Domus, June 1983

1984: a Preview in New York

“All that they did was to keep alive in him the belief, or hope, that others besides himself were the enemies of the Party. Perhaps the rumors of vast underground conspiracies were true after all 0 perhaps the Brotherhood really existed! It was impossible, in spite of the endless arrests and confessions and executions, to be sure that the Brotherhood was not simply a myth. Some days he believed in it, some days not.”

George Orwell, 1984

With less than a year before 1984 is upon us, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, together with Carrie Rickey of The Village Voice, have taken George Orwell’s theme of a despotic state and mounted another extravaganza with works by over 70 artists. The spirit of the exhibition is close to that of last year’s “Atomic Salon” with many of the same artists presenting work along with several new ones.

Basically, 1984-A Preview is a pot pourri of current images and ideas in a wide range of media, each of which is presumably linked to the famous anti-utopian novel in some way. The show suffers from overcrowdedness and, in some cases, a number of too hasty decisions as to what might be appropriate for an exhibition of this nature.

Nevertheless, there are some very substantial pieces which deserve their place on the floor. Such works include Laurie Anderson’s woven newspapers in English and Chinese, Komar and Melamid’s mock summit conference with Stalin, Hitler, and E.T., Nancy Burson’s manipulated photographic projections of the Royal Family in England, Sean Elwood’s hidden surveillance cameras, Alex Grey’s mysterious paintings, New Man I and II, and a fascinating videotape by Hartmut Lerch and Claus Holtz which blends several faces into a single image.

Clearly, the exhibition reveals that polemic content alone is not enough to sustain such a vast body of work with any degree of consistency. The best works are those which have either a strong formal coherence or a technical virtuosity which under pin their polemicism. The showpiece of 1984-A Preview is the controversial tableau by sculptor George Segal in which a man poses transfixed in front of his home computer while his wife does the same. Seeing the actual sculpture is a much different experience – more alive and certainly more poignant – that when it first appeared on the January cover of Time magazine as “Man of the Year.” The absurd irony of this reproductive use of art indirectly points to one of the most significant issues the show raises.

ROBERT C. MORGAN