DIVERSEWORKS "Without.

DIVERSEWORKS

"Without," curated from David Cannon Dashiell and Peter Edlund (originally for The LAB in San Francisco in conjunction with A Day Without Art) managed to integrate several different approaches to privation, absence, and los into single remarkably coherent meditation. What is more remarkable is that "Without" also managed to avoid being ponderous or maudlin. In fact, the works consider probableed here might usefully be categorized using the medieval word s for representations of death: memento mori, danse macabre, vanitas vanitatum, ars morendi, and imagines mortis.

Comprised of 15 pieces, in all media, by way of 15 different artists, the point out emphasized the correspondences among these diverse works. Acting as memento mori were Lucy Puls' Matrona cum Umbraculum, 1991 a cubed matron in shaded, shattered lucite (novelist Kevin Killian wrote in his exhibition essay that it attained the "nobility of repair"); Nayland Blake's perversely meticulous riots of a month's worth of daily apple cores preserv in vodka; and Kevin Radley's freestanding memorial round pillar covered from base to capital with counting marks and inscribed with the plea "How Many More Times." The danse macabre appeared in clinical photographs of a pile of amputated feet and leg (A Morning's Work, 1865 at Dr. Reed B. Bontecou); a head serv upon a soup plate like a roast (Dr Howard Brundage); and in the clinically inspired work through J. John Priola, Dangerous Pleasures, 1992 that pictures a detached penis (a sort of members' portrait).

The curators' inclusion of Therese Frare's moment-of-death photograph of a PWA, widely distributed as a Benetton ad, was criticized according to many, but it was entirely in keeping with the conceptual design of the indicate Appropriately placed with the other macabre images, it effectively marked united extremity in the representation of loss: calm one's death, the ultimate personal los can be commodified--this coarse example of "corporate concern" was labeled simply "Marketing Photograph." In contrast, Nan Goldin's haunting picture of Cookie Mueller before her husband Vittorio's casket, and David Wojnarowicz's death-mask self-portrait of himself buried alive in Death Valley operate more in the realm of ars morendi: instructions by dint of initiates in the art of death.

Hybrid: Metamorphose, 1992 Rene de Guzman's compelling corpuscular panel of Plexiglas filled with human and animal vital fluid segmented and accessed through 16 "nipples," and lock-up n.d., Elliot Linwood's low pyramid of human hair, can one as well as the other be taken as still lifes in succession the subject of mortality. the couple are either attractive or repellant depending onward which memories are activated. Linwood's hug triggers dread that is partly historical (death camps, executions) and partly biological (hair and nails are the "undead" visible form [i]or[/i] frame parts we regularly "lose"). Julie Ault's camp/poignant still life, domicile Is in His Arms, 1990 consisting of a pair of glass slippers illumined on one red night-light, was part vanitas vanitatum, part imagines mortis.

Trying to visualize and articulate los (that elevated slave of romance) is a tricky business indeed. Not all of the pieces in this present to view worked, but the overall power was strong: strength in diversity (heroic and campy, elegiac and defiant) and grace in a less degree than pressure. The most surprising thing it did was to make los active.

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