'Now and Later' fails to offer viewers the full picture

By Peter Eleey

COURTESY YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY Matthew Barney's "Vaseline Dumbbell," complete with refrigeration unit.

The works of Jessica Stockholder, Ann Hamilton, and Matthew Barney, BR '89, are the highlights of the show's sculpture portion. Although their small pieces are pleasant, they suffer from Pissarro and Crow's sideshow-like treatment of this section. Hamilton, one of the youngest McArthur Grant recipients in history, is best known for her large, powerful installations, including covering a floor at the Dia Center with horse hair. Her smaller works, while intricate, lack the impact of the big ones; they seem almost like sketches. Ex-J.Crew model Barney is similarly underrepresented by his painfully small "Vaseline Dumbbell"; I was left wondering why his latest Cremaster film wasn't included.

Stockholder, too, is better recognized for her larger installations, but her smaller exhibition piece holds its own with a cool, leftover, ready-made aesthetic. Critics have raved about Stockholder, citing the importance of her mediation between abstract painting and assemblage sculpture, and the enticing nature of the tension she creates between colorful, luxurious surfaces and their quotidian origins.

Beyond the installation sculpture, the show contains several examples of paintings which test figurative boundaries. John Currin's "Pelletiere," cleverly hinting at clichés without succumbing to them, commands total attention. Its style appears classical, yet the picture's only space results from the tension of the matte ground and the glossy figure of a woman. The mismatched eyes of Currin's subject are just as difficult to resolve.

Lisa Yuskavage is another strong presence in the show; her large painting pulls off a dramatic still life space that reads like landscape. It would have been much more interesting, however, to display one of her doll-like sex toy female figures to contrast with Currin's more classical approach to a similar topic. Byron Kim's wonderful portraits on handmade paper prove that identity issues still provide ample material for visual discussion. Though the identity of paintings in art has become a hackneyed concern, Kim's works lend a new dimension to the controversy.

The photography is well-placed, with Dawoud Bey's parcelled portraiture sharing a wall with Currin's Botticelli-ish girl (the description makes the Venus connection for you). Lo Connor's sweeping large-format urban landscape is exquisite in its detail, and seeing it is well worth the trip. I was surprised, however, that rising star Phillip Lorca di Corcia's interestingly-lit photos were not included in the show.

One wonders how Pissaro and Crow decided on these artists. Hamilton and a few others seem like obvious choices, but it is unclear why many of the artists represented are more deserving than some who were excluded. One of sculptor Brian Tolle's cardboard desk multiples would have fit well, but perhaps he's too young. Or are Sylvia Mangold (whose work is placed in the "Then and Now" section) and Mel Bochner too old? Perhaps Bochner's fairly recent restrospective at the Gallery precluded his participation in the show. I have trouble discerning a significant thematic drive to the curatorial choices which, if made more evident, might have helped answer such questions.

The cross-listings on the wall tags are gratuitous, and merely treat the interested viewer to the type of didactic hand-holding usually reserved for a petting zoo. The cu-ratorial descriptions read like memos from Pissarro to Crow, deciding if they should have hung the subtle Wegner paintings next to the fascinating Brice Marden down the hall. The title of the exhibition, which has various permutations in Gallery literature, provides enough of a link between this and the prior installment of the show. Yet regardless of the curatorial mishaps, the works are still among the more exciting, and certainly the most contemporary, that the Gallery has shown in the last few years. The number of crucial Yale artists is far too large to contain in a room this size; I wanted to see more.

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