Daphnie Wright,
Indeed, Indeed, 1998
tinfoil, glue, 243 x 457 x 243 cm

The theme that runs through the show is a sense of alienation that occurs not so much through manifestations of identity politics, but from the disembodied representational stance and the artists’ psychological estrangement form being cultural outsiders. While the international art world is engaged with works that are flippant, full of irony, and iconoclastic, it is difficult to see the “0044”’s artists as simply following an intellectual trend. Instead, the exhibited incongruities and impertinences are an expressive means exercised by the artists that give voice to their alien political and psychological situations. These artists are part of a professional diaspora in a land where they are not necessarily welcome. In the catalogue, many artists discuss people turning off to them upon hearing their Irish accents. Such an undoing of the Socratic primacy of speech ideal has forced these artists to “speak” in a subversive visual or physical language. I can think of no group of artists better suited to these ironic expressions.

The most legibly political work in the show is Cross Examination III, 1999, by Anne Carlisle. The piece, composed of five lightboxes stacked in ziggurat form, has lights which flash through gels with printed words. Terms including “subordinate,” “insinuate,” “eliminate,” and “frustrate” all indicate the presence of a state power which acts upon individual people. Such authority is represented on the gels with pictures of an eye (surveillance), a fist (physical domination), and a helmeted soldier or policeman (the state’s instrument). Paul Seawright’s four large photographs are also overly political as they display contemporary Ireland’s point of contention. Three works, titled Fire, Belfast series, 1997, offer aestheticized formalization of the charred no-man’s land between Northern Irish Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods. One piece shows a charred fallen roof section that has become a landscape element perspectivally receding into space. Seawright’s images are the Irish equivalent of Anselm Kiefer’s monumental German works dealing with similar scorched earth and the hope of renewal coming from the ashes.

The sculptures in 0044 communicate transitional instability through metaphor, satire and an indeterminate symbolism which prevents literal readings. Cecily Brennan’s enticing cast stainless steel pieces suggest renewal through injury or corrective surgery. The prosthetic Hinge-Ons for Bad Days, 1999, are protective leg armor with wounds and sutured cuts depicted on the exterior. Tina O’Connell’s Fire Bricks, 1998, refers to the Tate gallery’s controversial 1976 acquisition of Carl Andre’s 120 firebricks, a purchase which raised public outcry at the exorbitant price paid for such common material with taxpater’s money. O’Connell’s strategy is to call attention to the alchemy that is a common tenet of consumer society–the transformation of worthless material into valuable objects . Her 120 firebricks (which one never actually sees) are individually wrapped in chic handbags suitably emblazoned with the “firebricks” brand name. The branding indicates that the consumer’s relationship to an object is an embodiment realized through ownership. O’Connell reveals Andre’s notorious work as a fiscal performance. In her other works O’Connell transforms the precious and valuable into ostensibly marginal detritus. Her Waterford Crystal pieces, 1999, are, indeed, melted Waterford Crystal pooled into corners, and placed under pipes and a drinking fountain to appear as leaked water (punningly, little water fords). Despite this precious substance’s transformation and relegation, it maintains its beauty and allure. Kathy Prendergrast’s work is elegant in concept successfully fusing intellect with the palpable. Her The End and the Beginning II, 1997, turns kinship into kinshape with her family line represented in a spool of human hair from three generations. The End and the Beginning I fuses a baby bonnet with old age’s white hair, thus offering a condensation of human life.

As might be expected, notions of political boundaries and land permeate 0044. All of the references to landscape in the show, however, voice displacement rather than location. APrendergrast's pencil on paper map works, Lakes of the World and Rivers of the World, 1999, hark back to the dematerialized cartography and site works of 1970’s America. Prendergrast subverts the disembodied cartographic colonial tool. Rivers’... seemingly arbitrary scribbles and Lakes’... biomorphic forms show the futility of representing dominion, and the simulacra that precedes and shapes the political.Indeed, Indeed, 1998, by Daphne Wright is an installation of hollow tinfoil geological forms evocative of Britain and Ireland’s most scenic shores. Small foil gulls attached to the constructions give a scale to these otherwise biomorphic human sized forms. Siobhan Hapaska's Land, 1998, is a slick-surfaced biomorphic extraterrestrial landscape populated only by epiphytic plants, making any viewer a stranger in a strange land.

The most powerful works in the exhibition use technology to force the viewer into disjunctive perceptive modes. Mo White’s video installation deals with the body’s fracturing, but in terms of fetish. At the Table of Fine Graces’ spoken component tells of “the experience of looking” in which the artist wants “this body to stand in for that body....” The artist juxtaposes her prostrate body floating by the screen’s bottom with images of finger biting lips, and rubbed eyes and bellybuttons. Andrew Kearney’s Isn’t It Normal, 1999, utterly displaces the viewer who can’t decipher the relationship between overwhelming amplified ambient sounds and aluminum racks of irregularly flashing light bulbs. This work inundates the senses and emotions not only through harsh noise and light, but also through the alienating lack of cause and effect. Frances Hegarty’s video installation is the exhibition’s literal and emotional center (the loud soundtrack actually gives the exhibition a pulse). Auto Portrait #1, 1999, is a narrative sequence of strobes increasing in cadence. The artist claws at herself until under increasingly bright light she becomes skeletal and dematerialized. Later in the sequence, Hegarty mimes her rematerialization, grabbing substance from the void and putting herself back together as the strobe tempo slows.

Even the most formally oriented works in this exhibition embody a tension between being and perception. Maud Cotter’s monolithic Air, 1999, seems impenetrable at a distance, but with its corrugated cardboard construction seen from the edges, it becomes diaphanous close up. The sculpture suggests dematerialization and fragility. Air and space more properly defines the sculpture than does material facticity. Eilís O’Connell’s steel cable weavings make up an organic architectural geometry not unlike Frank Gehry’s buildings. Nyama series #6, 1999, seems to fold in upon itself and reveals a hole in the top which pierces the object’s solidity. John Gibbon’s works are also steel lattices. Beginning, 1995, offers a large barrier, a literal and sculptural fence reminiscent of cell bars that suggest the real barriers between Northern Irish neighborhoods or political dissenters’ imprisonments.

This exhibition’s painters present abstract visions which inevitably collapse into mimesis. Nicholas May’s two 1999 works titled Liminal appear photographic, like Edward Westin’s sand patterns. Upon closer examination, however, the indexical disappears, and one is drawn to themetallic powder and matte bituminous resin’s materiality. These materials are manipulated by the artist in a painting (drying) process whereby the metals and bitumen separate and congeal in abstract patterns. Elizabeth Magill’s oil paintings are large abstractions brought back from the sublime by visual mimetic cliches. View (with Eagle), 1997, offers “serious” paint nuancing. Washes on the canvas and layers of sensuous blue and black tones come crashing down to earth with the inclusion of a raptor in flight and a rhinestone evening star. Forest Edge I’s Rothkoesque paint handling loses its pretensions to heroics with the inclusion of tree and telephone pole forms on a horizon otherwise composed of painterly touches. Mark Francis’s Gyration (Pulse g.+bwr+b), 1999, offers an electron microscopic vision created through oil paint. This work is grounded in the look of photorealism but isn’t photorealistic per se. A flat black line punctuated by black and beige dots are wet brushed into a slick red surface thus giving the impression of photographic graininess. Like the rest of the artists in 0044, these painters offer a perceptive shift that leaves one in the state of indeterminacy caused by cultural transplantation.by cultu

William V. Ganis

0044 is at P.S.1, New York, June 20 - August 29, 1999