ARTFORUM INTERNATIONAL Exhibition Reviews

December 2007:

Sadie Benning
Orchard Gallery

Sadie Benning has garnered widespread acclaim since she was a teenager for her do-it-yourself approach to art making, especially among those of her post-punk peers who favor collaboration over individuality. Her career arc, though fairly well known, bears repeating: In 1989, as a teenager, Benning began to make candid, diaristic videos in her bedroom with a Fisher-Price PixelVision toy camera. Ten years later, she co-founded the feminist indie band Le Tigre. After years of incorporating politics, queer sexuality, and personal history into her work, that Benning has taken an increasing interest in abstraction should come as no surprise. Like a fun-house mirror, however, her new work contracts and contorts her established preoccupation with eroticism, sex, and desire, without once concealing it. Though no longer trading in representation rife with emotion or pathos, Benning's recent output sees her at her most inspiring.

Scheduled to coincide with a weekend screening of Benning's two-channel video installation Play Pause, 2006, at the Dia Art Foundation space in Chelsea, this exhibition presented viewers with the full range of Benning's multifaceted practice, including work in drawing, video, installation, and music. The sole PixelVision video in the show, One Liner, 2003, which follows a pen as it draws a series of dots (and seems to try but fail to make a straight line), here provided a visible link between Benning's past and present forays into abstraction, while referencing her ongoing interest in the intimate and the handmade, the bodily and the tender.

On display throughout the gallery were nine small geometric colored pencil drawings (all 2007) depicting shafted and rounded shapes colliding and merging with one another, as if engaged in various stages of sexual activity. Inspired by Gordon Matta-Clark's use of heavy boards to mount his photographs, Benning has attached these delicate renderings to rectangular pieces of bookbinding board with softly rounded corners. The drawings' candy-colored palette distinguishes these works from the monumental and vivid "Head" paintings (1999-2006) that debuted at the Wexner Center for the Arts earlier this year. Instead of that series' strong graphic line or the dense pixilation of her videos, Benning here makes pencil marks that are cautious and mutable. (The icon depicting poop going "back and forth forever" devised by Miranda July for her film Me and You and Everyone We Know [2005] comes to mind).

In the center of the room, a record player with a series of six LPs, titled Play Pause Tapes: Soundtracks for Looking and Listening, 2007, provided a sound track of jarring rhythms and repetitive beats that energized these otherwise placid drawings and further riffed on the abstract tenor of the show. The LPs, reformatted from cassettes of the kind that Benning made in her youth with a boom box and turntable, feature spliced-up funk, disco, soul, and R&B, juxtaposed with isolated instrumental sounds. Visitors were encouraged to change the records and experiment with Benning's eclectic mixes, an enticing offer that yielded some pleasurable results.

The title of the show, "Form of a Waterfall," was a reference to the DC Comics animated teenage superheroes "The Wonder Twins," who change shape by commanding "Form of a ___!" Certainly the eroticized shapes intermingling in Benning's new drawings engage in transformative actions as well, offering a porous reading of sexuality and gendered identity. Perhaps these works should be considered alongside other contemporary art incorporating sexual themes, such the collectively produced journal LTTR, whose fifth issue, "Positively Nasty," provocatively surveys queer desire. However, taking into consideration Benning's figurative work, for which she is better known, this show of exclusively abstract works proved that she is able to comfortably navigate through abstraction and figuration, while retaining the rare ability to create an effective metaphoric mash-up.

November 2007:

Dana Frankfort
Bellwether

"DF," Dana Frankfort's second solo exhibition in New York, presented ten thickly layered, restlessly gestural paintings, each featuring a word or phrase scrawled messily across its surface. Grappling with the history of abstraction, Frankfort's canvases are marked by an engagement with text; by vibrant, lustrous colors; and by energetic brushwork. The artist's work appeared in more than one group show this summer. GUTS (yellow/gold) (all works 2007), for example, her contribution to "Late Liberties" at John Connelly Presents, is a vivid and uncompromising canvas that confronted viewers with a seemingly metaphorical treatment of the titular word, ensuring that they would be hard pressed to disagree with curator Augusto Arbizo's claim that "for a young artist to be making work at this moment in what could be called an abstract or non-representational manner . . . is . . . a highly personal and political act." In the current phlegmatic climate, it takes guts indeed for an emerging artist to make subjective, expressive paintings.

While Frankfort's work seems to eschew some of this historical weight in favor of a nuanced linguistic playfulness suggestive of the paintings of various other artists, including Ed Ruscha, Mel Bochner, Suzanne McClelland, and Kay Rosen, it nevertheless both engages with the physicality of paint and retains a certain conceptual directness evocative of Louise Fishman's groundbreaking "Angry Paintings" from 1973 (recently included in the exhibition "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles).

The strongest works in Frankfort's show push the tension between verbal language and painterly gesture to an extreme. Letters and lines swim in and around each another, foreground and background are transposed, and colors and shapes compete to occupy tiny crevices. Unlike Robert Smithson's 1966 drawing A Heap of Language, which teases out the myriad meanings of the word "language," the scribbled-over, crossed-out, and otherwise distorted words buried under Frankfort's skeins of oil are, one can only assume, meant to be kept secret. A large, square painting titled Lines (transformer), 2007, features several planes of text woven together in a tautological game that almost fills the canvas, leaving only a stark white border. The word LINES, also rendered in white, spills over the panel's edges and covers TRANSFORMER, painted in purple, which is itself arranged over several mostly illegible lines of text, in shades of green. Other paintings, such as STUFF, A LOT OF STUFF, CRACK, and POSSIBLY PERMANENT, smartly both embody and obscure a clear textual address, shunning vagueness for a more useful ambiguity.

In a few works, Frankfort brushes the Star of David over words or washes of color. These paintings appear less formally resolved than the others on show here, but are interesting nonetheless in their intimations of autobiography--stars connect the artist's Texan and Jewish lineages--and may become fertile ground if they begin to incorporate the productive unruliness of her text-based paintings. By worrying so insistently at abstract painting's frayed edges, Frankfort and her contemporaries are beginning to push beyond inward-looking debate over the form's continuing vitality into new territory.