Semaphore Gallery
review by Jean Fisher
Artforum January 1984
The Gods of Politics (1984)
Joseph
Nechvatal, like Picabia, traces figures from
Renaissance art, a strategy of quotation that is fast becoming so repetitive as
to render it a meaningless gesture except insofar as it indicates the
impoverished language of a reality unable to represent itself other than by a
doubling back to the myths and icons of the past. Nechvatal does attempt to
forestall this closure by also incorporating into his drawing images of
American media icons and objects of modern technology. We are guided,
therefore, into a reading of power and exploitation, impotence and alienation,
that nevertheless is still too literal to overcome a stereotypical humanism.
Where the
work begins to transcend its sociological subject matter is in certain features
of its execution, which go some way toward recognizing that we need a new
spatial model to represent our location (or dislocation) in a
late-capitalist-mediated world. The images, variable in scale, are given visual
coherence through being embedded in a dense matrix of graphite smudges, lines,
repeated and abstract motifs (ÒLinoleum was a major influence on my work,Ó
Nechvatal has said) like so many emptied carcasses caught in a science fiction
web. As we scan the picture we are confronted with neither a traditional single
focal point, nor a Modernist multiplicity of equivalents, but the appearance
and disappearance of discontinuous forms in an indeterminate space which begins
to function as a metaphor for time as so many disjunctive fragments of
experience, and space as decentered and without tangible coordinates. The sense
of distance created by the uniformity of traced lines is emphasized by the
presentation of the drawings as photographsÑhomogenized surfaces. What remains
disappointing and inexplicable is the artistÕs addition of colored stripes and
washes, which seem too arbitrary to function as more than conventional
formalistic devices.