Reviews

by Christopher Fischer, May 2000

It should come as no surprise that Michael Hernandez de Luna's "Sextablos" traveling exhibition originating at Chicago's Hyde Park Art Center last year has been refused by several institutions around the country on the probable grounds that it would prove too offensive or would at least be difficult for broad, cross section audiences viewing art. And though it contained one of the bigger bad boy names in Andres Serrano (whose piece was sold and therefore not in this exhibit) it was not promoted by any art dealer/collector/mogul's ownership or co-arranged by a major public art institution like the Brooklyn Museum of Art, it none the less possesses a certain hope for sensation. That Andy Antippas and Rene Broussard of Barrister's Gallery and Zeitgeist Multi-Disciplinary Arts Center would host this show in their new space on Aretha Haley Blvd. Seems almost a given. Antippas and Broussard have been independently presenting challenging works by artists in various media straddling the censorial-taboo edge as central tenants of their endeavors for quite some time. "Sextablos" is inherently structured to crack certain barriers of expression and give the floor to uninhibited artistic expression aimed at the often-repressive attitudes regarding sex. Choosing the Mexican folk art format of the traditional retablo is a fairly curious premise and the show's contributors more often than not completely refuse any specific aesthetic genre for more abstract or oblique references.

Curious as well are the local artists' responses in this traveling and growing show (the next stop is a private gallery in Houston) who have chosen collectively to ignore for the most part our local inventory of stereotypical sexual territory such as the notorious domain of Bourbon Street, the fabled lands of long demolished Storyville, or the seedy low rent venues along Airline Highway. None of these world-class ex sites are to be seen as well as any of our infamous sexy icons such as the ageless Chris Owens or any of the augmented starlettes of countless strip mall-sex clubs. Instead the twelve or so locals have taken very personal and off beat approaches to respond to the sanctity of sexuality.

Jeffery Cook and Gary Oaks both introduce three dimensionality to the otherwise flat squarish foot square sheets by breaking the static flatness that typifies the retablo format. Cook has shredded, snipped and reassembled a shaggy, textural clumping of edges from curled and bent scraps while embedding found objects such as a condom package and a plastic sticker painted with the word Sex. Oaks ahs applied a cut and rounded off triangle above a snapped shut mouse trap holding a limp, unfurled prophylactic possibly suggesting the occurrence of a regrettable mishap or that the sexual encounter is an unfulfilling and ensnaring experience.

Anastasia Pelias woven and layered clippings from an erotic magazine stimulates the warp and weft style of brushstrokes in her painting by crossing over and under creating rhythmic, linear color fields. In this tiny work her melded tones of printer paper set above a vibrant painted background of pink enamel combine into a fluctuating, nearly non-objective pattern of broken forms merging into a beautiful composition of fragments in sensual flux.
Willie Birch uses an enigmatic, sophisticated folk approach to consider the retablo idea with a provocative take on the misunderstanding and confusing nature of sex.

An engorged phallus bulges out of a glass cookie jar while spraying the surrounding miniature scenes in a spray of semen perhaps suggesting an unleashed fountain or an uncontainable force waiting to explode so that sex is an act of nature, in this case a metaphorical geyser. Birch's pictographic rendering is both respectful and mocking of the allegorical iconography found in the religious storytelling, symbol-laden format of the retablo.

Mary Jane Parker's triptych of charcoal drawings mounted on copper plates is classically drafted to depict a pair of hands, breasts, and feet on separate panels. The question she provokes may be aimed at our fetish behavior towards certain erogenous body parts and therefore a certain disconnectedness in the anatomy of sexual experience. Nonetheless, her piece is skillful and intriguing, reading like a mysterious arrangement of sensually rendered, contemporary milagros in a drawn form of prayer of thanks for miracles.

John Lawson's beaded phallus integrates Haitian pictorial beadwork with a Judith Leeber purse-wear elegance. His design is both clever in its blend of figurative concerns and whimsical with its abstract properties employing lustrous, colorful plastic beads to celebrate idealized male genitalia. David Bradshaw who usually works on a large sculptural scale with explosives and sheet metal offers a bullet hole fired through a polished plate of steel bearing standard military typeset explaining which pistol and ammunition created this particular work. For Bradshaw the idea of sex is perhaps a machine-like process of projectile and its recipient target, leaving behind transformed matter behind as forceful evidence of a fleeting encounter.

Hugo Montero's vertical diptych of a dominating and possibly masochistic Madonna morphs from our familiar lawn-ornamental version of the Virgin Mary into a horrendous matriarch poised for control and nasty seduction to tempt the ever-vulnerable self esteem by anti-traditional means. Like some enlarged wallet card she is painted onto a burnished ochre background and clad in leather mask with a matching crotch less outfit in a bizarre mixture of comic a book heroine and an adult classified listing for catholic nightmare supply catalogue.
So as "Sextablos" could be added to the growing field of irreverent sensationalism wherein the art World reluctantly plunges into the arena of tabloid headline craving culture to cultivate both attention and market presence, many artists and gallery goers must be wondering what will come next and how far all this will lead. Sex in the hands of artists here feels like a pop-cultural sideshow trying to taunt a conditioned mainstream with a lure of deviance from their tiresome and overly regulated norms. In attempting to do so, this exhibit instills a fashioning of hybrid actions and beliefs with artists accepting a traditional narrative pretext to inject a contemporary and contradictory posture of intimacy and exposure, with gladly uncertain results.

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