The Soho News, March 16, 1982

War and Pieces

WAR is hell. Even talk of war is hell. Talk of war has trickled down into my neighborhood Laundromat where, while folding sheets, women talk about the possibility of their sons being shipped off to El Salvador.

War can be an open battlefield for the imagination. This is well demonstrated in a knockabout show, “War Games” at Ronald Feldman Downtown. “War Games” doesn’t hit you over the head with pathos a la Guernica, nor does it get to you through irony like “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” Frankly, the show is a little mad; the ghost of Dr. Strangelove rattles in it.

The neighborhood around the Feldman gallery is a wholesale fabric district. In the gallery window is a male mannequin draped in pinstriped material and wearing a hood. This image, by John Alexander, is the Korporate Klansman. He’s an apt guardian figure, acknowledging both the earnest cloth-selling business outside and the industrialists who sponsor what’s evoked inside.

Eleanor Antin brings us the Crimean War. The Crimean War? When was that? What was it about? I suppose that’s the point. Who remembers? At first, when I surveyed Antin’s array of sepia-toned photos, I thought I was looking at authentic American Civil War documents. But I soon became attuned to the high jinks and exotics. It’s the Russians and the British. The Crimean War may be just a footnote in my mind, but it certainly was romantic. Antin, who has often played a modern-day nurse in her performances, plays a Florence Nightingale here.

Set up in front of the photographs (which are excerpted from a videotape) are pasteboard cutouts of the principals, including a surgeon and patient, both wearing bloodstreaked sheets. Another helpless cut-out is literally flat on an operating table, and severed hands and feet, like roofing shingles, lie in piles on the floor. Taking in the spectacle are a well-dressed gentleman and a lady with parasol. Even though this is but innocuous pasteboard, the contrast is grisly.

Humble materials are also used to bracingt effect in Todd Siler’s miniature theater, an egg-shaped dome cut away to reveal tiny chairs ringing an elaborate mushroom cloud fashioned from crinkly paper. The cloud is so luxurious it might have been swiped from Colette. One understands why in the ‘50s people were fascinated, even mesmerized, by the shape.

Adolph Hitler still mesmerizes. For all his palpable hideousness, Hitler keeps a strong toehold in the imagination. He had a grand Wagnerian design – a design that, by comparison, makes the prospect of chasing rebels in a steamy jungle seem like whittling sticks. Hitler has come to stand for more than a charismatic person. Komar and Melamid show how he is identified with paranoid states of mind.

Last summer, at the ill-starred Monumental Art Show in Brooklyn, Komar and Melamid trotted out a full-length portrait of solemn Hitler flanked by pots of flowers. That portrait is here, now complete with a slash; some irate visitor to the summer show stabbed the depicted Führer near the heart.

Near this portrait, which sounds a loud crashing note, is a riff that is amusing, though not without darker overtones. A recent page from the Arts and Leisure section of the Times asks, Why the continuing popularity of films about Hitler? This query gives the two Soviet dissident artists license to go Hitler hunting. They turn the page into an Argentina of sorts, circling in red every capital A and H on the page.

If there is any genuine poignancy in “War Games,” it is in Nancy Buchanan’s installation. It’s a succinct display of documents – on the wall, in cases, and in bound books. They all refer to the development of atomic weapons and the role of corporations in that development. It’s material owned by and pertaining to one engineer of note, Paul Ridenaur.

If one could wade through the material and could understand the jargon and the implications, one might find it as damning as the Pentagon Papers. But the aching rub is that Ridenaur is Nancy Buchanann’s father. That the engineers of mass destruction were also regular guys and good family men is evidenced by the personal photographs hanging above Buchanan’s black doomsday books.

It figures that Chris Burden collects war toys. They might be emblems of the pain and torture he inflicted on himself during his glory years as a conceptual/performance artist. Burden has amassed some 3000 war toys from several countries and has created a child’s fantasy of a war game. On his sandy peninsula he has demarcated two equal countries, each with leafy jungle, castles perched on rocky cliffs, and the latest in tanks and jet fighters.

Burden lets us see both the forest and the trees. The panorama seen with the naked eye is impressive, but Burden also furnished binoculars enabling us to see the toys close up and read the markings. Scanned thusly, the piece becomes very cinematic, alluding both to the science fiction of Star Wars and the absurd medievalism of The Mouse That Roared.

Burden distances us from his work through scale; Rudolf Baranik distances us through time. His photo-montage is a report from the twenty-fourth century defining war games. One of the definitions is of this show (next to Ronald Feldman Gallery is written OBSOLETE). The show “is believe to have been sardonic in nature.”

Thet pervasive sardonicism is why I am of two minds about the table of take-home anti-war literature on a table near the door. It doesn’t mesh with the show; it’s a ponderous “but seriously, folks…” after all the oblique and rangy art. That’s one side of me musing. The other side wonders whether the art isn’t here in part to lead us to this trough of eleventh-hour literature. It might be a good idea to drink.

WILLIAM ZIMMER