Ken Aptekar
The Four Questions and Other Pictures, brochure essay for Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, New York, April 1999

The recitation of the "Four Questions"--traditionally performed by the youngest boy--child at a Passover seder-is the key to the observance commemorating the Jewish escape from slavery in Pharaonic Egypt. If you know Ken Aptekar, it's easy to imagine him, as a child, asking the Four Questions: chanting in a clear, increasingly confident soprano voice, an ingenuously shy smile flashed at his parents upon the completion of his momentous task. For any Jewish child, this occasion is also a symbolic rite of induction into the community; the reply to the fourth question explains why today's observer must consider himself an actual participant in the emancipatory events that took place more than 5000 years ago. Aptekar is surely a product of this culture that so prizes history and discussion.

Long in Aptekar's thoughts, the Four Questions suite of paintings was actualized when Aptekar realized that this show would open on the eve of Passover. The first painting simply quotes the first of the four questions, "Why is tonight different from all other nights?" The text is etched on glass panels superimposed on a painted quotation from an early Renaissance portrait of a boy by Piero Della Francesca. The subject is blonde and looks nothing like the familiar dark-haired Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern European derivation. (It can hardly be a coincidence that Aptekar is a red head.) The original painting is small, about 17" high, whereas Aptekar's version is more than twice as large. He has monumentalized the child's viewpoint and dramatized it by rendering the painting as an object illuminated by a raking light that makes part of the gold frame and the boy's golden hair sparkle.

Two of the Four Questions paintings ask child-like questions (the other is "Why can't the people you love live forever?"), while two offer far more complex, ethical queries--"How accepting can you be without becoming complacent?" and "Who's to say I'm not a good Jew if I don't believe in God?" The latter is especially poignant: It bedevils many of us Jewish-American baby boomers who grew up absorbing the mixed messages of our simultaneously observant and assimilation-minded parents, yet now find ourselves incensed at the ravings of an Israeli rabbinate which pronounces our Conservative and Reform backgrounds un-Jewish. Although not an observant Jew, Aptekar is drawn to Jewish culture; he is a devotee of Jewish film festivals and books by such authors as Primo Levi and Giorgio Bassani. For Four Questions: #4 Who's to say..., Aptekar has appropriated three portraits of Hasidic Jews by the turn-of-the-century Viennese painter, Isidor Kaufmann, and hauntingly arranged them in a vertical row, their direct gazes interrogating us. Once again tiny originals have been monumentalized in scaled-up versions. That the youngest, unbearded subject seems larger and closer to us than his two confreres implies that the future of Judaism itself may be at stake.

The texts of the other seven paintings in the show don't ask questions. Instead they tell stories; about Aptekar's marriage, his childhood, a visit to Spain, an allegorical conversation with a rabbi's daughter. Although the stories are about him, Aptekar's approach is more autobiographical than self-centered. His open-ended narratives playfully twist, turn, and subvert the usual narrative desire to impose wholeness and closure. The text for When I Announce My Plans first describes his parents' worried response to his 1983 marriage to a Marxist academic. Superimposed on an early 17th century allegorical figure resembling an undraped Venus rendered in shades of red, the text, too, plays on the notion of red: it ends with kiddish cups of vintage Burgundy raised during the marriage ceremony, allowing the happy couple to "share in ecstasy the joys of red." Few viewers could experience such a work without pondering the near-universal impulses of parents to protect and control, and of children to determine their own, sometimes rebellious paths.

Other narratives are both more revealing and less light-hearted. The text for It Wasn't My Brother describes the shooting of a rabbi before his suburban Detroit congregation. Overlaying a mid-19th-century portrait of Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas Loraine McKenney, Aptekar's narrative transforms McKenney's Indian blanket into a prayer shawl. That Aptekar writes that the killer was "some other kid's mentally ill older brother [my italics]" and that "a family secret became a public tragedy," of course, announces family secrets of his own: a bi-polar, older brother whose difficulties were sometimes a source of concern to the Aptekars.

In our confessional culture, no family closet lacks its skeletons. Refreshingly, Aptekar wants to have a dialogue about them--and virtually everything else of ethical concern to him. (I invoke ethics here in the most fundamental sense of how we treat one another.) As a long-time observer of Aptekar's work, I've frequently been struck by his interest in engaging his audience in the most direct ways possible. His recent exhibition-project for the Corcoran Gallery of Art, tellingly called Talking to Pictures, includes a videotape of viewers responding to Aptekar and to works in the museum's collection, as well as Aptekar's subsequently produced paintings, for which some of those responses have been etched in glass. Aptekar's text-and-image modus operandi, itself a kind of conversation, juxtaposes quotes of other painters' pictures with his own (and occasionally others') informal narratives.

When I posed the subject of inviting dialogue to him, Aptekar noted that "it's of no great consequence to me whether the voice is my own in relation to the source painting or someone else's. I've always found conversation, especially about paintings, almost erotic. As if the paintings I look at with others are a pretext for a conversation that might not otherwise have taken place." How different this is from the classic rationale of many 20th-century artists who claim to paint in order to have "something to look at," suggesting an egotistical drive to make visual what has never been seen before. (Is this even possible?) The urge to tell a story seems as old as our species itself. What's new is that Ken Aptekar generously solicits your stories, too.

Andy Davey
Fortune 4 in 7 (Lucky) Paragraphs

Fabulous! Festive! Flavorful! Andy Davey's Fortune 4--an installation of cardboard banners pirated from fortune-cookie fortunes--evokes celebrations past and present. I'm reminded of the holidays of my youth, when Welcome Home banners marked the return of a constantly travelling father and Happy Hanukah graced a rarely-used mantlepiece. The mid-winter Chinese New Year remains the high point of my smorgasbord of ethnic holidays. But I digress; it is the Proustian madeleine that is a key to the past, while the fortune cookie is a harbinger of the future.

Of course Fortune 4, with its shiny golden banners, also suggests the Fortune 500--the ne plus ultra of captalism, and the embodiment of Lifestyles of the Rich and Richer. Gold reminds us, too, of the value of language and its (sometimes fascistic) power to mold consciousness. Fortune 1: A golden egg of opportunity falls into your lap this month. Think of advertising and Wittgenstein. But cardboard banners and tissue-like fortunes also suggest disposability. Only a gesture separates the telling artifact from the thrownaway.

Remember your last fortune? Or any of them? Fortunes are generic, but we respond when one seems to fit. I recall an unusual fortune of a few years ago, which my lover stores in a tiny plastic drawer labelled "The Dreaded Fortune." He loves you as much as he can but it isn't very much. As a gay man in a relationship, this fortune stands out for its perversity. It also suffers from poor market penetration by excluding half the adult population. When the restaurant that served it went out of business, I was certain such disturbing fortunes played their part.

The fortune is an apt subject for art because it gives linguistic form to ideology. It reinforces the blandly generic, but by no means neutral values of Confucianism, Judeo-Christianity, or what today's political and religious hacks call "traditional values." Such maxims are ripe for deconstruction. Fortune 2: Present your best ideas to an eager and welcoming audience. Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger coin their own aphorisms; Davey appropriates his. No master texts here! Davey's approach is laid back and the reflectiveness of the banners is--I think--a nicely metaphorical touch. You can't remind viewers often enough that meaning is something an audience arrives at, as much as something an artist produces.

Until recently, the humble fortune--no matter how apt as subject matter--has rarely been taken up by artists. That's changed over the last decade; an era future historians may tag Fortunist. Fortune 3: Your artistic talents win the approval and applause of others. Chinese-born Hung Liu paints a photo-realist green card-as-self-portrait identifying herself as Cookie, Fortune; Harley Spiller's A Million Menus, an installation-homage to Chinese restaurants, prominently features the fabled biscuits; and a recent work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres offers fortune cookies to viewers as gifts. None of these artists have much in common with Andy Davey--or with one other.

Nowadays fortunes come equipped with lucky numbers. Lucky numbers 21,24,27,35,36,45. Chinese numerology might account for the recent inclusion of lucky numbers, but I think it's the proliferation of state-sponsored lotteries and gambling. This is the downside of capitalism; the decline of real wages and the desperation of workers who lack job security. But it's also the irrationality of the fin-de-siècle, the mysticism that appeared in the 1890s and the 1990s. I know, I was born on Friday the 13th.

Ever dreamt about fortunes? Last month I dreamt I was writing them and after I woke up I began noticing representations of fortunes everywhere. On Edward Sorel's cover for the New Yorker's first issue of 1996. In the January issue of Art News, which featured an item about a "prominent collector" who backed out of a deal because of a fortune. The writer of the oddly self-congratulatory piece delighted in the wondrous irrationality of it all, as if the collector had been on-line with the Delphic Oracle, who prompted the cancellation of the order. Fortune 4: Delay a major purchase, a better deal is coming. Coincidentally, Davey uses this same, deal-breaking fortune in his installation. But unlike the magazine-writer, he probes the nature of our connection with these relics of pre-modern prophecy. A resourceful archaeologist of the language and imagery of pop culture, Davey is attuned to the resonant idiosyncracies so many of us take for granted. That he exhibits his work, is our good fortune.

Daniel Goldstein
Bodily Presence and Absence, catalogue essay for the show Reliquaries, Foster Goldstrom Gallery, New York, October 1993

"Do they smell?" I asked artist Daniel Goldstein. "Everybody wants to know that," he laughingly replied. "Funny but they don't." We were discussing the leather work-out-bench covers that now constitute the guts of Goldstein's "Icarian" series. Abraded, sweat-stained, and evocatively scarred, these discarded objects bear the imprint of literally heavy use. They are repositories for the visual--and visceral--scent of bodies.

As unconventional "prints" they remind us of other ghostly body-tracings in post-war art: of elements in Robert Rauschenberg's mixed-media works (especially his blueprints and "Hoarfrost" series), Bruce Conners' "Angel" photograms, even Yves Klein's "Anthropometries." Their lack of artistic handicraft may also recall some body artworks, such as Dennis Oppenheim's Burn (1970), a negative-image of a book burned onto the chest of the artist by the sun. But unlike the subject/object conflations of body art, Goldstein's found portraits were conceptualized by neither artist nor "sitter". They simply appeared like the Shroud of Turin.

Religious associations are inescapable here. Goldstein mounts his "skins" (his term) in heavy, deep, box-like frames to suggest reliquaries, placing their contents out of reach behind plexiglass. Constructed of richly glowing copper and wood, the frames evoke the preciousness of their medieval and Renaissance counterparts. Set against black panels, the brown irregularly-shaped skins offer not only Rorschach-like images, but metal staples and stigmata-like holes that allude to the passions of martyrs and saints.

In the reliquary, ancient spiritual impulses and rites meet the eternal dramas of possession and power. Fascinated by the notion of the reliquary as "dream architecture" and a "seat of power," Goldstein has put this form at the center of his art since 1991, when he began his "Reliquary" series. Each of its twenty-or-so works consists of a colored, aluminum-mesh box--often a peak-roofed tower--containing an illuminated, revolving vessel or house-form of the same transparent material. Coupled with the Platonic simplicity of both exterior and interior forms, the works' light-shot transparency suggest that these are mysterious containers of spirit, not matter.

What separates Goldstein's earlier series and the reliquaries in the "Icarian" series from their religious predecessors is their abstraction, their haunting lack of specificity. Catholic reliquaries were constructed to house (purported) artifacts of special historical figures or events--the knuckle bone of a saint; a splinter from the True Cross on which Christ was crucified. Such relics remain objects of veneration and the destination of pilgrims who believe that they possess magical powers.

Although partly inspired by the deaths of friends, Goldstein's reliquaries do not portray particular subjects. The works in the first "Reliquary" series are anonymous spirit-houses, while the "Icarian" pieces offer oblique commentary about our plague-ridden age.

Goldstein collected his skins from the Muscle System, a San Francisco gym located in the predominantly gay Castro district, the epicenter of the American AIDS epidemic during the eighties. Each piece in the series is named after the machine from which its skin comes--Incline, Hack Squat, Bench. Until recently, the goal of exercises performed on these machines was the creation of the attractive and healthy body. But AIDS has severed the link between these twin concepts.

For the HIV-infected the goal is likely to be the creation and maintenance of the attractive, healthy-looking body as a signifier of normality in the face of a frighteningly abnormal condition. Goldstein alludes to these oppositions in his series title: Icarian is the name of the work-out machine manufacturer whose benches he's skinned, but it also refers to the mythological youth who briefly soared, and then fell.

The gay/AIDS subtext of Goldstein's work is also open to a generational reading. For gay men of a certain age--those born in the forties or fifties--life is divided into the pre- and post-AIDS eras. Friends and work-out buddies have been lost; even the leather skins, Goldstein told me, have been largely replaced by vinyl. Always a favorite - that is, a safe and potentially erotic - meeting place for gay men, the gym was fetishized for commercial consumption during the seventies. Its latent eroticism made blatant, it became a popular setting for porno movies and a standard feature at bathhouses. Like Goldstein's skins and Catholic reliquaries, the mirrored gym offers only fragmentary views of bodies (or, in the case of reliquaries, actual fragments). Bear in mind that the earliest known fetishes--pre-historic fertility figures--are also the earliest known artifacts of both art and religion.

Although the "Icarian" works are among the most poignantly allusive of the enormous number of contemporary artworks inflected by AIDS, they should not be limited by such a reading. The skins are also objects that recall and make literal the qualities of touch and gesture fetishized in post-war, abstract painting. But Goldstein is no ironist. Like Ross Bleckner's similarly romantic paintings of dimmed lights and funerary urns, his works are images of bodily presence and absence, metaphors of mortality. The heavy frames in which the skins are encased cannily double as packing crates, but they might also function as coffins.

Some viewers may be put off by the found-object origins of Goldstein's skins. The use of found objects is by now a time-honored tradition in twentieth-century art dating back to Marcel Duchamp's pioneering efforts just before World War I. Unlike most contemporary artists employing them, however, Goldstein eschews the shiny, new object as a means to critique commodity culture. The patina of use attracts him, as it did such artistic forebears as the Dadaist Kurt Schwitters or the Beat-era, assemblage and collagists Wallace Berman and George Herms. Their potent art supports Duchamp's contention that artistic discrimination and intelligence are more essential to art production than mere craft or technique.

When I first saw the "Icarian" works from afar in the artist's studio, I thought they were x-rays. I now realize that my misapprehension wasn't so far from the truth. They are (figuratively) x-rays of a diseased body politic and reliquaries memorializing an increasingly threatened species. Richly allusive--more is generally more--Goldstein's poetic evocations of our death-obsessed/death-denying culture are both poetic emblem of presence and totems of loss.