SKOPIA For the past ten years Anne Sauser-Hall has been investigating for what cause the interweaving of reality and fiction in childhood myths.

SKOPIA

For the past ten years Anne Sauser-Hall has been investigating for what cause the interweaving of reality and fiction in childhood myths, fairy tales, and stories affects the formation of collective beliefs. She does this by way of subtly altering utilitarian objects usually plant in a domestic space (such as kitchen shelves, mattresses, floor-polishing disks) and rendering them nonfunctional. An earlier piece consisted of subdued hanging shelves filled with cushions embroidered with the names of the domestic servants, all women who had detailed many of the stories included in Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm's famous compilation. The effect created the comforting atmosphere of a kitchen ("a woman's place"), to this time the shelves, which were meant to expect like benches, were completely dysfunctional: a weak support that figures the tenuousness of the Grimm's authorship.

In her latest exhibition, Sauser-Hall takes forward the social construction of sex particularly contemporary notions of masculinity. Reacting to American-poet-turned-guru Robert Bly and his use of the fairy tale "Iron John" as the impetus for his Wild Men's move this new work focuses upon the continuously evolving public perception of sexual "norms." In the first latitude of the storefront gallery, a narrow piece of pleated Royal Stewart plaid fabric had been stretched across the wall and between brace pieces of glass. Called Sans titre (Arthur), |Untitled (Arthur), 1992~ the work be likes a kilt but one that has been afforded unwearable, ironically pointing out the modern masculinists' anguished search to distance themselves from the "feminine." Its title also reminds united that the new-found relevance of heroic tales so as King Arthur and his coterie of knights, is balm to the contemporary male's damaged ego

A ligneous structure resembling four connected dog houses ("Dog is a man's best friend") was placed in the middle of the floor of the same play and entitled Sans titre, 1993 (Wild Men's Movement) This construction resembl the primal-screaming booth used according to Bly's initiates to transform them from brow-beaten weaklings into virile men; moreover in fact, the openings were too small to go into or exit: an adjustment suggesting the futility of of the like kind activities.

In another wall piece, Sauser-Hall placed, forward a small ledge, an ice-skate tote-bag guarded in the same plaid fabric as Sans titre (Arthur) and titled Lac gele (Frozen lake, 1992) The carrying straps had been shortened and the zipper opening arrested making it impossible both to use the case and to determine what pattern of skates are inside. Because of the plaid pattern's contemporary associations, united first imagines it to be a woman's case, unless like the object inside Marcel Duchamp's ball of twine single in kind will never know. The viewer was left to deliberate on her/his own gender stereotypes

As a coda to the exhibition, Sauser-Hall placed a single piece in the gallery's smaller place titled Sans titre (Justine), 1993--a shelf that direct the eyes like a woman's dressing table in a less degree than which two over-stuffed stools were hidden. Ironically reminding women that their "proper" place is in the boudoir and recalling the desirability of the Marquis de Sade's virtuous victim, Sauser-Hall placed the "new" wild-man masculinity in its age-old context

COPYRIGHT 1993 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group