Nancy Davidson

How’m I doin’?

1997

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica, California

Nancy Davidson, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica reviewed in ART/TEXT 60, 1998, Mario Cutajar

Coming upon Nancy Davidson's inflate objects during an afternoon of gallery hopping, I immediately assumed I was looking at the work of an Angeleno. The in-your-face tackiness of Davidson’ s style brought to mind the Bette Midler character in Ruthless People. Surely, I thought, such a connois­seur of pneumatic brazenness must be a local, an illusion I was disabused of by her bio sheet, which tersely informed me that she was born in Chicago and lives in New York.

By using inflated weather balloons as the modular basis of her constructions, Davidson takes the idea of sculpture in the round to an extreme that is both absurdly comical and pregnant with all manner of allusions, not least to pregnancy itself. In the process, Davidson mirrors the fertility of her ebullient imagination in the ampleness of her forms.

The artist exhibited six works at Shoshana Wayne. By the time I saw the show one of them had ruptured and had been replaced by a Polaroid of the tattered remains. Even so, the remaining bodies seemed to fill the room to capacity. I do not think I exceed the vulgarity of the work itself when I say that the piece de resistance was, well, a real piece of ass.

Buttress consists of a floor-to-ceiling series of five units, each formed from twinned hot pink balloons strapped into some silvery material, which metamorphose from haltered breasts at the top to G-stringed buttocks at the bottom. The work re-does Judd's stacked boxes in such a manner as to exploit both the cinematic possibilities of seriality and the latent gynomorphic suggestiveness of jutting shapes-Le., restoring to the word "stacked" its vulgar physical connotation.

Unlike many feminist reconsiderations of Minimalist sculpture, Buttress evinces neither resentment nor envy nor the paradoxical dependence on the original that obsessive critiquing-feminist or otherwise-entails. Instead, it confidently asserts an unabashed female presence and functions as the most provocative of an ensemble of large, round forms whose exuber­ance introduces into the otherwise austere precincts of the white cube many of the things it was expressly designed to exclude.

In works like Netella (two yellow globes dressed up in fish net and displayed on a bed trimmed with black and yellow chiffon) and Budlette (a seven-foot-high steel-and-inflated-latex flower), Davidson cleverly exploits the parallel between the conventions of female display and those governing the display of art objects. But again, as with Buttress, she seems to delight in this parallel rather than contest it, thus bypassing the debilitating paradox inherent in the hackneyed feminist practice of constructing objects to critique objecthood. Free from the self-imposed restrictions of that academic genre, Davidson achieves some­ thing more subversive. Acknowledging her own enthusiasm for the female object, whose double meaning her objects treat as a hilarious pun, she suggests that the obsessions that underlie art­ making are not different from those which compel women to seek Stairmasters, plastic surgeons and fashion malls.

More Pop (and popping) than feminist,Davidson's work reflects the supersession of the physical body by its image. Thus while the attributes of femininity that the artist has fixated on are identical to those which are prominent in Paleolithic figurines dating back some 27,000 years, her work records a profound change in the meaning accorded to those attributes. Unlike our distant ancestors we largely fear fertility because its consequences-pregnancy and children-do not easily jibe with the quest for self-authorship, typically expressed as a need to feel "in charge." Nevertheless, since we remain genetically programmed to respond to the attributes of fertility, we have been compelled to devise a way of worshiping, or flaunting, boobs and buns without invoking their former significa­tion. Over time, they have become autonomous objects of fetishistic fascination; and it is as such that Davidson presents them. In this, she confronts her audience with a cultural fait accompli. The extent to which one finds the results amusing or shocking measures the degree of one's alignment with or alienation from the present.

reviewed in ART/TEXT 60, 1998, LA Weekly