rEviEwS CAROL BOVE
Haim Steinbach ’s mirror-plated displays may have been postmodern
pedestals par excellence for a 1980s generation weaned on Jean
Baudrillard’s semiotics and a love of industrial finish, but if the
subsequent proliferation of anthropological, historically minded
practices is any indication, we might presently find a more suitable
architecture in Carol Bove’s bookshelf. Trading Steinbach’s infinite,
commercial surface for George Nelson-inspired wood shelving,
vintage ephemera and collections of printed matter from that
late-1960s/early-70s period known, for lack of a better term, as the
sixties, Bove’s shelves simultaneously convey a sense of authentic
periodicity and appropriative inauthenticity, as if testament to the
dilemma that we, as contemporary viewers, face in wading through
Eddo StErn
an era diluted by many of its self-created myths. Easter Everywhere
(2007), displayed in the Swiss artist’s first solo exhibition with New
York’s Maccarone, houses all of the expected first editions, including
Stan Brakhage’s A Moving Picture Giving and Taking Book (1971) and
Dick Higgins’s George Herbert’s Pattern Poems (1977), along with
less expected, even controversial (but nevertheless period-specific)
fare, such as The People of Kau (1976), Leni Riefenstahl’s second
book of photography of regional Sudan. That these curatorial
incongruities break the fictional veil appears to be the point, for
Bove aspires not to dramatise 1960s domiciles so much as create
retrospective tableaux, in which the relics of one cultural myth must
sit, at times uncomfortably, beside those of others.
As fascinating as they are, Bove’s shelves do not benefit from
seriality in the way that Steinbach’s displays do: their particularities
and their allusive, conceptual networks become deceptively facile
when reduced to formula. But these works have always functioned
as select points in the artist’s constellation of practices, and while
they lose some of their lustre in this latest outing, her larger-scale CArol BovE:
installations finally have adequate space to reverberate, thanks to
Maccarone’s sprawling raw interiors. The installation The Middle thE MiddlE PillAr
Pillar (2007), for example, materially invokes the Kabbalistic method MACCAROnE, nEw YORk
prescribed in Israel Regardie’s 1938 book from which the exhibition 27 SEptEMBER – 27 OCtOBER
takes its title: the search for ‘the place of balanced power’ between
extremes resonates from a series of objects, including a hanging
piece of driftwood, appropriated mixed-media work by Bay Area
artist Bruce Connor (September 13, 1959, 1959) and a platform
covered with 4,000 peacock feathers, whose variably sized eyes
collectively suggest that the objects – not the audience – are doing
the spectating.
Arrayed throughout the space are massive concrete slabs
whose surfaces equally bear the signs of (masculine) minimalist
discourse and of the wood vessels in which they were cast without
ultimately being beholden to either. Like her bookshelves, these
elegant structures – at turns sculptures, partitions and pedestals –
form preconditions, not limits, to the psychic lives of Bove’s objects.
Innerspace Bullshit, 2007, mixed media,
Tyler Coburn 107 x 107 x 30 cm. Courtesy Maccarone, new York
135 ArtrEviEw
December_REVIEWS.indd 135 2/11/07 12:17:28
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