"Critical Mass," a collaborative installation by photographer Meridel Rubenstein, writer Ellen Zweig and videographers Steina and Woody Vasulka, was inspired by the 50th anniversary of the explosion of the atomic bomb near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Emphatically postmodern in format, the multimedia show claims to go beyond the legend surrounding the superphysicists of the Manhattan Project lab by illuminating their relationship with Edith Warner, whose tea room was a favorite hangout during their breaks from atomic endeavors.
Located on New Mexico's Rio Grande and convenient to the lab, Edith's home and her famous chocolate cake attracted a diverse crowd which included A-bomb scientists J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Albert Einstein, Edward Teller and Phillip Morrison (who put together the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki), as well as area artists and Pueblo Indians who lived nearby.
The show does not substantiate the claim in the least. In fact, while "Critical Mass" manages to be quite interesting visually, the conceptual underpinnings fail miserably. In attempting to discard the "myth" surrounding the Manhattan Project (a myth never defined in the show), the artists succeed in sending out bizarrely mixed messages about Oppenheimer, et al., and somehow raise Edith Warner to the status of Lady Bountiful. But you never really figure out why.
Rubenstein's palladium print photo collages are featured in the first room, framed in heavy steel that recalls the innards of a nuclear reactor. The prints are warm against the cold steel, juxtaposing the barren beauty of the desert and domesticity with destruction and science, a constant thread throughout the show. In "Oppenheimer/Archimedes #2" Oppenheimer's face gazes across the room toward evocative collages of photographs contrasting the faded warmth of Warner's and the Pueblo dwellings with the desolate New Mexican desert landscape.
In "Archimedes Chamber," the secondary phase of the installation, the mood becomes increasingly dour. At the room's portal, four screens repeatedly show "If Archimedes" at staggered intervals. The video compares Oppenheimer to the ancient Greek mathematician who sacrificed his quiet life of theory to build war machines to use against Rome during the Punic Wars. Archimedes, by the way, as legend has it, is the gent who discovered the principle of displacement by a floating object while taking a bath, then ran nude through the streets of Syracuse crying, "Eureka!"
The visuals of "If Archimedes" by Rubenstein are eerie and depressing, but the soundtrack made me feel as if I were in an existentialist play. Why the artists chose to turn Ellen Zweig's cryptic and meandering poem into an annoying vocal stew of four voices running over each other is beyond me. One can barely pick out a word. For a show that professes to combine art with history and even provides a reading table with background literature about the development of the atomic bomb, this high artiness is annoying and out of place.
Also annoying is the image of a hand projected onto the floor of the darkened chamber. The hand bubbles and burns, probably alluding to Archimedes' lenses, built to nastily scorch the approaching Roman legions. Or is it flesh burning to gristle during a nuclear holocaust? With the yammering videos behind my head and a burning hand at my feet, I was feeling more NYU film schoolesque by the moment. With a little Operation Rescue thrown in.
Things got a bit better at "The Meeting," but not much. Talking video heads portray Warner, Los Alamos scientists such as Fermi, Bohr, Einstein, Oppenheimer in his signature wide-brimmed hat and Pueblo governor Tilano Montoya, discussing dreams, the ethics of science and the wonders of chocolate cake. A very cool idea, but the actors' detached voices continually collide over some industrial clanking sound, once again making it difficult to understand what is being said. Maybe I'm making a big jump here, but I would assume that the artists want the installation to be accessible.
As there are few more intriguing dining experiences I can imagine than the one proposed by "The Meeting," it was bothersome that (perhaps owing to the acting abilities of those chosen to portray the characters) everyone at the table except Warner and the taciturn Montoya comes off as annoyingly full of himself.
Wait now, I thought we were comparing Oppenheimer to the great Archimedes.
The messages in this show are all over the map. Two steel-framed photo collages corner the room--one showing portraits of the scientists with some tools of their trade, the other featuring the women of the Pueblo displaying their craftwork. Propaganda alert. Read: Women equal Domesticity which equals Good. Men equal Science which equals Bad.
"Critical Mass" seems to be done in by too many spoons stirring the soup. I think the artists may have realized the lack of focus. The opening statement of the catalogue reads like a caveat: "This work is about the impact of large historic events on ordinary people. Most of the pieces in the exhibition are complex portraits . . . Our portraits are ambiguous: We enlarge the lives of ordinary people, we strip the mythic characters of history down to their ordinariness, and we replace the usual metaphors about historical figures with images of fallibility and their connection to place."
Huh?
It's too bad. Many of Rubenstein's photographs and the video images are quite powerful. The factual story of the interaction between Warner, the Pueblo Indians and the legendary 20th-century physicists is a fascinating one; some of the scientists wrestled quite vocally with the ethical questions posed by the Los Alamos project. But the point about "the impact of large historic events on ordinary people" got lost in a storm of messages and thus failed to tell me what that impact was.
Whereas "Critical Mass" aims to tell a story of male destructive drive through the vehicle of Big Science, Scottsdale artist Robert You's "The P2 Project" in the "New Directions" Gallery goes inside man's bone, muscle and evolutionary codex to illustrate the same matter with subtlety and quiet irony.
You, who was born in Beijing, China, uses the ancient Chinese book of divination, I Ching (The Book of Change), and the concept of yin/yang in this collection of mixed-media sculpture and drawings.
The 3,000-year-old I Ching, itself a work of art, bases its fortunetelling on 64 hexagram symbols, which are transformed in meaning depending upon the position and brokenness of each parallel line within the hexagram.
Like in I Ching, the meaning of You's works is not obvious at first glance. The works are titled only with letters and numbers accompanied by seemingly random indices of words beginning with the letter "P." Association is invited. Think "parfleche," "parthenon," "pandemonium," "pandemic" and "parvenu."
Sensual and organically curvy sculptural pieces are stationed around the room. Simply and elegantly constructed from pale wood, metal and found objects, they look like things caught by the viewer in a state of transformation. One of the "P" group looks like a violin turning into a crossbow adorned with tiny brass fixtures. Another resembles a minimalist male skeleton, anatomically correct thanks to a large bullet which juts from the lower torso, evolving into something else chained and vaguely military looking.
There is a catapultlike pitchfork and a bodylike rifle. Despite the associations with weaponry of many of the pieces, their elegance and simplicity sidestep the violence of their real-life counterparts, and simply suggest how male they are. No huge conceptual leap there.
You plays with the popularly known, if poorly understood, concept of yin/yang (the female/male principles of Tao incessantly struggle toward balance) in his quietly provocative drawings. In "P2" the rotund and huge-breasted Venus of Willendorf (a lovable and nonthreatening fertility goddess if there ever was one) hangs balloonlike over a handgun and a tuning peg for a musical instrument. The ancient stone tools of "P2" evolve into sharp little bullets.
My favorite piece, a diptych on the left side of the room, appears at first glance to be partly a gridded map of an unidentifiable land, complete with legend. A closer look reveals cross sections of the brain and male genitalia fighting it out within tao.
I could go on and on. Don't miss it.
Also on view at Scottsdale Center for the Arts are "Francine Funke: Plumes, Kuwaiti Oil Field Fires," an exhibition of five rice paper and acrylic paintings depicting the oil fires resulting from the 1991 Gulf War, and "Suspended Animation: Delivery Systems of Applied Science," Lew Alquist's installation combining the constructed image of a drug-fueled Nazi V-2 missile with the projected image of a hypodermic syringe driven by rocket fuel. Confused? The best part is that you have to stand right in the missile's path in order to read the info about the V-2.
All exhibitions are on view until Sunday, November 5.
Loose Ends
I highly recommend an immediate perusal of Art One gallery in Scottsdale. Tempe artist Ian Davis' new paintings--highly reminiscent of (\#213)60s jazz LP covers--are quite gear. Also, Robert Anderson's new paintings are remarkable, vibrant and strange. I hope they are still on the walls--there were red dots on all but two paintings in the show last time I checked. Call 946-5076 for information.
Java Road in Tempe (11 East Seventh Street) is developing the gallery side of its personality. Tanned, renovated and hopped up on caffeine, my pet latte joint unfurls its fall art lineup this month. Call 829-3797 for information.
