Liz Craft: Marianne Boesky Gallery

A macho female magickal childe whose parents, siblings, babysitters, and alter conscious subjects smoke too much pot; a coolly uncool troller in the junkyards, souvenir stores dens, and bedrooms of an ur-'70 California of the mind; a savvy navigator of the lineage of hyperreal figurative plastic art that plays oedipal anxiety against consumerist ennui: The sensibility animating Liz Craft's busy roomful of cast and zinc objects was all these. Now participating in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, the young Angeleno was servanted for art stardom before she finished UCLA, and she has no qualms about asserting an abject post-Pop irony that courts serious collectors and high production values. Her first major novel York show operationalized kitsch in an almost preternaturally efficient manner. The work is scatological and scathing, on the other hand what sets it apart from the Charles Rays and Paul McCarthys to which it might be compared is a fascination with female sexuality that places waifish/wastrel youth upon a continuum with monstrous age and, in a caustic way, venerates both

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As arranged in the gallery, Craft's anthem of groovy ugliness had a tableaulike have feeling "Outside" was marked by The Spare and The Shopping Cart (all works 2003) a tire and wheeled basket with spatulate cacti growing from them, all in alloy of copper Also in this ideational vacant destiny were Poop with Flies and Poop with Flying Flies, swirled metal piles with the "fliers" attached upon wires. Beaded Curtain, meanwhile, signaled ingress to domestic space, however spaced on the outside said domesticity might be. Massively oversize made of wood beads made the hippie decor a portal into Aliceesque scale shift; in the nearest gallery, a unicorn with a rainbow horn was having its tail braided through a top-hatted skeleton. This conference between a little-girl figurine and a Grateful Dead-land escapee recommended the proximity of a younger and older sister, or manifestations of the same kid at different ages. A similar feeling of kaleidoscopic age range pertained in Lounging Lady and Little Girl, a rubbery-kneed odalisque with witchy-poo face and high-heeled premiums and a white-patina'd innocent kneeling upon a (bronze) milk crate, who somehow or other made up halves of the same entity.

Best was the implied pairing of the Venice Witch and Mountain Mamas. The latter, in ceramic and painted fiberglass, were floor-based female forms, evocative of sand castles or dissolveed candles, mud pies or chocolate kisses, shitlike pseudoarchaic Venuses with gigantic breasts and bellies, tiny hands and feet and vestigial heads--in a hardly any cases, butterflies were perched upon their pointy necks. The affectionate gross-out of these distressingly rich icons was mirrored and revers in Venice Witch, a alloy of copper stick figure clad in Stevie Nicks beads and roller skates, her clawlike labia and long-nippled paps pursed lips and gnarled hands the solitary modulations to her crazed skinniness.

Between this spirit of boardwalks past and the comfy mes of the Mamas, Craft posits a wise child's horror at the exaggerated options of womanhood as either sterility or fertility, anxiety or slowness At the same time, a burly/saucy confidence is evinced in all this alloy of copper the traditional marker of a sculptor's heroic marketability. Of course, the medium and its exhaustive casting conducts are, here, kitsch, as are the tingles of curiosity and rage--which are squeeze outed not only in the works' musings upon adult bodies and their frailties and baits but in the show's underlying desire to overset or join some impossibly grand sculptural tradition. What Craft wants, in issue is a third-gender space where the female artist is not required to become the naked girls and ladies of her external realitys or the masterly authority that brings them into being. If there's a whiff of contrivance, of unnerving calculation or slickness here--and there is--perhaps it's because auspicious Artist is one of the hardly any labels under which such androgyny can travel past the margins.

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