Elizabeth Cohen’s Strap-ons
While analyzing Medieval and Renaissance carnival traditions Mihail Bahtin describes the grotesque body as a body in making, a body that builds and creates a different body in order to, at least briefly, achieve a sense of closeness and cosmic fusion between man and everything surrounding him. That which we recognize as grotesque or what should be grotesque by nature of the inclusion of some of its elements unites the 3 segments (video, photographs and objects) that compose this exhibition.
The video “Mermaid Parade”, a documentary of the traditional parade held on Coney Island in Brooklyn, depicts a spontaneous event that welcomes everyone who wants to take part, all kinds of costumes or entertainment. This bizarre public celebration dedicated to the mermaids preserves a true essence of carnival, untouched by the mighty tentacles of Capital and Politics that so much love to merge with all sorts of mass merrymaking.
In the sophisticated photographs installed opposite the video screening we recognize a cliché of fashion photography – the embodiment of the ideal of the emotional coldness and aloofness of a contemporary woman. Fashion, being a reflection of life style, always includes status codification. While analyzing differences in language in every stratum of society, Pierre Bourdieu points out that there is an aspiration for distinction in each group through its relationship to language. In fact, it is a different use of language related to the body that exposes each stratum. “This sensation is impressed into the deepest regions of the corporal disposition: the entire body through its posture responds to the tension of the market.”
The bodies in the photographs appear dominant, claustrophobic in their self-oriented care and thus self-sufficient. Graciously and frivolously they flirt with sprouts that protrude from the felt “bandages”. A sudden evocation of Beuys is unavoidable, but the entire aura is completely opposite to the one emanated by his monumental ideas of a return to body heat and energy. The images of the bodies by Elizabeth Cohen could rather be compared with Deleuze/Guattari’s “craving machines” or “bodies without organs” which is implicated by the nondescript tailor’s dummies. Appendages sewn on and shaped as bodily parts, small animals or medical tools, no longer refer to the organism with phantasmatic function – meaning a unity lost and possible future totality.
Artificial metamorphoses show through in each work, ones that don’t belong to carnival humour yet use the same elements. With a good dose of irony that is not short of wit (maybe closer to black humour) the works of Elizabeth Cohen discretely reflect that which is close or remote, an already existing reality in which science and technology watch over the human body and agitatedly worry how to “improve the quality of life”.
Iva R. Janković
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Michale Talley’s Baggage
The procedure appears to be simple. For instance, at the bottom of the brown suitcase Michael Talley attached a sheet of clean white paper on which he placed the self-propelled, rotating, tripod drawing device of his own design and construction. Its body consists of an inexpensive battery powered electric motor on which 3 aluminium handles are screwed into a star shape arrangement. The entire device stands on the 3 drawing cartridges filled with red, green and golden yellow ink. Michael switched it on and it started its haphazard dance bouncing off the sides of the suitcase while marking its path on the paper. Then the suitcase was closed, placed in the crate together with the other suitcases, themselves containing different drawing devices. According to Michael’s observation our drawing device stopped halfway between Brooklyn and JFK Airport. The rest of the drawing is a result of the convulsions caused by the movements of the delivery vehicle, waiting at the customs terminal, loading into the plane, its take off, flight and landing, unloading, manipulation at the customs in Zagreb, transport to the city… . Finally 10 suitcases were laid on the floor of the Križić Roban Gallery and when opened they ceased to record a diary of their travel (until they commence their return).
The moment in which the drawings came to light, with the opening of the suitcases, was truly exciting to Michael and the rest of us. The results were unpredictable and though most of the drawings surpassed our expectations, their visual quality had no relevance to the aesthetic evaluation of the “Air Cargo Series” concept. Different devices that Michael Talley built into the luggage, ranging from the relatively complex as described “Air Cargo #3” to the simpler ones as “Air Cargo #8” (a golf ball mediates between the paper and glass laboratory pipettes filled with black ink, while the voyage itself causes their interaction) point to different issues. Talley is concerned with the collision of the constructed structure with the unpredictable randomness of the indifferent surroundings. While affinity and imagination in the execution of the basically mechanical objects is evident, deeper meaning reaching to a possible paradigm of reality inflicts itself upon the spectator. But one might as well concentrate on the more cheerful aspects. The entire concept of the exhibition that completes itself during the voyage to its destination in different parts of the world, is practical and a witty answer to the demanding organizational problems of the transport of exhibitions and the accompaning bureaucratic customs procedures. The ironic idea of the crate that contains smaller containers from the artist’s collection of paraphernalia plays with the haughtiness of the scientific research. One just has to visualize all of the crate’s interior activity. Noisy or silent yet completely unusefull seismography of the voyage consistently (pencils, flomasters, pastels, cartridges, etc fixed onto the skaters and sensitive springs, or plainly thrown to roll freely inside the suitcase) records volumes of undecipherable data.
The artist’s inclination towards parody in the “Air Cargo Series” is also shared in the video “Road Test”. Michael, a passionate car fan, redesigned the Chevrolet utility vehicle adding one more pair of back wheels and reshaping all 4 of them into a semicircular form. During the endless driving around over the dusty Brooklyn lot, this useless prototype comically tosses about and wriggles under the alert and neutral camera eye. The artefacts from the Michael Talley workshop embody creativity in its purest and purposeless form. Without an evident wish to provoke they point to the essential problem of civilization, the obsession with utility that slowly but surely devours science, technology and art.
Branko Franceschi
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Elizabeth Cohen
elzcohen@aol.com
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Michael Talley
mctal@aol.com
