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each other, each print being a version of the other. We are confronted with visual ambiguities compounded by the system of dots and vectors indicating real and imaginary force fields. Both sets of work present the viewer with aspects of time. The process of punching holes is rhythmical and steady, yet the dot drawings teem with energy. The television images are caught frozen in time on film, quivering with static and technical ghosts, and confounding us further with Pendell's notations of an energy crystallized, recycled, and filled with potential. - Lorraine Gilligan Wiki de Saint Phalle (Gimpel & Weitzenhoffer Gallery, November 29-January 21) Niki de Saint-Phalle has been making her brightly colored, earthy "nanas" since 1965. They are rich in their plastic form because they combine the funky materialism of Pop Art with a more ritualistic (iconographic) imagery. Her recent show at Gimpel of seven small sculptures and as many prints did not include any new work, and so was a good (albeit small) sampling of her active career from 1965 to 1972. (Rumor has it that since 1972, when she stopped makin art, Saint Phalle has been working on a monumental architectural project.) The earliest work shown, a dancing papier mache nana suspended from the ceiling, was covered with hearts made from fabric, rope and string. It expressed all the wild and pure fantasy around which Saint-Phalle's world revolves. The remaining fiberglass nanas, naked or in sundresses, were small studies, each painted with a solid Day-Glo undercoat and then decorated with equally bright stripes and flowers. The most recent works were [[photo caption// Niki de Saint Phalle, Nana, 1971-71. Cast polyester. 23"h. Photo: eeva-inkeri. /photo caption]] animals (a serpent, owl and camel) which appear frequently in her narratives. They were bright and inviting but lacked the intrinsic charm of the lumpy ladies. The prints included helped amplify Saint'Phalle's obsession with her father and being loved, but added little power to the show. The power came directly from the nanas-as totally contemporary, yet mythical beings-and Saint-Phalle's unique handling of them. - Jill Dunbar Doris Ulmann "A Survey of Her Life's Work in Photography" (Marcuse Pfeifer Gallery. November 1-December 23) Doris Ulmann's life in photography was spent documenting what one observer has called "the vanishing American peasant." Ulmann photographed simple people with en eye for complexity of character. Some of her subjects are black, some white; most are rural, poor in goods, and old. We see them at work with looms, churns, tubs, ropes, fishnets. Or we see them at rest, sitting with a book. Often we see them framed by the fences, houses, and windows of their wooden environment, already old, soon to vanish. Many of Ulmann's contemporaries working for the FSA made harsh, sharp-focus pictures documenting the grimness of Appalachian and other rural poverty. Ulmann's photographs are soft-focus, and show the true portrait artist's emphasis on the individual characters of her subjects. The photographs are highly composed, but never obtrusively so. Ulmann's hand has entered the picture to arrange things so her subject will speak. And so, looking at her pictures, one is struck not by photographic effects, but by the eloquence of a shirt, its simple dignity, the way it falls across a pair of thin, straight shoulders. Or one is moved by the tilt and shape of a plain hat, the touchingly high style of it. There is a gentle understatement in her presentation of her subjects-our examination is invited, our scrutiny invoked, but Ulmann's camera does not deign to dazzle us with its virtuoso superiority as an observer. At its sharper focus, a camera's scrutiny is so much more intense than our own, so much less editorial, that we are often shocked into passivity by the reality it presents to us. Ulmann's softer focus solicits an active eye that will work to penetrate the ever so slight haze her subjects are surrounded by, the envelope of the artist's respect for her subjects' reserve. Ulmann's soft focus grants privacy, recognizes the inwardness of her subjects' lives. And in making surfaces speak a little less, she allows what is beneath them-the character of her subjects-to speak a little more to the careful observer. Like Edward S. Curtis, with his massive study of the North American Indian, Ulmann dedicated herself and her resources to documenting her subjects, producing over 10,000 negatives of them. Her dedication has produced work that stays in the mind's eye, not disturbing with the memory of intense sensation, but expanding our sense of the possibilities for courage, dignity, and style in difficult circumstances. - Patricia Eakins Polly Hope (Kornblee Gallery, Dec. 17-Jan. 18) Is quilting an art? There are many answers possible, i.e., folk art of craft, but the ultimate test is what one does with any medium. Polly Hope makes quilts on a grand scale that are as engaging as paintings. They are sometimes just narrative pictures as Indian Connections in which she shows a Viscount Hope (a family connection?) standing next to an Indian gentleman with a small black man on a rope, and a dead tiger at their feet. In the background there are limousines, an English lady, two Indian women, a snake-charmer, two hanged men swinging from a gallows and an elephant. As you can see this is quite a detailed piece of work. Other times her quilts become more like sculptures in which figures of animals and people are sewn together to make a large wall hanging. A wonderful erotic quilt that seems connected to the shotgun tradition shows a fornicating couple in a Japanese interior being watched from the doorway by a maid. The penis is done in glittery lame and the piece has an elegance that is marred only by questionable drawing in the woman's legs. If only life were perfect-but Polly Hope's quilts were quite impressive. -Robert Sievert [[photo caption//Polly, Hope, Red Flowers (31), 1977. Quilted and embroidered tapestry. 90x86' (detail). Womanart/Spring '78
