Out of Fashion

Dieter Roth, Fashioning Fiction, and Lee Lozano

The union of the Museum of Modern Art and P.S. 1 has done wonders for art and New York City. It helps keep alive an adventurous, essential space for contemporary art—and I definitely do not mean MOMA. It adds to the cultural boom and still untapped potential of Long Island City. It makes one wish that the Modern's temporary home, MOMA QNS, would last forever, rather than give way to a gala Manhattan reopening in the fall. But has it really altered business as usual for either one?

This spring, for once, the institutions fully collaborate. Dieter Roth gets enough space for even his obsessive habits and outsized ego. His retrospective builds from his Bauhaus roots at the Modern to a full-blown tool shop at P.S. 1. Where the two museums go there own way, however, may say more still.

Along with Roth's animal house, MOMA QNS is dressed to kill. In the adjacent gallery, it looks at the carefully staged world of fashion photography. Meanwhile, Roth shares a wing at P.S. 1 with a woman who seems never to have dressed the part—and whose ego was clearly not made to last.

Lee Lozano has the temerity to make her signature paintings out of Roth's own favorite male domain, the tool shed. Yet her sadly neglected works dwell on her self-doubt, and she dropped art all but unnoticed in 1971, the year she lost her Soho studio. She had lasted barely ten years. Together, the three shows say a lot about the two institutions and about how women fare in a competitive art world.

From closet space to storage space

When it comes down to it, MOMA and P.S. 1 pretty much go their own way. With the Modern in Queens for now, an easy walk from its partner, one might expect more. P.S. 1, I could argue, has even let the older museum off the hook. Now it can act virtuous while leaving real experiment to others. It can safely represent Modernism and Postmodernism as a distant past. Sound suspect? It might work, too.

Modernism entered the textbooks fair and square. Like every inch of art and history, it deserves space for people to see it and to debate who owns it. Postmodernism loves institutions, too, if only to scrutinize them. In addition, while scrapped for space, the Modern has to keep its aims modest. Perhaps it can try more next year, with a monster in Manhattan and unclear plans for the building in Queens. Besides, who could conceivably do more for art than to leave Alanna Heiss, the director of P.S. 1, to her own devices?

That said, Dieter Roth makes a great case for bringing the two together. His overbearing, if not exactly overwhelming retrospective does not just cover them both. It puts the strengths of each one to good use.

The tidy spaces and moveable walls of MOMA QNS give a born collector all the closet space he needs. It places him in European art history, from prewar design to something like Arte Povera with a German accent. It caps his fifty-year career with a quilt and a wall-like contraption teetering, appropriately, just off the museum's awkward, sloping lobby.

P.S. 1 rounds out the show both in time and in space. It reminds one that Roth keeps at it while remaining largely an outsider to the New York scene. It also carries him from closet space to storage space. One long room offers a cross between a junk yard, a hardware store, and a roller coaster. Another stacks well over one hundred TV sets, perhaps even more than Jon Kessler can muster.

Unfortunately, it adds up to a little too much—and far too little. On the one hand, Roth will try anything, so long as it has his name all over it. On the other hand, he runs to a safe rehash. He recycles art movements that had long lost their momentum. He revisits work of his own that had too little motivation in the first place. He does not grope with the implications of recycling, in terms of art's authenticity or the urban sprawl of the real world echoed so well by, say, Phoebe Washburn.

From Bauhaus to outhouse

Roth fled to Switzerland in 1943, to escape Allied bombing, and his earliest work has neutrality written all over it. The first room holds student reworkings of Bauhaus motifs already grown quaint. From there, he tries printed books churned into sausage meat and rickety relief sculpture in kaleidoscope patterns. Even when he gets messy, he is articulating the proper principles of visual design, reproductive technology, and optical theory.

Roth at last makes his critical career shift, from neatly layered junk to junk for its own sake, with food. A cabinet of brown powder could stand for geological strata or human remains, but he is recalling the homey echoes of a spice cabinet. He also starts fashioning art of chocolate, including busts of himself. One should not approach this retrospective on an empty stomach or a full one.

For a while, his career loses any arc at all. He tries other modes of self-portraiture, from mod 1960s' design to videotape. He collects books of never-discarded sketches and carousels of slides from his years in Iceland. He presses trash into boxes and sorts them as if for a library. He seems like a guy who would try anything for a laugh, if only he were funnier.

The reflection upon self-reflection gives this art its punch. It takes a Postmodern critique of art as expression and signs it in bold letters. It takes the concern for entropy of earthworks and removes any trace of the natural. If the final, huge pieces at P.S. 1 took years to accumulate, they grow out of what he has always done. Guess whose image one sees on those TV monitors?

Still, the show's haphazard course keeps it from ever having much urgency. Even the roller coaster amounts to a student copy of Liubov Popova's 1922 Moscow theater sets. In another's hands, the food imagery could point to shortages in postwar Germany or the strain of consumer culture. Here it looks isolated from much of anything, like a Godiva shop that happens to have sat around for forty years. Roth may never escape from his own time warp either, not even with his death in 1998.

As with the chocolate molds, Roth prefers ashen tones. He may grow slovenly and self-obsessed. Still, one never forgets that one is seeing a balding, portly German who passed his formative years, after Switzerland, in the chill of northern Europe.

Fashioning fashion

You remember Cindy Sherman and her first forays into color. A woman who just loves to dress up puts on clothing that no one in her right mind would buy, in elaborate settings that few could afford. And you remember Nan Goldin. Scantily clad models, from the photographer's exclusive inner circle, flaunt a risqué, slightly degrading sex life. And that was before one could get those meds through spam.

No, wait: that sounds more like fashion magazines, right—in a time when artists have even made the style pages or, like Shannon Plumb, mocked the fashion runway? MOMA QNS sure thinks so. Sherman and Goldin star in its survey of fashion photography since 1990. It proposes that fashion can co-opt the stratagems of its most creative critics without changing them—or itself. "Advertising photographs," writes Susan Sontag, "are often just as ambitious, artful, slyly casual, transgressive, ironic, and solemn as art photography." The exhibition differs only in considering that a compliment to both.

The museum actually takes this stuff seriously, and it has a serious case. Sherman, who opens the show, looks stunning as ever. Seated, as if floating on her own wedding dress, with a wild expression somewhere between Eliza Doolittle and the madwoman in the attic, she could be playing a young Miss Havisham. As a clown in absurdly colored, baggy pants, she takes on a surreal sanity.

The show has a theoretical case as well. It skips around controversy over the integrity of, say, Richard Avedon by avoiding such comforting elegance. It prefers paid features rather than advertisements, and it sees the first as subverting the second. With Philip-Lorca diCorcia as its guiding light, it highlights elaborately staged narratives that deny a coherent beginning or ending. As the exhibition title puts it, the magazines are "Fashioning Fiction." Here comes Thoroughly Postmodern Millie now.

This highly selective take never convinced me, and neither did the pictures. They make a big fuss over the same strict, narrative conventions that isolate them from much creative photography in the first place. They also stay comfortably clean and extravagant, when such artists as Lorna Simpson can play dress-up, too. Sherman segues smoothly into actual photos of wealthy women, rather than into her own gallery work, with its deliberately disgusting dismemberment of female beauty. Sherman herself has curated Robert Mapplethorpe, whose photography often has the gloss of fashion, especially when in the nude. Here each realm has its artificially defined place.

By sticking to subjects remote from the viewer, the show keeps fashion on a commercial pedestal. In contrast, one longs to know or to identify with Sherman in her Untitled Film Stills. Conversely, by seeing fashion as critical rather than commercial, it skirts real questions. In the process, it misses the chance for a truly subversive look at art, photography, and their markets. Last year, the Frick Collection illuminated the connections between James McNeill Whistler and fashion. Here a museum gets scared lest the connections between art and fashion run a little too deep.

Turn on, tune in, drop out

Roth's machine shop and fashion photography belong together. Both know where to assign the sexes. Both know that real men and women never give up center stage. They make Lee Lozano seem unintelligible. Like others between 1961 and 1971, she turned on, tuned in, and dropped out. No wonder she also pretty much dropped off the radar until her death in 1999.

Lozano did everything wrong. She dabbled in Pop Art, abstraction, and conceptual art, without sticking to anything long. She includes jokes. Long before the art world had assumed today's epic proportions, she challenged its politics with a Dropout Piece. And then she dropped out for real. She had the guts to compete with others on their own ground, plus the honesty to admit her frailty and her doubts.

Lozano's best work comes with a hammer blow. In fact, it depicts a hammer, in close up. The clarity of drawing, like the subject matter, suggests the Pop Art of those days, not to mention the male posturing. However, the oil paint has a creaminess well beyond even Wayne Thiebaud's layer cakes, and the claws nestle around the hammer itself, as if caught up in the flow of paint. The point of view makes it closer still to abstraction, as well as removing any chance that one can picture the tool in one's hand, as advertising product or as extension of the male ego. Lozano is happily losing her grip.

If one has a hammer, people say, everything looks like a nail, but she has little like it again. P.S. 1's two-story basement room has a way of making art look good—whether one looks down from the first floor, as if into a forbidden chamber, or steps up from below into the light. The abstract paintings hung there do look rather nice, even if I could not get over the sense that I had seen the pale tones and even curves before. Still, I may never see Robert Mangold as quite so original again.

Most of the other rooms contain works on paper, blending quick sketches and intricate annotations. Despite the great number and the detail, they go quickly, and they fill out the story of a woman trying to make sense of her life and her art. They also show a politically aware women trying to take the issues and constraints of her time seriously. They may not replace the hammer, but at least they make its luxuriant assertiveness all the more remarkable.

One sketch supplies a life in miniature, as an ironic résumé. It has the dates of a marriage and an abortion a year before. It dates sex, alcohol, and drugs as "continuing." The mix of wit and poignancy made me think of another women who changed her name from Lenore and who had trouble holding on to her life as an artist—Lee Krasner. They also made me think again of Roth and fashion. She could not turn her art into a factory product or herself into an image for sale, but what happened then?

jhaber@haberarts.com

"Roth Time: A Dieter Roth Retrospective" ran through June 7, 2004, at MOMA QNS and P.S. 1, "Fashioning Fiction: In Photography Since 1990" through June 28 at MOMA QNS, and "Lee Lozano: Drawn from Life" through September 13 at P.S. 1. Susan Sontag's typically brilliant line appears in the final chapter of Regarding the Pain of Others (Picador, 2003).