Also this issue: Artsbeat -Debra Auspitz Denyce Graves -David Shengold Hands Across Veronica -Debra Auspitz Eric Schlosser -A.D. Amorosi Hillary Rodham Clinton Living History -Lori Hill "Stuffing Birds, Pressing Plants, Shaping Knowledge: Natural History in North America 1730-1860," -Kristina Weise There's Something About Mary -David Anthony Fox These Mortal Coils Norman Rush details a marriage from the inside out. -Justin Bauer

June 19-25, 2003

art

Puh-leeze Don't Squeeze the Artwork!

Polly Apfelbaum, installation view of Blossom (2000), 18 feet in diameter, synthetic velvet and fabric dye.

Polly Apfelbaum’s work is a tactile wonderland.

by Robin Rice

At the ICA admissions desk, someone has placed a few oval cutouts of thin synthetic velvet. Each, the size of a largish lopsided oatmeal cookie, was stained a smudged black by Polly Apfelbaum for her assembled floor paintings in the galleries. A card invites, "Please touch this, not the artwork." I smiled at the swatches on the way in, but couldn’t resist handling the plushy, ultra-pliable fabric on the way out.

Inside the galleries, the viewer is ever-aware that Apfelbaum's opulent floor-based fields of color -- by far the most satisfying and memorable items in this, her first museum survey -- are composed of thousands of independent touchable elements. The artist herself positioned each piece of fabric on the floor. Part of the experience of these floor pieces has to do with not stepping on them while craning forward to drink in the super-saturated colors that are this art's primary pleasure and substance. This paradoxical off-limits allure, so characteristic of Apfelbaum's work, is echoed in contrasts of organization/entropy and analysis/experience.

The core of Split consists of ovals dyed black and gray like those on the desk. The center resembles a vast growth of lichen or mold. From this squashy-looking mass radiates a broad fringe of linear elements striped with black like tigers' tails.

Apfelbaum applies dye to her velvet with a squeeze bottle and later cuts the shapes out. The tiger-tail comparison occurred to me at the entrance to the gallery, where orange and black predominate in the linear elements. In fact, the meandering band of black-banded color modulates smoothly through a kind of spectrum as one paces the perimeter of the piece: deep yellow, tangerine, magenta, violet, blue, gray, avocado, olive, brown, ocher, rust, umber, gray-blue, yellow.

The ICA Split is really a split Split, for the original 1998 version occupied two sides of a room leaving a kind of walkway through the center. Here Ice (1998) glazes the opposing area, suggesting a radiant rainbow-faceted crystalline surface. Many long elements are paralleled into a semblance of rough hatching, which might make visitors think of Jasper Johns' crosshatch paintings. Apfelbaum's encrypted references to other artists, as well as film, music and politics, are legion and one of the unpredictable, almost secret, pleasures of her work. One might feel the experience as purely sensory, but thoughts creep in, insidious, contrary thoughts.

A peculiarity of Ice is that visitors are not allowed to walk along the narrow corridor that separates it from the wall. Once again, Apfelbaum tempts us, only to thwart our pursuit of satisfaction. She is cunning: Is not this sort of frustration the price of civilization?

Psychedelic Reckless (1998) is reckless, a carnivalesque explosion, containing, like chaos, discreet unexpected patterns. It is a descendent of Ice in that it is composed of pieces rejected from Ice, though it was never before exhibited in the same venue.

These works are all downstairs. A huge expanse of Oblong wallpaper draws the eye upward as it extends through the second floor of the galleries, reminding us that there is another level to the exhibition. The only work made especially for this exhibition and Apfelbaum's first work to be fabricated by others, Oblong was designed with colored markers. In vertically arranged geometric ovals on white, the paper shimmers like a candy rainbow -- yummy and mechanical at the same time.

Apfelbaum's earlier work is provocative, but not as thrilling. Daisy Chain (1989/2003), rows of three-dimensional wooden forms based on clover leaves, flowers and perhaps cogwheels, intrigues. A Pocket Full of Posies (1990) is a circle of cutout steel flower silhouettes. Both contrast heaviness of material with a lightness of subject. Bones (2000) is a row of rolls of dyed fabric, only one of which we are allowed to see unfurled. The conceptual content of works like The Dwarves with Snow White, a dozen muslin sacks filled with shredded colored paper, dominates their visual rewards. Particularly notable is the glittering mandala Wallflowers (1990), in which Pop Art is a clear influence. A satirical formalist riposte to minimalism, Compulsory Figures, a field of paired rectangles of cutout fabric, is coloristically and experientially far less compelling than the more intricate floor patterns, of which Blossom (2000), Wallflowers' floored sister, is the most ordered.

If I had to devise a style affinity for Apfelbaum's recent work, it would be post-pattern and decoration. Her painstaking hand labor and use of ordinary tools and materials -- even the freedom with which she composes her designs -- suggest P&D. This mid-'70s/early-'80s movement was a protest against anti-retinal, over-intellectualized art. With full cognizance of art history and human history, Apfelbaum takes us back to the expansive, primal visual experience.

On Wed., July 9 at 7:30 p.m., Apfelbaum will present a lecture, "Fractured Fairytales," discussing the influence of film on her work, followed by a screening of one of her favorite films, Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point.

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