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PARTISAN REVIEW
radically reformulate the entire tradition of geometric abstraction, as
Alexander Alberro maintains in the catalogue, or are simply logical
extensions of that tradition-which seems closer to the mark-these
uncanny, harmonious colored forms were hard to ignore.
Surprise number two was the advent in Soho of Culture, the New
York affiliate of an established London gallery.
It
takes courage (or fool–
hardiness) to open an exhibition space on West Broadway while every–
one else is moving to Chelsea, but the real surprise was Culture's second
show, a ten-year survey of works by the British sculptor Stephen Cox,
who is almost unknown in this country. Since
1986,
Cox has spent a
good deal of time in India, working in Mahabalipuram, where the tra–
dition of carving devotional sculpture in stone has continued unbroken
since the sixth century. He has also spent a good deal of time in Maha–
balipuram's Tuscan equivalent, Pietrasanta, which still glories in the fact
that Michelangelo selected marble from its quarries. As David Cohen
points out in a perceptive catalogue essay, the multiple allegiances-to
the archaic and to the classical in both its Eastern and Western sense–
that are signified by these sojourns are palpable in Cox's work in stone.
Most of the sculptures at Culture were confrontational, deadpan, and
relief-like. Cox examined the possibilities of likeness and difference in
groups of elongated ovals, suavely carved into elegant convex forms and
mounted on the wall. Breasts and genitals made some sculptures overtly
suggestive of the human body, turning them into emblems of a kind of
abstracted, multi-gendered sexuality. (Cox plays fast and loose with
notions of hermaphroditism and androgyny-conflating the traditional
forms of lingam and yoni is the least of it.) Other sculptures were
allowed to provoke more unstable associations.
Space Invaders,
1996,
for example, first called to mind a scattering of schematic animal heads,
like oversized fragments of some vanished Indus Valley civilization, but
transformed itself into a cluster of potent torsos, a flight of bombs, and
more.
Ambiguity seems essential to the effectiveness of Cox's work; too-lit–
eral carved faces marred some pieces.
In
the most satisfying sculptures
at Culture, abstractness subsumed even the most complex allusions; the
best of the wall-mounted ovoids read not as improvisations on partic–
ular body parts, but as distillations of the tumescent volumes of Hindu
temple sculptures, in general; like their Indian antecedents, they seemed
conceived in terms of voluptuous mass and surface, rather than
anatomical logic. Cox further evoked Indian traditions by anointing
parts of his sculptures' rhythmically pecked surfaces with oil or paint,
striving to change the rough and dry to the sleek and mysterious, and
