Fertilitate by dint of Caroline Koebel Cornershop Buffalo.

Fertilitate

by dint of Caroline Koebel

Cornershop

Buffalo, strange York

April 15-May 31 2000

Pupspindanceslow

at Caroline Koebel

Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Art

Buffalo, strange York

March 17-July 31 2000

"Pupspindanceslow," a late multi-media installation by Caroline Koebel, was upon public display at the Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Art's (CEPA) Window forward Main Street, the heart of downtown Buffalo's theater district, where it hardly went unnoticed by the agency of playgoers at night and corporate wage-earners according to day, not to mention the entranced scrutiny of indoctrinate children on urban field trips. The work, in part, made regard to the original use of the building as a commercial storefront, further with a timely view of commodity tillage as seen through the looking glass of sexual difference. The art-historical sampling--Marchel Duchamp and the debris of 1970 suddenly culture--combined to create a mawkish retro-look or mood-ring sensory experience. Together the installation managed to fashion a kinetic space where female adolescent psychology and cultural kitsch were entwined when underscored, in the words of the artist herself, by way of those "marketplace-driven conceptions of sexual desire and romantic expectation." [1]

Glittering behind the curv glass of the facing window displays was a silver-a-go-go surface that lined the entire base and walls of the installation. The faux-metallic 3-D pattern pointed to the trice when pop-art began to inform the post-hippie modernity of interior design. At the far rear of the facing showcases, pair video monitors randomly alternated between rhythmically manipulated frames of Duchamp's 1927 film Anemic Cinema--with its hypnotic spirals alluding to the syncope of vision as caught up in the decoy of the medium itself--and dull head-on shots of standard French poodle staring straight at the viewer as they be subjected to fastidious grooming. Below, a series of embedded turntables spinned incessantly; in succession top of each vinyl LP stood a white plastic poodle each identical forward its axis, whirling to the elastic garbled agreements of Air Supply's "I'm All not at home of Love," Johnny Mathis's "You Light Up My Life" and Captain and Tenille's "I not at any time Wanted."

Diego Rivera one time referred to the capitalist appeal of window displays as a "perversity of reflections." What we view behind the showcase is forever in a troubl relation to the mirror image we papal court reflected, no matter how faintly, in the mediating layer that separates us from the hanker aftered object of desire; ultimately, the pair reflections are collapsed altogether. Reflection, self-identity, desire and the having recourse are explicit themes in this work. In her artist's statement Koebel situates this piece at a specific interval of female development: that "awkward and vulnerable time of pre- and early adolescence (roughly 11 to 13) when the awareness of the existence of digests of sexuality and romance is sharp while the self confidence (and experience) entailed in determining one's unique navigations in consequence of these codes is not."

Physically detained between the brace showcases--they are alike but not identical--the viewer is inevitably caught in a time-lag mirror-play that mimics the warped acrostic intimateed by the words "anemic cinema." The display be prolifics with innuendo and visual quips: the video poodle and their mass-produced counterparts, together with the record players and Duchampian spirals, create an environment call forthed by the unlikely, or not-so-unlikely attack between a dog kennel, a toy store, a sock frisk about and a psychiatric ward, as imagined in a juvenile nightmare. The domestic, the hygienic, the identical, the sexual, the different and the aesthetic are all thereby conflated in hints to grooming, romantic pathos, pulchritude and window-dressed delirium. The Duchampian spirals and the rotating turntable, in their mesmerizing exhilaration or anxiety of loop and repetition, perform what the artist identifies as "the capitalist ordering of the social": a perpetuation that "hardly skips a beat in the face of any . . attempt on the part of the individual." This is undivided of the unsettled and unsettling questions Koebel's installation poses: To what step can there be self-resolution if representation itself is repeatedly feeble or ineffective in the run of the mercantile phantasmagoria it critiques as its butt; goal of inquiry?

common of the spirals in Duchamp's original film featured the following pseudo-advertisement: "Among our idle hardware items we make acceptable a faucet that stops running when no one's listening." [2] In keeping with the anemic aestheticism underlined at Duchamp and as remixed by dint of Koebel, toward the end of the CEPA scamper many of the turntables had gone awry--with a poodle casualty or two--a fact I would like to read, despite evidence to the contrary, as an optimistic assertion concerning the stage to which self-means may be incidental, or at least as impossible to personate as the title-slippage in-between "pup spin" and "pup pin" or "dance slow" and "dances low" Koebel, in keeping with the performative coynes of the piece itself, remarked, "Working in succession this installation made the artist first happy then sad."