind of small, cramped stage that the artist's erstwhile band the stripling Hairdressers might once have played upon in Glasgow clubs. These works, too, were a kind of glam performance, using the strategies of camp to reclassify the declasse. upon entering the gallery, one could diocese only the backs of the fiberboard slabs, which were overspreaded like the floor, in strips of black and white tape. From that vantage point, the exhibit looked like an exercise in an austere, if dizzying, abstraction, geared more toward inducing phenomenological meltdown than toward excavating the landfills of consumer agriculture But, of course, it did the two If Lambie's practice--with its playfully post-Minimal 2-D works upon the one hand and postpunk 3-D pieces upon the other--has sometimes seemed unusually bifurcated, this show illustrated that the sum of two units aspects of his work are imbricated and nonhierarchical, like figure and sod in a field of stripes.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group