"psycho and other gob smackers"
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30 JANUARY - 20 FEBRUARY 1997: Every Little Detail LYELL BARY Every Little Detail the show is called, but what is there to see? There are three titled works with enlargements made of each. The Long Goodbye is composed of a series of phrases taken from an article about the late American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Psycho and Other Gobsmackers is a list of 10 "gobsmacking" moments from popular movies. Can Prozac Be the LSD of the '90s? is a continuation of Bary's earlier work, in which he traced the grain of plywood panels to produce a kind of silhouette or shadow. The line in each case is a firm but slightly wavering arabesque, undoubtedly deriving from the psychedelic poster art of the '60s and beyond that from the symbolisme of the teens and '20s (think of the signs at the station entrances of the Paris Metro, for example). But look closer, as these details urge us to do, and what do we find? Like one of those infinitely "deep" diagrams from fractal geometry, the same insistent pattern appears again and again, a fold or pleat occurring at greater and greater resolution each time. "Raiders" becomes "S" becomes the bend at the top of a letter. It is as though we were somehow staring into the very fabric of things, the warp and woof of the universe itself. Like forcing us to look down the wrong end of the telescope, the uncanny inversion Bary performs is that he makes it seem not that these are details of a larger world, but that a world is contained in each of these details. Beyond their allusions to Sherrie Levine and even Matisse, we would call these works Baroque in their fascination with the curve, the fold, the textures and surfaces of everyday life. Rex Butler |
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"psycho and other gob smackers" |