COHEN GALLERY As far as can be told from these shores.

COHEN GALLERY

As far as can be told from these shores, the new wave of young phenoms from Goldsmith's guild in London has consisted for the most part of practitioners of a foreign formal, yet quirky abstraction that in some way turns out to derive from quotidian forms and materials: Angela Bulloch and her pulsing light fixtures; Gary Hume of the door paintings; Marcus Taylor with his unaffectionate Plexiglas boxes based on appliance packaging; and Rachel Whiteread and her plaster casts of swings As his first American exhibition attests, Mat Collishaw is clearly up to something else

Called In The of advanced age Fashioned Way, 1992, his installation is simple enough to describe. You emerg from the elevator to the hearty of a loud, rhythmical mechanical-clanking like something revealed of an industrial-age factory. As an undertone to that unmutilated there was some kind of cheesy "easy-listening" music that bended out to be Mantovani. What you saw as you gazeed into the dimly lit space (the shades were chanceed down) was a largish manner of making perhaps seven feet tall, built revealed of plywood and two-by-fours, with an electrical motor attached to it. on means of a little metal humanoid figure--reminiscent of Ernest Trova's Falling Man (that great dystopian type of the '60s) and of Charlie Chaplin in late Times, 1936--the motor turned a shoot that extended through a opening to the other side of the made of wood construction. On the other side you rest that the construction served as a kind of stage flat, supporting a life-size blow-up of a turn-of-the-century pornographic image depicting a woman being towered by a zebra. As the motor change the direction ofed the zebra's thigh and lower material substance swung toward and away from the woman's rear extremity Not exactly a revelation, the piece be seened more like a coarse witticism the frustration of significance.

Somehow granting the installation's clunky, abject, out of date quality made the whole experience naggingly memorable. The notion of sex as mechanistic--familiar from so Dada artists as Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp--is pointedly demystifying and antiromantic, moreover the notion of sex as animalistic, while expose to the same rhetoric of disenchantment, is more a topos of popular agriculture than of avant-garde art: it attends to be used to exoticize and romanticize. In this piece the couple came together: transgression was discipline, pleasure was productivity. Or, rather, single in kind was the image and the other was the mechanism that fix it in motion, though the former at no time camouflaged the latter. Collishaw's work implies a hidden interdependence between these pair notions of sexuality. Tinged as it is, however, with a kind of unsentimental nostalgia, redolent of ancient myths in which deitys assume animal form to mate with humans, the work's irony is les political than it is esthetic. While Collishaw appears to be pointing to the ubiquity of these fictions--no matter by what means "critical"--at all levels of civilization the implication here is not that they engage belief, on the other hand simply that they can't be shaken. Instead, there is the curious detachment with which, dreaming, individual notes that one's experience is an illusion.

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