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Reviews

the throne of expressive freedom for the servitude of engaged dialogue with the culture. It's tough, especially when one knows that Cooling is quite capable of lyric naturalism, and Saunders has a shaman-like facility for drawing out lifelikeness that just won't quit. But to deny the self and restrain one's language to vocabularies intellected rather than just felt is to make a powerful statement. In the hands of a master like David Salle the texts go beyond those found on the printed page and the cinema to constructs that obtrude into "real" life: revolving doors, cubical rooms, baby's blocks. Meaning has become so engineered, says Salle, that primal instincts and actions lose their inherent violence and become virtually lost in a constantly turning wheel of action and reaction.

Religion might once have been one of those primal instincts, but as Glier implied, it's a glamor item now, an object that, once desired, is a captured prize and can be displayed. Artist Steve Smith abhors organized religion. He evangelizes its fakery in his reliefs and constructions which are as beautiful as they are malicious.

When Smith (SPACES) talks about his art, he continually prefaces remarks thus: "I'm obsessed by...." Smith's obsessions, like Glier's, Salle's and Rothenberg's, are deeply felt, honest, rock bottom. When such feeling lies behind art-making, when self-analysis and self-structuring precede the first mark, then the art can strike home. Without it, Mr. Dine, expressionistic brushwork stirs up a tempest in a teapot.

1Graham W. J. Beal, Jim Dine: Five Themes, Minneapolis, 1984, pp. 43, 47.

2Face It: 10 Contemporary Artists, catalogue of exhibition, pp. 14.

Geraldine Wojno Kiefer is Dialogue Corresponding Editor for Cleveland.

Performing Seduction

Michael Smith Performance/Contemporary Arts Center/ Cincinnati/14 September

By Sandye Utley

[[Image]]
Michael Smith, in performance as "Baby Ikky".

Cincinnati is fortunate to have become something of a regular stop on the performance art "circuit" due largely to the presence of The Contemporary Arts Center. Since the Eat Art exhibition of the mid-70s with performances by Pat Oleszko and Martin Mull (an early performance-to-comedy crossover), the CAC has presented works by Laurie Anderson, Klaus Nomi, and Charlemagne Palestine among others. More recently, two of the "hottest" names in American performance art, Eric Bogosian and Michael Smith, have been in residence. Touted in publications ranging from Vanity Fair to the Village Voice, both have been compared to legendary show biz figures (Bogosian to Lenny Bruce; Smith to Woody Allen). But more importantly, both have created a larger following by working in theaters and comedy clubs in addition to artspots. Not unexpectedly, it was Bogosian with whom Smith's performance was compared by audience members lucky enough to have seen both.

Eric Bogosian's Fun House, presented 27 April, owes much to the social consciousness embodied by Richard Pryor and Lily Tomlin. Without benefit of costumes and only a table, chair, and telephone as props, Bogosian peoples his fantasy world with cogently drawn characters from the urban landscape. Replete with nuance, they range from a pushy insurance salesman dialing for dollars to a street savvy, three card monte hustler to an "is the gay / is he straight?" male stripper and more. Setting the audience up like a con man's "mark," Bogosian's potent portrayals force us to laugh (through nervousness or otherwise); then just as suddenly, in that extra long beat of time, they can cause us to feel shame for laughing, move us to tears, and to feel the shock of knowing that we are involved, like it or not. Acutely observed bundles of energy and contradiction, his characters oblige us to respond.

If Bogosian is a tightly coiled spring, tensely waiting release, Michael Smith is more a Slinky, loose and meandering. Known as well for funny videotapes,