Millenial art: tarred,feathered, hung todry

ANDREW HEID/YH Gallery reconstructed, first floor deconstructed before your eyes.

Forget the Yale University Art Gallery's (YUAG) messy upstairs remodeling. The real story is on the first floor with the exhibition Postmodern Transgressions: Artists Working Beyond the Frame. Richard S. Field and Joachim Pissarro, Postmodern Transgressions' curators, describe their 90 selections as work that deliberately blurs the accepted limits among forms of visual and textual dialogue, incorporating media including wax, tin, fluorescent lights, burlap, steam irons, thread, rubber, macaroni, feathers, snakeskin, flannel, pins, and blood. In the show's catalogue, the artwork is suggested as a possible response to artist Allan Kaprow's assertion that "[Jackson] Pollock left artists at a point where they must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or...the vastness of 42nd Street." The show's voice is the artist as his or her own unique projectionist. If the resulting din is a bit much, it's still worth the listen.

Postmodern Transgressions is a vastly entertaining if not cohesive experience. There's a pile of 121 red sponges. There's a Ronald Jones photogravure. There's a gorgeous Luis Gonzalez Palma diptych. There are vastly disparate, impressive works by Mel Bochner, Eva Hesse, Chris Burden, Chuck Close, ART '64, Robert Mapple-thorpe, Alice Neel, and James Rosenquist. Just don't come looking for strong thematic ties between pieces—you'll be disappointed. This is not an exhibit with an encompassing concept, and the varying messages and levels of meaning among the artwork are dizzying. There is some orientation: these are all late-20th century artists working in non-traditional amalgamations of media and subject. The term "transgressions" suggests that all the artists have an agenda beyond typical representation, allowing for alternative, groundbreaking interpretations. The picture frame is no longer a boundary; this is art without limits, and it can get pretty wacky.

This light-hearted diversity is a refreshing change from YUAG exhibits like Worlds Within Worlds: The Richard Rosenblum Collection of Chinese Scholar Rocks, which graced this same gallery space for much of last year. Though a beautiful show, it was, in the end, merely a collection of rocks, redundant and unyielding. Post-modern Transgressions offers far more variety and accessibility, especially to people without extensive art backgrounds. Much of the collection of photography, paintings, built objects, and sculptures is visually appealing and evocative—though pleasure isn't always achieved without a struggle.

The found-object sculptural work of James Magee invites you to listen to a tape to hear its title, forcing the viewer to actively work toward comprehension. Lesley Dill's melding of poetry and photography in "A Word Made Flesh" is just as engaging, and suggests a spiritual awareness. Her three photolithographs incorporate parts of Emily Dickinson poems, illustrating, as the poet Charles Simic commented, the "intimate immensity of consciousness." In one photograph, Dill prints, "The Soul has bandaged moments," across the naked back of a woman. In the next print, "I am afraid to own a body—I am afraid to own a soul" is scrawled down a neck. The final photograph is of two hands with the quote, "I felt my life with both my hands, to see if it was there." The imprinting of word upon image heightens the message's impact, and the isolated body stills and fragments of poems, along with the thread sewn into the paper, indicate the piecing together of identity.

The viewer's interaction with Magee's and Dill's works exemplifies perhaps the most peculiar aspect of this exhibit—its mix of the weighty and the whimsical. Even when artists are working in similar media, their messages are often incredibly disparate. Adrian Piper beautifully addresses issues of race and identity with the photo series "Food for the Spirit," while Duane Michal's "Take One and See Mt. Fujimaya" tells a deadpan story of an erotic fantasy with photos and handwritten text.

There is, as well, a danger of sensory overload. With so much vying for your attention, it is very easy to miss some of the quieter beauties, like Yizhak Utzy Elyashiv's Handful of Grains Map, which assembles wheat grains and steel plates on delicate paper.

While looking at the exhibit, I overheard two particularly loud viewers commenting on the Magee pieces. "Who do you have to know to get your art in here?" one asked the other angrily. "Who the hell buys these?" Her friend answered, "No one buys these, that's why they're here." Postmodern Transgressions offers plenty of reasons why art at the close of the century is still important. It serves as both tool and instigator of our own awareness of value. The artists in this exhibit extend the boundaries of representation, and as we, too, find ourselves outside the frame, we cannot help but be a part of the experience.

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