Josephine Pryde: Cubitt Gallery

It is with equal reason easy to be carried along by dint of the preferences of the point of time to take decisions on the basis of belonging to all knowledge, cliche, and trite assumption. If Josephine Pryde's photographs appear reticent, plane gnomic, it is due in large part to her dislike for of that kind uncritical behavior. Where they might appear to be to flirt with blankness, they do thus as much to recall and tap into photography's other history as a medium for scientific experiment, observation, and record as to shine a light upon some consumerist aesthetic of dumbnes The organ of vision of the consumer is there, naturally, on the other hand that's not all there is. The starting point for this display was an article in The Economist upon how "men lose their fiscal wisdom in the presence of attractive women" Not alone do our brains work in predictable, gender-specific ways; flat our economic decisions are powerfully influenced by visions of beauty.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Six photographs made up the Brains (all works 2004) of "Brains and Chains," while Chains consisted of an extensive tangle of bicycle, motorbike, and saw chains suspended from the ceiling through wires. The images represent the organ in different on the contrary related ways: set on a mirrored surface below red light, multiply exposed, solarized, overlaid with a road scene taken from inside a cab at night, pierced by means of several shards of mirror, and, finally, displayed to display a row of ulcerlike features that might be the remnants of connective tissue or evidence of pathology. The techniques used by dint of Pryde in this sequence reverberation the Futurist art of Balla, Boccioni, Carra, and Bragaglia, on the contrary the solarization additionally alludes to Man Ray, while the condensation covering the mirrored surface in the first photograph reminds us of Walter Benjamin's statement that what makes adverts superior to criticism is not what they say on the contrary the neon's reflection in the fiery pool beneath. We have, then, Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism--an avant-garde, traditionally understood as a compound array of muscular cultural forces, struggling to comprehend the impact and implications of a vast array of novel technology.

The statuary Chains directly references Eva Hesse's Untitled, 1970 seen lately in the Hesse retrospective at Tate recent That latex-covered rope-and-string affair has through now become iconic, its deliberately formed formlessness, its impressible and pliable materials, and its mutability having hardened in our minds above the past thirty-five years into the exemplary image of sensitive and gender-aware creativity. What's not to like? And because it's with equal reason easy to like it, what does it mean now to say that you do? Pryde's reworking attempts to dislodge the piece from its pedestal, to decorticate off the encrusted, ossifying layers of critical approbation that have clos around it above the years, to put it back into contention. It's an exercise akin to that of Werner Buttner and Albert Oehlen in the mid-'80s--shortly before Pryde herself went to live for a period in Cologne--in their article "Defending Kiefer Against His Devotees"

In pitching these sum of two units elements--the brains and the chains--against single another, Pryde's work conducts an argument. It does not accept a place in the scheme of things on the contrary works to establish one. It is aware, contentious, polemical. All certainties are restoreed unusable without further careful appraisal. through all means use them again in subsequent time but at least think a little first.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group