The Portland Phoenix
September 7 - September 14, 2000
Art Reviews
Election figures
Politics at Davidson and Daughters
by Jenna Russell
"Tin Ears and Feet of Clay," shows through
September 30 at Davidson and Daughters,
148 High Street, Portland, open Tuesday
through Saturday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Just in time for the serious
start of election season,
Davidson & Daughters has
assembled a two-woman show
with lots of substantial and
specific political content.
Sculptor Kim Wintje names
names, and favors major
domestic players: George and
Al, Monica, Janet, and both
Bills -- Gates and Clinton.
The work, in washed-out shades of tin and
aluminum, hangs on the walls and from the
ceiling.
Ceramic storyteller Jane Kaufmann makes softly
colored raku figures that sit on clay skyscraper
bases, each inscribed with the ironic retelling of a
lesson of history. Kaufmann questions popular
notions of greatness and success, and manages
sophisticated social criticism through visual means
that are childlike in their simplicity. It's fitting
that both women live in political-minded New
Hampshire.
Both artists use the human figure, reduced to
doll-like proportions, and as a result the viewer
relates with relative ease to larger-than-life
characters like Van Gogh and Joan of Arc. In
Kaufmann's clay pieces, the little people sit like
toy brides-and-grooms on their wedding-cake bases.
Wintje's medium, "sewn metal," sounds like an
oxymoron, but it's an effective, unexpected,
junk-yard method of assemblage, scraps, and squares
of metal punched with holes and stitched with twists
of wire. Each sculpture approximates a simple body
or a miniature robot, with utensil limbs and a
box-shaped frame for a head. Like an an all-purpose,
fill-in-the-blank voodoo doll, the frame becomes a
face when Wintje inserts a small,photocopied picture
of her chosen candidate.
When she pairs up Gore and Bush in a single
sculpture, it's to document their "Self Inflicted
Wounds." The metal figure crosses its arms out front
in self-protection, and attached metal labels are
printed with the politicians' avoidable errors. "I
Did Bad on Reporter's Pop Quiz," reads one,
referencing an early Bush gaffe. "I Invented the
Internet," another label says, recalling Gore's
self-important misstep.
Some of Wintje's match-ups are funny and unexpected,
suggesting links between the most unlikely couples,
like a weird, intellectual version of "Six Degrees
of Kevin Bacon." "Joan and Satan Discuss Hot Seat"
is one such work. The idea of a discussion (such a
civil interaction!) between the devil and the martyr
pushes hard at the limits of our imagining. "The
Cutting Edge with Bobbitt and Van Gogh" disregards
boundaries of time and place to partner Lorena and
Vincent, two quirky characters with a shared
penchant for chopping off appendages. The title
seems to poke fun at the vernacular of the American
media -- it sounds vaguely like a late-night,
celebrity-driven, current-events TV chat show.
Kaufmann's couples are famous ones typically thought
of in pairs. She forces us to reconsider their
legends, exposing an alternative reality under the
polished glaze of conventional understanding. In
"The Story of Ferdinand and Isabella," the crowned
king and queen wear gorgeous gowns and hold their
oversized hands in their laps. The text on their
pedestal notes the Inquisition, the expulsion of
Jews from Spain. "It's hard to decide now if these
people were good or bad," Kaufmann writes. "We never
discriminate against minorities today or take over
their lands." Of course we know better. "The Story
of Georgia O'Keefe" concludes with a bitterly
practical moral: "If you want to have a career in
the arts, marry someone who can make you famous."
There's a jarring contrast between the eyes-open,
sometimes angry realism of the artist's message and
the sweet, folksy appeal of the objects themselves.
Left unread, the pieces are empty vessels, props
abandoned on a darkened stage. Like a political
puppet show, the art uses unthreatening images to
make its meaning accessible. In a few cases, as if
to prove herself capable of contentment, Kaufmann
celebrates the simple and domestic. One sculpture
thanks her mother for setting a good example, and
another describes pushing a baby in a carriage. The
child points at "dis" and "dat," passers-by smile
indulgently, and the text concludes "I am happy."
Wintje makes no similar statement, though her sense
of humor never fails her. Her "Women with Balls"
salutes fearless grrrl prototypes Frida Kahlo,
Josephine, and Juliet; its partner piece, "Lovers of
Women with Balls," provides a similar flip-chart of
heads of their counterparts, Diego Rivera, Napoleon,
and Romeo. One imagines the artist respects and
maybe identifies with these women. It's less clear
what she makes of Monica Lewinsky, whose giddy face
is topped with a tin-man funnel hat in one
sculpture, while a spiral of pencil words on her
chest spells out her crime, "inappropriate sexual
relations." The hat bears a second phrase in metal,
"becomes weight loss spokesperson." The intern looks
young and foolish, like a dunce or a clown, and the
words would make no sense at all in any time but our
own. Possibly the piece is simply about the
astonishing spectacle of it all, the strange ways of
American culture and its inexplicable icons.
Jenna Russell can be reached at
russelljenna@hotmail.com.
Copyright 2000 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group. All rights
reserved.
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