The Collectors

The Collections of Barbara Bloom

Beth Campbell: Following Room

A museum exhibition for Barbara Bloom is like a free trip to Mars for Ray Bradbury. Been there, done that, and so what if none of it was real? Stranger still, what if some of it were?

Bloom could find her way into practically any museum, whether of art, design, science, or antiquities. She also takes the museum as her subject, and she ever so quietly makes it over in her own image. Meanwhile at the Whitney, Beth Campbell does much the same thing, only on the more modest scale of a living room.

The muse of the museum

Bloom hit her stride in the late 1980s, when everyone was talking about appropriation, but artists were acting like stars. Rather than an appropriator, however, one might better describe her as a collector, with a virtual cabinet of wonders. She even calls her retrospective "The Collections of Barbara Bloom," and it could well have drawn on any number of museum collections. She finds use for everything from ancient statuary, eighteenth-century furniture, and European paintings to travel posters, Playboy, and an engraving on a grain of rice. She cherishes things, even at times in reproduction. She also cherishes their absence.

She may borrow, photograph, or recreate them, and she often makes it hard to know the difference. Her last gallery show, subtitled "Absence-Presence," greeted one with shadows—of a music stand, a bentwood hatrack, an easel. At least it seemed so, for she had painted the illusion on the wall. The commodities themselves, however, lay further inside. So naturally did their shadows, exactly as one had seen them before. Then came one's thoughts of them, of their history, and of the gallery's West Village townhouse, where these signs of old-fashioned culture look so at home.

Bloom has adapted to museum spaces, too. Her best-known work expanded to the scale not just of an installation but of a period room. In The Reign of Narcissism, she also introduced her own face onto each Regency piece. Reasonably enough, it appeared in black and white, like a vintage photograph or a silhouette. Her curly hair and high cheekbones seem meant for another, finer era. It belonged quite as much to her time, too, a time of when the "me generation" had grown up and a decade in art when irony ruled.

One could forget for a moment that the work had opened in 1989 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and then in Soho. Still, the obsession with her own image fit just fine with Cindy Sherman's. Claiming well-known art for herself fit with Sherrie Levine, and her grainy photographs and men's magazines fit with Richard Prince. The Reign of Narcissus turned up again ten years later, in "The Museum as Muse." MOMA could have titled the group show just for her, and it describes her inspiration and her desires. It also, ironically enough, made clear her relevance—as now the muse of the museum as muse.

Compared to those others, however, Bloom has a directness and a lack of disdain. Unlike Sherman she makes no effort at disguise, and unlike Levine she respects this stuff and accords it a past apart from her. Unlike Prince, she looks beyond his corner of contemporary America, and she places some serious limits on the male gaze. I could not quite make out the pornographic image on a grain of rice, even with the magnifying glass that she graciously supplies, and I definitely could not drool over it. For her Playboy issue, she manages to find one translated into Braille. Other collectors, apparently, have obsessions that not even an artist can match.

She laughs at no one in particular, other than herself. Smooth, carved black granite looks ever so elegant, even if it supplies her tombstone. It also necessarily gives a woman's age, along with the inscription "Ashes to Ashes / Diamonds to Diamonds / Dust to Dust." It does not even add a lecture on conflict-free diamonds. It cannot give her a date of death, which calls into question its very existence as a headstone. On the other hand, maybe she can add one later, or maybe a future museum can.

No ideas but in things

Work like this is sensual and philosophical rather than overtly political. Talk of her "collections" echoes the vocabulary of the fashion industry. If Braille seems to lose the point, unless you really and truly buy Playboy for the interviews, that approach to reading invokes the sense of touch. The foldout takes on a new light. Other works hang behind gauze curtains, and their touch enters the work along with the filmy white of the images seem through them. I instinctively looked behind me for fear of the museum guard while lifting the veil, even after it sank in that Bloom has placed the wall labels behind the curtains as well as the photographs.

Besides appropriation and self-reflection, her work also fits with conceptual art, but it makes an intriguing contrast with another recent retrospective, that of Lawrence Weiner. He says that his work need not be made, but it hits one like a shotgun blast, and it keeps its messages short. Her work has to exist, but with a studied reserve befitting its beauty. The International Center for Photography only heightens Bloom's reserve, with little hint that the viewer has or could enter the work. If before she has adapted to a posh gallery and to a period room, here she adapts as best one can to the museum's depressingly clinical midtown lobby galleries.

Even more than Weiner, she plays enough mind games for a conceptual artist. Like Williams Carlos Williams, she knows "no ideas but in things"—but also no things without a history of ideas. Big color swatches on the entrance wall form neat squares, as in a designer's Pantone flip book or "Color Chart" at MOMA, but the labels do not match the colors. For that matter, unlike Jasper Johns, she does not even give the words for colors, just a jumble of names and terms. As in a Gary Hill or William Wegman video, a child or a dog could be learning to read, stumbling every step of the way. The photos behind the curtains run from Neoclassical nudes that might seem to need a decent covering to more curtains, to more paintings nestled behind more curtains, to people milling about looking at paintings and curtains.

Her exhibition title, "The Collections of Barbara Bloom," insists on art in the plural. It also insists on an arrangement by theme rather than chronology. Themes run to such weighty ideas as "Stand-ins," "Twins," and "Doubles"—daring one to figure out the difference, if any. Wall labels mix ordinary museum assistance with someone's meditations and qualifications. They refer to the artist as yet another fiction, a character known only as BB. One wall label appears twice.

That label evinces BB's measured distrust of beauty, along with her respect for it. She gives a classical definition, of the relationship of parts to the whole. Then a series of questions demands what one could ever mean by the whole. Like Jacques Derrida discussing the frame of a painting or Constantin Brancusi making pedestals into art, she asks where a work could possibly begin and end. Perhaps behind the curtains. A photograph of a chicken posed before two corner mirrors makes me think of Oscar Wilde's disdain of realism—as "the rage of Caliban on seeing his reflection in the glass."

Bloom returns often to Vladimir Nabakov. He, too, was a collector (of butterflies), an esthete, a comic pornographer, a Modernist, and a creator of Postmodern metafiction all at the same time. Nabakov himself might have succumbed to the stultifying detachment of the ICP, and Bloom very nearly does now. Still, the show offers a good prep course for whenever Bloom next resumes her amazing shadow boxing. One work makes Volume One of the first edition of Lolita into a drab green rug. This way, she can defer the novel's conclusion, in Volume Two.

Mirror, mirror . . .

Another artist, too, likes simple concepts and open-ended alternatives, personal histories and impersonal repetition. In the past, Beth Campbell has projected herself over one seemingly ordinary day, three screens, and half a dozen cities. In each, she enacted in close synchrony such gestures as catching her reflection and brushing her hair. More recently she took a downtown storefront, pared down its wares, and multiplied it into infinity.

Where Bloom lets one stumble upon treasures of the past, Campbell uses materials so simple that one could overlook them in one's own life. Yet they branch out into at once a space and a narrative, not unlike the cross between a chandelier and a family tree that she once fashioned from twisted wire hangers. In each work, she creates public spaces with room for just one person to linger. However, one can enter only visually, and one cannot easily call that person the artist or oneself.

What is past is past, and so is anything subject to representation—but whose past could connect these disparate representations? Traditionally, art based the illusion of reality on a vivid metaphor, the mirror of nature. She makes it hard to distinguish a mirror image from an illusion.

Following Room at the Whitney takes Campbell's usual alternatives to extremes. In the process, the illusion grows harder than ever to dispel. Black, open shelving appears to define a living room, and it holds what look like memorabilia. Yet the display seems cheap and empty, and the room's inhabitants are nowhere to be seen.

A scarf drapes over a chair, a book lies open on the floor, and a red cushion has fallen beside the shelf. The artist might have left only a moment before, and yet the moment grows longer the longer one looks. The shaded river walk in a framed photograph might or might not exist in Paris, but the absence of lovers undercuts its evident romanticism. Besides, I could swear I saw that movie with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy—plus its sequel.

Most people, no doubt, construct their living rooms and their lives from received images here and there. Sure enough, this sculpture includes multiple copies of its one-of-a-kind objects. As with Campbell's storefront, some might mistake the display for a singular arrangement reflected infinitely in paired mirrors. You must have puzzled over how that illusion works, too. One's mistake, however, lasts only a second or two at most. Without question, at least some of those mirror images have the solidity of things.

The flip side

One quickly admires Campbell's careful construction of the same scene and its mirror image, over and over, each copy reflected in mirrors at the center of the installation. Yet even that comforting discovery does not last. For one thing, one's assurance stems more from the absence of a mirror's shine than from the firm presence of reality. For another, the assurance proves wrong.

The illusion of infinity boils down to exactly a dozen copies, without a single mirror. I passed my hand, gingerly and guiltily, through the panes where a mirror ought to lie. It took me several experiments to get over the disbelief.

Campbell, in short, has created the illusion of an illusion. Do the copies of copies now seem twice as cheap or twice as ingenious? Why not both, and they also seem twice as funny. The book's spine promises The Other Side of Me, as if one could get to the bottom of her by stepping through the mirror. Starting at least with André Malraux's popular text, The Imaginary Museum has haunted Modernism and art history. Like Bloom, Campbell hints that real museums, too, harbor illusions.

All these puns suggest an object lesson in Post-Structuralism's "fiction and repetition." But you knew that, and the curators duly haul out quotes from Roland Barthes on photography, Paul Churchland on consciousness amid neural networks, an explication of André Gide's mis en abyme, Lewis Carroll's looking glass, and Anthony Vidler on architecture as the space of anxiety and estrangement. The work itself has enough influences to call it a near knockoff—from Sophie Calle's comedy of fiction and confession to Carol Bove's discarded household, the New Museum with its "Unmonumental" sculpture, and Bloom's own museums of the mind.

In the past, of course, she has knocked herself off. Consider a little further that earlier video not on view at the Whitney, Same as Me. There Campbell sways to blow-dry her hair or polishes off fast food. She pauses to window-shop or sits by the road, her head turning to follow the traffic. She walks right toward the camera, without a trace of a smile. She lies ever restless, crossing her legs or twisting to scratch her back.

Only she does it all in perfect synchrony on three screens, from utterly distinct parts of the world. Thirty-one variations on a theme, in a video by Lorna Simpson, reinforce the constraints of black urban experience. Campbell covers ground from nameless city streets to Chelsea galleries, a German town, the suburbs, and desert landscapes. She dresses differently in each shot, but her gestures never fail to match up precisely on different screens.

Small change

One never identifies a scene for certain or remembers a specific disjunction. Sometimes a scene takes a while to end, so that she takes too long to catch up to her other two images, adding to the strangeness and the comedy. It turns the scenery of the world into a woman's life, her life to a passing show, and a show's illusions to the uncanniness of ordinary existence. Banality can take one suprisingly far, whether into Campbell's past or into one's own.

Same as Me could have the message of a Cathy cartoon. See, wherever I go and however much I attempt to change, I shop for new clothing, I never share the space of the imagination with another being (much less a man), and I never do lose weight. It could serve as well as one ever-shifting reminder of an artist's months of patient dedication.

It could also reverse the message of some other wondrous art-world posers. When Cindy Sherman puts on one fancy character after another, all and none are "just her." Here, the artist at her most natural is merely a pose. If that, too, has a strikingly feminist point, it leaves Campbell somehow still more exposed to life and the male gaze.

In her video, Campbell seems too modest, too self-aware, too bound to the sensual, physical weight of living, and much too funny to have such high aspirations. That, however, may be how she makes all my suggestions of meaning possible at once. It may also explain how she grows so hypnotic over fifteen minutes. Not acknowledging the viewer becomes an ironic understanding that she is playing to the camera all the time.

The more elaborate the construction, in contrast, the more Campbell tempts one to write it off as a gimmick. That would be a mistake, although I did like Same as Me better than the Whitney's careful charade. I feel closer to the work when she lets herself in. And she does it again, in a museum handout that alone justifies the new show. Oddly enough, it also brings her closer to the museum as muse herself.

Titled My Potential Future Based on Present Circumstances, the handout resembles a drawing she once contributed to "Greater New York" at P.S. 1. She pretends to begin when "I've been invited to do a project at the Whitney." From there, the weave of pencil traces extends to such outcomes as "A few people quit or are fired because of my show" and "I suffer from terrible guilt," not to mention "My baffling 'artspeak' is translated into genius." She recalls one of Ad Reinhardt's sardonic diagrams of Modernism. So, in fact, does Barbara Bloom, and both leave his insistent determinism for someone else to recover.

jhaber@haberarts.com

"The Collections of Barbara Bloom" ran at the International Center for Photography through May 4, 2008. Her ran "Takes One to Know One: Absence-Presence" ran at Tracy Williams Ltd. through June 22, 2007. Beth Campbell's "Following Room" appeared in the lobby gallery at The Whitney Museum of American Art through February 24, 2008. Her "Same as Me" showed at Roebling Hall through October 14, 2002, and that part of this article originally appeared with a review of that fall's Brooklyn exhibitions. At the risk of wearying a reader, I wanted her to have a fuller history in one place.