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C21 The New York Times, Friday, June 18, 1993 Art in Review -Subtlety to stridency -Off the wall and in your face, engagingly -Fabulous fancies of an existential nebbish. 'Howardena Pindell' 'Abstraction of Metaphor 1972-1992' Kenkeleba House 214-216 East Second Street Lower East Side Through June 23 'Howardena Pindell' 'Social and Political Work 1980-1993' Alternative Museum 594 Broadway, at Houston Street SoHo Through Wednesday In her prolific career, Howardena Pindell has moved from work that relies on formal nuances to a passionate involvement with questions of identity and politics. These two shows trace the evolution of Ms. Pindell's art over the last 20 years, with Kenkeleba House offering a retrospective of her earlier paintings and collages, while the Alternative Museum features later works on political and social themes. In the 1970's, Ms. Pindell often mixed confettilike bits of paper produced by a hole punch into the pastel surfaces of paintings done on unstretched canvas. A few early pieces suggest the influence of Minimalism, but more often these colorful, textured paintings achieve an all-over, decorative quality. Gradually, Ms. Pindell added other techniques to her formal repertory, among them applying paint in regular crosshatched patterns and cutting up canvases and loosely stitching them back together. In collages made after trips to Japan, Egypt and other countries, she stretched out postcards by cutting them into strips and filling in the gaps with painted renderings of the same scenes. Unfortunately, this roster of devices never really adds up to a distinctive style. The quiet exuberance found in a few early collages is lost in Ms. Pindell's later paintings, and her photocollages do little to transform the original tourist views. At the Alternative Museum, Ms. Pindell offers works that are explicitly autobiographical and political. Charged words and phrases march across the canvases; while the sense of outrage behind these strident works is manifest, it is not always clear what issues they address. Occasionally, Ms. Pindell finds a powerful metaphor for her concerns. In a recent maintain, names of African slaves float above a landscape of chains; clustered in the ocean in the foreground are the name of New World ports that early slaves were brought to. But despite such occasional successes, most of the workers here seem strident and unfocused. CHARLES HAGEN [[image]] Part of Howardena Pindell's "Slavery" at the Alternative Museum. and 70's. There is something almost appalling about these "conflations," as he called them, emerging aggressively from the wall, antlers and phallic forms protruding seashells, glass eyes, metal tools, dice and bits of driftwood stewing together like flotsam washed in by a tide. More remarkable, though,is the way the work settles down and begins to tell its arcane but purposeful symbolic stories. "Going"(1972), one of seven works in this engaging show, is a shallow shadowbox construction recalling the jewel-encrusted shrines found in Spanish churches (Ossorio central image is not a religious icon, however, but a squat male figure with his back to the viewer, apparently exiting the sculpture from behind. He is surrounded by a tiny mass-produced Jesus, an animal skull suggesting a tribal mask, a slender, poised brass Buddha's hand, plastic models of human intestines, wooden mallets and splotches of blood-red paint. The bottom edge of the picture is framed by an old, long-handled scythe, underscoring the references to mortality that are the theme of the piece. Ossorio was, by all accounts, a bright, loquacious, inquisitive man with an sharmp eye for bizarre facts, poetic images and things spiritual. All of these characteristics are evident in these sculptures, and there couldn't be a better moment for looking at them. Visiually engross their blend of Old World Roma tholicism, non-Western art, ism (Jean Dubuffet was friend), action painting (so son Pollock), tourist tcho found materials all add gent version of the mu so much in the air in behind, reahces for his gun; in the other, he looks through binoculars while his shadow has sprouted antlers and seems about to attack him. Other works offer allegories about the artist's life. A painter in a rocking chair reaches out with his brush blank canvas, but the easel rockers too, and the canvas re tantalizingly our of reach. In the pointed work here, Mr. Hock away at a typewriter fed with tinuous scroll of paper while car alter ego sits across reading from the paper Mr. Hocks prints tures large, and colon parent oil paints aged look. Occassionally obscure or other many other smart bite.
Transcription Notes:
I didn't know what to do with the words that were cut out.
