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[[Top left page; Photograph of art piece captioned "Jackie Ferrara, Red Pool House 288, 1993, bass 9 x 52 x 8".]] [[Center Top Page; photograph of gallery captioned "Michael Joo, Salt Transfer Cycle 1993-94, mixed media. Installation view."]] [[main text]] stripe. There is no stable top or bottom to the painting, thanks to this dialectic between the orientation of the image and that of the painting-as-object. It is as though one were caught in a perpetual loop or Mobius strip, always returning to the same moment of tragedy. -Barry Schwabsky JACKIE FERRARA MICHAEL KLEIN INC. In her most recent exhibition, "Wallworks and Tableworks," Jackie Ferrara presented small-scale, rationalist wooden constructions. Built from layers of horizontal wooden slats, each of these seven works formed a pristine communal space that recalled traditional gathering places such as public baths and arenas. Red Pool House 288, Grey Pool House 292, and Yellow Pool House 289 (all 1993) each consist of a succession of rooms arranged laterally along a thin horizontal plane. While the actual function of each chamber is not clear, each space evokes the various elements of a public bath - pool, sauna, hot tub, etc. Other works, like Linwood Balcony 281, 1992, Arena 284, 1992, and Red Sands 290, 1993, are more akin to public follies, overconstructed to the point of dysfunctional paralysis. In Linwood Balcony 281, for example, a long, thin, and awkwardly proportioned balcony is elevated above an equally awkward, almost inaccessible courtyard; such an inhospitable space seems to defy practical use. While these table- and wallworks might be described as "models" or "maquettes," such terms suggest that the sculptures are ultimately subordinate to a future full-scale public commission. Far from baiting federal or corporate funding, however, Ferrara's works enable an interaction with the spectator that is as profound, if not more so, than that produced by their realization on a grander scale. On a larger scale, the works paradoxically become more objects of contemplation than examinations of the spectator's relationship to space, calling into question their potential success as public sites. With their modular, built-in benches and programmed walkways, they seem typical of the spaces found in corporate plazas, atriums, and shopping centers. Dependent on this tradition, they are particularly classicist in design and therefore, highly rational in conception. Flat planes, right angles, and sharp edges have never been incorporated comfortably into environments for living. Ferrara's wall- and tableworks raise the problem of the ineffectiveness of rationalist designs in actual human spaces. While many of these works are elegantly designed (the proportions in works like Yellow Pool House 289 or Red Pool House 288 are such that the height of a bench is the same as the height of four risers of a stairway), they fall into that centuries-old rationalist abyss of form over function. Not unlike Mies van der Rohe's plazas for New York's Seagram Building or Berlin's New National Gallery, these works function best as memory theaters, recalling the utopian follies of rationalist design. -Kirby Gookin MICHAEL JOO NORDANSTAD GALLERY PETZEL/BORGMANN GALLERY Though the title of Michael Joo's installation, Salt Transfer Cycle, 1993-1994, suggested a neat scientific diagram, the artist offered a complex, disjunctive work. Several videos, one of which was projected across the space, partly obstructed by aluminum poles, competed for attention. A scale model of a missile-shaped vehicle sat on the floor; rows of slaughterhouse meat trays and elk antlers lined the side walls. This calculated visual scatter reflected the deliberately contradictory impulses of Joo's work. Videos projected on the back wall traced the salt transfer itself: they showed Joo "swimming" through two-thousand pounds of powdered MSG, a salt substitute; in the next sequence the artist evolved from an aquatic organism to a four-legged creature to a man, as he crawled, stood, and then ran across the great Salt Flats in Utah. (A monitor below contrasted Joo's movements with that of the Blue Flame, the vehicle mentioned above, which broke world land-speed records in trials on the flats.) Finally, Joo appeared in a pastural setting in Korea, wild elk licking the salt off his naked body. The objects in the room wove a web of associations around the performances enacted on screen. Along one wall, the meat trays were inscribed with the words "potency," "longevity," "vigor," and "desire" (the Koreans harvest antlers, grinding them into powder to be used in homcopathic medicines that they believe can instill these qualities); on the opposite wall the trays displayed the Latin names for the chemical breakdown of the elk-antler extracts. The irreconcilability of East and West was but one in a series of oppositions underlying the installation. Other works played on internal contradictions: MSG is a toxic substance, though salt is crucial to the body's survival. Similarly, the "rationality" of the speed vehicle is undermined by its uselessness. Though Joo's own physical exertions (and the danger he faced in the approaching the elk) yield no "useful" end product-no information- they create a collection of haunting, if perplexing images. Joo has often zoomed in on the insidious ideologies that underlying gauging, measuring, and naming. In an earlier work called Slanty, the Angle of Identification, 1992, Joo created a pie chart based on eye angles, demonstrating that there is no consistent difference between those of Asians and Westerners. In the current installation, naming also came under fire: does scientific nomenclature illuminate or obfuscate reality? This question is addressed in Joo's own performances-in his scrambling of the "evidence" and in his presentation of seemingly disparate information and imagery in the closed quarters of the gallery space. He further complicated things by transferring the same information into various languages: raw materials, written words, sculptures that strain the limits of formal composition and provoke wayward metaphors, quasi-narrative video sequences that cycle back and repeat endlessly. In collecting "unprocessed," unassimilated elements, ripped out of the contexts that typically supply or reinforce their significance, Joo created a host of association that ricocheted off each other. This transfer of meaning, like the salt transfer, takes energy, demands the viewer's active engagement. Despite the many linear and circular elements in Salt Transfer Cycle, Joo offers no real lines or circles, no true continuity, merely a tangle of loose ends and seeming dead ends that if tipped off balance (like the aluminum rods) could prove toxic. -Lois Nesbitt Michael Mazur Mary Ryan Gallery Referring to an earlier exhibition of prints, Michael Mazur reflected that his skill with color comes from "observation heightened by imagination controlled by memory." The same could be said of this show of paintings, his most abstract works to date: while taken from nature, these images-which are perhaps most easily described as branches forms emerging from, crossing over, or resigned within deep and complicated light-posses a macabre excess that is controlled only by the artist's remarkable awareness of tension between two-and three-dimensionally, between painterliness and representation, between pattern and depth of field. Japanese painting has been a primary influence on Mazur in the creation of these paintings. He presents a quintessence of nature without inciting on Western ideal of perspective. Rather, the works seem to pre- September 1994 107
