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Eddo Stern
POSTMASTERS
459 West 19th Street
September 06–October 11
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Between Langlands & Bell at Henry Urbach and Eddo Stern at Postmasters, art modeled on war-themed video games seems to have reached critical mass. Of the two exhibitions, Stern's is the more authoritative—and not just because he served in the Israeli army. Stern elevates video games above the status of gallery novelty act, making viable sculpture out of bulky mainframes and combining the (still) surprisingly stilted imagery of Playstation bestsellers with music that is evocative and laughably low-tech (i.e., the tinkly arcade renditions of classic-rock songs in his DVD Vietnam Romance, 2003). And in the months since his first show at Postmasters in 2002, his work has of course taken on even more resonance: Bush has had his Top Gun moment aboard an aircraft carrier, the Pentagon's digital combat game America's Army (referenced in one of the sculptures here) has become a popular pastime, and the already faint line between virtual and "real" combat has grown all but invisible. Stern's work demonstrates how war, one of art's most ancient subjects, is becoming so saturated with virtual technology, that—for everyone but the victims and the infantry grunts—it's easy to forget that it's more than a purely aesthetic event.
—Martha Schwendener
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 | Fort Paladin (America's Army), 2003. |
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Marilyn Minter
FREDERICKS FREISER GALLERY
504 W 22nd St.
September 06–October 11
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Marilyn Minter's art exposes the seamy side of beauty and femininity, but her ambivalent approach yields something more complicated, and more seductive, than didactic critique. Her current exhibition includes several slick-to-the-point-of-sticky large-scale photographs and two hyperrealist paintings on metal. As she has in the past, Minter commandeers the visual vocabulary of fashion, then rearranges its syntax to create uncanny anti-advertisements: One richly colored
photograph (Vomit, 2003) homes in on a drooling mouth painted red and stuffed with pearls; another highlights the thick peach fuzz on an otherwise "feminine" face (Peach Fuzz, 2003). Most compelling are the paintings, which impersonate photographs so masterfully that at first glance it's hard to tell the difference. In Clown, 2003, an ambiguously gendered face tips back—eyes closed, lips, nose, and chin coated in a viscous pink that could be makeup but suggests decidedly more abject substances. At once sexy and gross, Clown operates in true Minteresque style: piquing desire, then demanding a reason why.
—Johanna Burton
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 | Vomit, 2003. |
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Matt Saunders
LOMBARD-FREID
531 West 26th Street
September 12–October 11
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In his first solo New York show, Matt Saunders presents fifteen portraits of avant-garde film stars, who range from the obscure (Heidemarie Wenzel) to the quasi-iconic (Udo Kier) and who are all shown sleeping or on the edge of slumber. The paintings are based on Polaroids of film stills taken directly from Saunders's TV screen; the images, rendered in layers of translucent oil on mylar, look like gorgeous indulgences in pure fandom—except for the subjects' closed eyes, which introduce a note of ambivalence. Also on view are a pair of videos that transform filmography into a kind of concrete poetry: In one (Slept, 2003), the names of every character played by the actors in Saunders's portraits snake across two screens; in the other (Udo Kier 41 Times [19662003], 2003), the titles from all of Kier's films are superimposed on top of one another. All of these works were inspired by Sleep, Andy Warhol's 1963 cinematic portrait of a slumbering John Giorno; together, they suggest that while Saunders may be a pop fetishist at heart, his mind is given to more deliberate cogitations. He seems interested in camp not only as an aesthetic but as an operation; here, he uses its mechanisms to explore the slippery relationships between intimacy and performance, audience and actor.
—Elizabeth Schambelan
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 | Slept (Paloma), 2003. |
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Danica Phelps
LFL GALLERY
530 W24th St
September 05–October 04
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In her current show at LFL, Danica Phelps lays bare her personal economy with illustrations, detailed lists of her activities, and rudimentary charts that track expenses and income. Phelps has previously used similar means to explore the economics of daily living and of artmaking and collecting. But now a fresh variable—namely, her girlfriend, Debi—has entered her equations, and she has turned her attention, as per this show's title, to "Integrating Sex into Everyday Life." She is living in the gallery space with her girlfriend for a month: Amid futon, hot plate, desk, and houseplants, Danica and Debi are on view. They sleep, cook, talk to visitors, and make affordable art that is sold from the walls. Numerous line drawings depict the couple engaged in sex, the outlines of their bodies delicately ensnarled: Phelps and her lover "consume" the space while offering their private lives for consumption. Putting a price tag on representations of sexual intimacy cannot signify the value of a relationship the way cost indicates the value of a car. But the depictions are no less affecting for their resistance to being commodified.
—Nicole Rudick
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 | "Danica Phelps: Integrating Sex into Everyday Life." Installation view. |
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Kelly Heaton
RONALD FELDMAN
September 06–October 11
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Visitors to this show are greeted by a huge blow-up of an article from the New York Times that describes a run on Tickle Me Elmo dolls; nearby is Live Pelt Archives, a display case filled with antique artifacts of the fur trade. Both objects are touchstones for Heaton's project, an absurdist stunt that involves a collection of used Elmo dolls, a prototype "Elmo fur" coat, and a working "fur studio" set up in the gallery. Linking the fur trade—which to a great extent determined early relations between Europeans and Indians in North America—to contemporary trade routes (all the dolls were bought on eBay), Heaton addresses changing mores in fashion and capitalism. The almost feudalist stratification of the fur industry, with its trappers, skinners, taxidermists, merchants, and buyers, is explicated along with the social meaning of fur (or, in this case, bright red synthetic fur). While the show might come across as an extended joke, if you read between the lines—and past the dopey Elmo faces leering at you from all over the gallery—it's quite a lesson in history, economics, and exploitation.
—Martha Schwendener
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 | Portrait of the Live Pelt Fashionista, 2003. Photo by Tom LeGoff. Makeup and hair by Tamah Krinsky. |
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Matthew Sontheimer
DCKT CONTEMPORARY
537 West 24th Street
September 02–October 04
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For the last few years, Matthew Sontheimer, a Houston-based artist making his New York solo debut, has been working on a project based on the myth of Sisyphus. "Within a Name" includes six of the works from this series-four small inkandWite-Out drawings on Mylar and two modestly sized vinyl wall pieces. They're quiet and unassuming works, but they hold up under the weight of the myth. In fact, Sontheimer's formal restraint seems crucial to his endeavor's viability. For each piece, he uses a simple code (derived, for example, from a telephone keypad) to transpose a short text into graphic form. The works are executed according to a progressive logic whose rules, outlined in an articulate artist's statement, are drawn from Sisyphus's story; the chainlike forms that result are delicate and haltingly organic, quietly hinting at the eternal via their endlessly interlocking lines. Working in the manner of a pared-down Matthew Ritchie or a latter-day, left-brained Cy Twombly, Sontheimer avoids bombast or pretension; instead, his careful and controlled works convey the historical and psychological resonance of his source material.
—Bethany Anne Pappalardo
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 | "Matthew Sontheimer." Installation view. |
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