Frequently this process results in erratic and capricious choices; it often favors exhibitions which provoke no controversy on the selection committee rather than far stronger shows which arouse dissent. As a result, the gallery's calender contains a number of rather anemic offerings. The logistics involved in presenting two shows at the same time seem especially problematic. While there have been pairs of exhibitions which have fully utilized the potential relationship of one body of work to another, they are the exceptions. The current Camerawork exhibition, hand-colored prints by George Legrady and photo-assemblages by Wu Chien Lem, evidences an absence of curatorship; the work is unsupported by any context or installation design, and the two artists share nothing in common beyond the minor element of handcrafting.
In Legrady's tableaux, the application of a film of uniform color -- one color per print, selected from a palette of acid yellow, electric blue, pantie peach, lavender and aqua -- seems gratuitous. The effect of the work does not depend on the color; in most of the images it hardly matters. Several of these studio arrangements are familiar expressions of the genre: Snakes and Ladders is just that -- paper snakes, toy ladders and a window screen; Rejects displays bits of unidentifiable and vaguely repulsive white flotsam in front of a potted cactus and a souvenir of Florida; Passing Note records a man's arm passing through a panel of chicken wire, his hand holding the note; Gesture focuses on a hand reaching toward a plastic pill bottle. The difficulty with work of this kind, which presumably intends that juxtaposition of disparate objects will produce a surrealistic effect, is that nothing ignites. Either the puns are too literal, or the objects are too arbitrary, or both.
In images where Legrady discards the shopworn tableaux vocabulary and begins to explore a more personal, more political myth system, the results are quite impressive. In several prints he has photographed clumsy corrugated-cardboard cutouts of American icons, arranged in the style of children's drawings. Model Home, a simple paper tract house with its own paper moon, is an effective reduction of the American dream to its barest outline. It is one of the few images in which the color -- a cold moonlit blue -- contributes to the sense of the work. Contemplation supplies a factory for the worker who lives in the Model Home, complete with grease-pencil smoke pouring from the stacks and a neatly landscaped Astro Turf lawn. Archetypes is a rough paper-doll gallery of people: mother, father, daughter, neighbor, lover and stranger. In Decor we see how they live: a couple's silhouetted heads, made from black cardboard, rise above a gleaming table decorated with a fake-fruit centerpiece. The two are caught in mid-scream, the space between them filled with empty, hard-edged word balloons which convey quite succinctly the probable tenor of the argument. A scribbled-over console television in News documents the latest, up-to-the-minute details of the war, bringing a paper tank and the tiny flattened figure of a casualty to the screen. These are marvelous images. They are concise, original, and oddly elegant, presenting clear social content in an amusing context. It is unfortunate that the obvious connections between these five particular photographs didn't suggest to the curator that they should be placed in some proximity to each other. Instead, regardless of apparent content, Legrady's images are simply lined up on the wall at eye level, in the familiar format used in every other exhibition in the same space.
Lem's wall pieces are a curious hybrid of op-art painting, mosaic, and patchwork quilt, though none of these terms quite describe the works' structure. Each of these five very large wall hangings is bordered in raw canvas, inside of which a checkerboard field of small painted squares holds a superimposed grid of photographs. Most of the photographs are composites in which two prints, cut into strips narrower than the painted squares, have been woven together to reassemble the images. The technique used in these pieces and a realization of the awesome number of man-hours which must have been involved in making them tend to overshadow whatever is in the images, at least at first glance. In two of the works, the effect does not transcend the merely decorative. Anaho, which contains various sizes of woven black and white prints on a field of bright red squares, is extremely difficult to read. The red sets up an intense retinal vibration which effectively prevents a close look at the photographs. There seems to be no discernible reason for the size variation, and the ultimate effect is that of a quilt. In Anaho II the subjects within the photographs -- sea gulls and oceans -- are sufficiently clichŽd to render this piece also as primarily decorative.
In the works titled CG I, CG II (Grand Canyon?) and Badlands, Lem has achieved firm control over his rather unwieldy technique. In all of these the painted areas -- in lavenders, blues, ochers and siennas -- are very subtly interactive and make good use of the rules of optical color illusions. The photographs used in these are also in color; they are muted scenes of desert dunes and mountains that are printed in a value range than makes the interweaving almost unnoticeable. The dunes and mountains seem to emerge from the painted surfaces as though synthesized from the same color of material. The whole effect is restful and mandala-like; like the heated air over a desert, the pieces appear to shimmer.
It is difficult to imagine any works more dissimilar than Legrady's and Lem's. It is even more difficult to imagine what logic brought them into the same experiential space. Nothing in the installation makes the abrupt shift from Legrady's sophisticated naivetŽ to Lem's contemplative spirituality assume any significance or purpose. Legrady's images are precisely in the center of current photographic practice; Lem's work is only marginally related to photography, despite his use of a large number of prints. The key to understanding Lem's pieces lies, perhaps, in giving up the attempt to read them as information and consenting to enter them as spiritual places. On the other hand, without literary and social information, Legrady's puns and critiques would be totally inaccessible.
Curatorial responsibility does not end with selecting the artist's work and placing it on the walls. The difference between merely handing artwork and exhibiting it requires that a real effort be made to understand what the work means, the cultural history from which it is derived, and the context in which its meaning would be most accessible. The predictable eye-level row of prints hung at equal distances from each other around the perimeters of the same old, uniformly empty white rooms does not an exhibition make. Legrady's language-based works suggest quite natural groupings around subject and approach; Lem's oeuvre might best have been represented by one or two pieces in a very large space, with something for the audience to sit on -- which would suggest that these works require stillness in order to be experienced. The pallor of many of Camerawork's exhibitions (and certainly the gallery is not alone in this) comes not so much from the fact that the work is uninteresting as from a lack of initiative and imagination in its installation. There is a curious curatorial notion that photographs are basically self-contained ciphers which need only to be placed in the art location to assume meaning. In the exhibition at hand (which is reasonably good work -- not great work, but certainly good), the absence of any sense of curating, or any direction into the work, leaves both artists and audience with less than they deserve.
