KAREN WILKIN
131
within the strict language of collage-derived construction, she has evolved her
own idiom. Gleaming stainless becomes, in her hands, an extraordinarily re–
fined metal whose burnished surface seems to have more to do with fine old
silver and jewelry than with advanced technology and industry.
Press's smaller works were, generally, more successful than her larger
pieces, possibly because they were denser. When Press builds blocky forms,
by boxing-in volumes, she adds welcome contrast
to
the uniformity of her
surfaces, her clean edges and thin planes. The clenched
Rand de jambes
(curiously named for a ballet movement that demands an extended leg) was
the best of the smaller works. It was clear, concise, intelligent, its energies
turned inward. The play between sharp edges and swelling forms reinforced
the contrast between crisp geometry and shiny material, while the density of
the piece made it both self-contained and unignorable.
Petah Coyne's assemblages, shown atJack Shainman Gallery, spring
from a conception of sculpture wholly opposed to Press's. The heritage of
Picasso, Gonzalez, and Smith has everything to do with Press's work, nothing
to do with Coyne's. Shamanism, craft, and the beljef that objects gajn meaning
by virtue of having been chosen and displayed by the artist are at the heart
of Coyne's work. She has been getting a good deal of attention lately - she
was recently invited to do a major installation at the Brooklyn Museum, ft)r
example - and I suspect some of Coyne's populal"ity
arise~
uecause hel'
work allies itself with that of feminist heroines such as Eva Hesse and Louise
Bourgeois. Surely Bourgeois's clusters of dangling, frankly erotic forms are
the ancestors of Coyne's current hanging sculptures; like Bourgeois's work
too, Coyne's sculpture alludes to the branching patterns of plants, to seed
pods, to growth and accretion in general. But Coyne's large-scale
constructions also have peculiarly modish connotations. They are like high–
style, nonfunctional chandeliers as much as they are metaphors for the body
or for nature.
Like many younger sculptors, Coyne knots, drapes and wraps, rather
than
constructs. Her pieces are rigged, tied, suspended, but there's something
odd about them. What one might expect to be soft and light is usually, in this
series, hard and brittle. Pouchy forms turn out to be made of metal. The
matte black color, which contributes to the sculptures' stylish, designer look, is
achieved with a kind of sand that changes its color through a chemical reac–
tion. None of this, however, is apparent
to
the eye.
I imagine Coyne's method has importance
for
her, since there are eas–
ier ways to achieve the look of hel" recent work, but unfortunately, the pro–
cess has little positive effect. The flat blackness of Coyne's suspended con–
structions flattens them; they become wholly graphic, like flimsy drawings
hanging in the air, with little spatial presence.
