Richard Artschwager's Retroactive Stardom: The Artist as a Chest of Drawers, 7 Days, February 24, 1988, p.33

Who is Richard Artschwager and why are they calling him the most influential artist in New York today? The Brooklyn-based sculptor and painter is a master of paradox and a bundle of contradictions. His sensibility might be described as a cross between a furniture maker's love of the well crafted and the indolent nose-thumbing of Marcel Duchamp. "Thought experiencing itself" is Artschwager's definition of art, and his own work, currently showing at the Whitney, certainly fits that bill. It has also provided a potent model of intellectual rigor for Eighties artists fed up with overheated, Neo-Expressionist art.

The furniture maker who loves well-crafted objects is Artschwager himself. During the Fifties he supported his family by making custom furniture and designing for the Workbench stores. A late bloomer, his artwork emerged fully formed in the early Sixties. While it is surely no coincidence that his sculptures play on furniture forms and his paintings depict interiors, little else of Artschwager's life can be gleaned from his art. The most personal work visible in this show is Portrait I (1962), a self-portrait hybridizing a cast-off chest of drawers and a blurry image of a head. The drawers open, but nothing of the man behind the artist is revealed.

The fact that we only see Artschwager's head seems apt, though. He thinks inordinately. While his art may be cool as ice and cerebral as an article in Artforum, the quality of his obsessive thinking can be irresistible. "I want to make sculpture for the eye and painting for the touch," he says. Paradox is his modus operandi, and his art is every bit as quirky as his aims would imply.

The three-dimensional works--"sculpture for the eye"--are objects resembling tables and chairs, pianos and chests, even a cradle. Although this is the stuff of everyday life, virtually none of it functions. Table With Pink Tablecloth (1964) is a formica-covered, table-size wooden block. Expertly applied formica creates the illusion of a table, a tablecloth and the darkness beneath the table. But when we think of it as a table, we see that its form contradicts its function.

The two-dimensional works--"paintings for the touch"--are similarly mind-bending. Banal images of domestic interiors taken from newspaper photos, they are painted on celotex, a vinyl wallboard with a brushy, swirl pattern. As tactile as formica is slickly repellent, each of these industrial-age materials comes equipped with the built-in imagery of wood graining or brushstrokes.

Equally important, they provided Artschwager with a method of squeezing as many contradictory ideas as possible into each work--form-function, sculpture-painting, abstraction-representation, to name just three. He must feel like a preacher officiating at a shotgun wedding of life's great irreconcilables: the intractable inertia of material and the unbearable drift of consciousness. The tension between them results in a body of work riddled with queer objects and quirky lines of inquiry. Alternately ingratiating and alienating, his art may be the most eccentric of any being produced today.

There are too many artistic odd birds on view at the Whitney to mention more than a few. Consider the abstract, watermelon-shaped objects of rubberized hair (!) that nest in the galleries like pods from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Artschwager may regard them as "loci of visual attention," but the rest of us will see them as bizarre and/or endearing kitsch. Or consider the huge three-dimensional exclamation point near the simulated elevator-chamber that moans "up" and "down" in a human voice. Finally, note that some of the sculptures, like the tortured-looking Flayed tables (1984-85), more nearly resemble Dali's melting watches than the minimal sculpture with which Artschwager was formerly--and superficially--associated.

Now, through literally dozens of group shows over the past few years, Artschwager has been similarly linked with an entirely new generation: the overlapping Neo-Geo and Neo-Conceptual artists, including Jeff Koons, Meyer Vaisman, Ashley Bickerton, Haim Steinbach and John Armleder. The tie that binds them to Artschwager and to each other is their interest in art as "simulated" and "appropriated" reality--the hottest current issues in New York art circles. Many of their functionless furniture sculptures or reproductions of generic images and objects knockoff a single aspect of Artschwager's multifaceted thinking. Conceptual one-liners are the typically enervated result.

Imitation has already moved so far beyond flattery that the younger artists are now being invoked to validate Artschwager's pioneering efforts, rather than the other way around. Even Artschwager's dealer, Leo Castelli, says of them, "They've made such an incredibly clear context for his art." Here we have an instance of the retrospective exhibition's use as retroactive star maker. The disturbing implication of this link is that without these Eighties artists, Artschwager's work would be far less worthy of our attention.

In an age of heroes, that role seems an unlikely one for the perennially underground and self-effacing Artschwager. Ironies mount since the most impressive aspect of his art is its virtuoso slipperiness, its refusal to be only one thing at any given moment. Artschwager's speculations about the domestic landscape transcend--and brilliantly transform--the commonplace nature of his imagery and objects. Like formica, his testy work refuses to age or settle in.

As Ye Sew, Village Voice, April 25, 1995, pp. 82-83

"Division of Labor: 'Women's Work' in Contemporary Art" is as deeply divided as Caesar's Gaul--and every bit as combative. Organized by Lydia Yee for the Bronx Museum of the Arts, this scrappy show looks at gendered themes (domesticity and motherhood) and gendered media (sewing and knitting) in the past three decades' art. It opens with sardonic wit. You're greeted outside the exhibition by Marisa Hernandez's Camouflage Curtain, a trio of fringed, mosquito-netting panels embellished with heraldic, camouflage appliqués that vividly evokes the show's concerns. Hernandez envisions the domestic sphere as personal and aesthetic battleground, the home of once-discredited decorative and functional art. The going gets rougher, though, when the viewer enters the exhibition.

Installed in two, chronologically arranged galleries, "Division of Labor" is also broken into three, more or less decade-spanning sections: 1962-76, 1976-85, and 1985-95. But the tripartite delineation doesn't really work. Circa 1980, you simultaneously climb the stairs leading to the second gallery and turn your back on artworks of the Pattern and Decoration persuasion. You sense that you've left the already-charted past for the more open-ended present, which underlines the show's point that pioneering, mainly feminist, artists made the artworld safe for younger artists of both genders. On the heels of "Bad Girls"--last year's spectacle of feminism-lite--Yee is to be congratulated for the seriousness of her attempt to historicize gendered art. But her cause-and-effect narrative is misleadingly reductionist. The show's over-emphasis on Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro's "Womanhouse" signals a too-narrow approach to the issues at hand.

The welcome recreation of several installations from "Womanhouse"--the student project sponsored by Schapiro and Chicago's Feminist Art Program at Cal Arts in 1972--literally takes center stage in the show's first gallery . (It's partly installed on a raised area of the gallery emblazoned with attention-riveting signage and snippets of feminist crit painted directly on the walls.) The original Womanhouse transformed a dilapidated Hollywood house into an environment comprising room-size installations including those recreated here: Chicago's disturbing Menstruation Bathroom, Faith Wilding's deliciously macrame-esque Womb Room, Beth Bachenheimer's eclectic Shoe Closet, and Sherry Brody's elegant Lingerie Pillows. Johanna Demetrakas filmed them--her about-to-be-released videotape plays in the gallery--as well as the performances and consciousness raising groups that were central to the project's non-art aims of empowerment and attention to process, rather than to art product.

Art is nourished by other art, as well as by life. Unfortunately the historical part of the show belies this. Although it's a pleasure to see Harmony Hammond's circular rag-rug-floor pieces, Martha Rosler's mail-art meditations-on-domesticity and the phallicized objects of Yayoi Kusama--our new Frida Kahlo?--this history is woefully incomplete. Admittedly the museum's limited space precluded comprehensiveness, but the literal emptiness at the center of the lower gallery ironically suggests that there's not enough historical works to fill it. Art that might have occupied this void and broadened the show's scope include Tina Girouard's linoleum floor pieces, documentation of Bonnie Sherk's conceptualist Farm, or Ree Morton's proto-installations fashioned from wallpaper or faux baked goods. Several male artists of the sixties and seventies whose works were only infrequently discussed in terms of gender might also have been represented. Consider, for instance, Andy Warhol's controversial wallpapers of the late-sixties, Lucas Samaras's eye-popping fabric abstractions of the early seventies, and Kim MacConnel's fabric and furniture installations of the late-seventies.

The gallery devoted to the past 15 years' work, by contrast, is bursting at the seams with compelling art that's far more engaging than the Whitney Biennial's. Well-known artists like Kiki Smith and Faith Ringgold are seen alongside less-renowned artists who are rapidly (and deservedly) attracting attention. Among the many noteworthy works in this section of the show, I particularly commend to your attention: Joyce Scott's view of the nanny "problem" from the perspective of the black nanny's neglected child, Ernesto Pujol's elegy on a child's laundry, Oliver Herring's silver-mylar shrouds, and Lynn Yamamoto's breathtakingly spare commemorations of her grandmother's life of backbreaking domestic labor.

Unlike the historical half of the show, there's near gender parity here, but its meaning isn't explored. The vast majority of men whose works are featured in "Division of Labor" are gay. While Yee is attentive to multicultural issues, when it comes to discussing specific works she inexplicably ignores sexual preference. This isn't a matter of bean-counting but of carrying an intellectual inquiry to its logical conclusion: If sewing is a gendered art practice, it is also--based on the evidence presented here--a sexed practice. Panels from the NAMES Project Quilt, the premier, feminist-inspired, community artwork of the late 20th century might well have provided a coda fitting the show's admirably democratizing intent. Is any New York museum--even one located in the Bronx--ready for that?

Maria Nordman
Light Paints a Museum, ArtWeek, July 28, 1979, pp. 1, 20

Blackness envelops Berkeley. It is the predawn hour of the wolf. At 4:55 am about a dozen people congregate around the locked doors of the University Art Museum. Soon the sun will rise on this, the longest day of the year (June 21), and on this, the last of the Space as Support series of installations. The director/designer of this early morning drama is Maria Nordman.

At five o'clock the doors open by flashlight. Inside it is pitch black. The audience, which will grow to about 150 in an hour, mills around the irregularly shaped lobby. Many of us strain to see what Nordman has done to alter this particularly extravagant space. We had been tipped off--and might have guessed--that artificial light would be banished from the museum all day. Nordman's strategy is soon revealed: she has affixed white contact paper to the main and adjoining gallery floors and transparent red, green and blue acetate to the museum's glass doors.

With the day's first light, the floor begins to glow an arctic, pearly white. It is a vision out of Bruegel. The reflected light gradually makes the upper galleries among the brightest places in the museum. As the sun rises higher, the floor becomes increasingly dissociated from the surrounding concrete architecture. Frozen moats and Norman fortresses come to mind. It is 5:45 and I am very close to dream consciousness.

June 21 is a typical summer's day in Berkeley. The sun and fog are engaged in meteorological tug-of-war. By 1 pm the sun is victorious, and we're treated to a spectacularly clear and sunny summer solstice. The museum is very bright now. Dawn's eerie romanticism has been transformed into shadowless daylight.

The crowd has changed, too. The art world professionals have mostly left; many will return for sunset. Tourists and university students wander in, some are taken aback, some are intrigued, and some are totally mystified by Nordman's lighthearted enterprise. An occasional viewer yields to the urge to interact with the space and light. There are crawlers and dancers and shadow-makers.

The upper galleries are by now virtually floodlit with reflected light. The natural light makes for a variety of subtle and not-so-subtle changes within the museum environment. Some normally spotlit art objects are dim and shadowy: Francis Bacon's Lying Figure With A Hypodermic Syringe seems particularly purple and nightmarish. Parts of the Hans Hofmann gallery are brilliantly illuminated, and certain early paintings seem less garish, more playful than usual. This viewer (formerly a painter) was reminded that painting is all about the reflection and absorption of light by pigments. Nordman's installation was full of information, simple lessons in looking. Those viewers who never raised their eyes from the floor--and I saw some--missed the point. Using the most economical of means, Nordman managed to transform the entire, cavernous space. That, essentially, was the difference between her installation and Robert Irwin's earlier Space as Support fluorescent-light work. Irwin's piece never really transcended the discrete, object-orientation of its light-fixture component parts.

By 7 pm the art clan begins to regather. A double-edged and, for me, entirely new element of social interaction surfaced in Nordman's Berkeley installation. For her South-of-Market (San Francisco) piece a few years ago, she allowed only one viewer at a time into the storefront space. Certain other month-long installations in small, out-of-the-way, nonart venues have rarely been seen by more than a few viewers at the same time.

When I asked Nordman why she chose to work at the University Art Museum, she replied, "I wanted to work on a building where people would be at different heights in relation to each other." This installation married a multileveled structure and numerous mobile viewers (past installations have sometimes incorporated a single, fixed, most effective point of view) with an ongoing sixteen-hour presentation. Faithful viewers, of course, ended up interacting with each other as well as with the space and light. And sometimes curiously strong bonds develop between those who've gotten up at 4 am with a shared purpose.

Sunset brings a gradual softening of light. Where dawn had made the floor an icy pond, dusk makes it a limpid pool. The red acetate on a south-facing door turns a nearby wall beige. A street light is reflected on the floor as if on water and the nearby Durant Hotel's neon sign flickers in reflection. By 9, colors are bleached gray. Shortly thereafter, the lights go on in the building for the first time that day, signifiying that Nordman's work was complete.

The Raetz of Spring, 7 Days, June 15, 1988, p. 56

Markus Raetz: In the Realm of the Possible. New Museum of Contemporary Art, 583 Broadway. Through July 10. And recent work at the Brooke Alexander Gallery, 59 Wooster St. Through June 11.

"Living in the material world," that most resonant statement of the '80s Zeitgeist, aptly describes both the notorious arbitrage and artwork of our era. Whether in the form of Julian Schnabel's ongoing ode to a magpie or Jeff Koons' transformations of throwaway vinyl rabbits into stainless robo-bunnies, the ponderously earthbound and the fatuously rhetorical are Big. Enter Markus Raetz. The 47-year-old Swiss artist is a master of the fragile and the fragmentary, the feather-light touch and the invisible ego. In the high-cholesterol art world, his work is like a sorbet between courses at Babette's feast.

Well-known in Europe, Raetz made his first major local appearance late last year at the Soho gallery of his Paris dealer, Farideh Cadot. His art was seen but lost in the shuffle of two very different MoMA group shows, "Information" (1970) and "An International Survey or Recent Painting and Sculpture" (1984). The felicitous timing of his current New Museum retrospective, "In the Realm of the Possible," provides a preview of the imminent Venice Biennale, where Raetz will represent Switzerland. One reason it's taken so long for us to see his work is that he's out on his own aesthetic limb and not likely to be included in group shows celebrating the latest -ism. Raetz can't be dubbed a conceptual or process artist, much less a neo-Expressionist or neo-geoist. His understated creations demand that we stop classifying and start looking.

The first works you see when you enter the show announce Raetz's thematic preoccupations. Towering above us on a tall white pedestal, three tiny wooden figures or Feldstechermanner (1987) stand on individual pedestals and gaze through binoculars, but not at us. Bird watchers or spies? (The untranslatably idiomatic title meaning something like "binocular men" is no help.) Not merely unanswerable, after a moment this question no longer seems quite relevant. There is no story to decipher or power plays to decode among these male figures. Raetz has jettisoned the usual modes of interaction between viewer and artwork.

The lack of psychological abrasiveness is even more evident in the nearby untitled circle of 16 framed black-and-white photographs of a male head. The camera moves around its subject with clinical detachment and makes regular stops on its 360-degree journey. The subject's eyes are never trained on us; there is no hierarchy making one viewpoint more important than another. Raetz does his damnedest to evoke visual and interpretive multiplicity.

But even before comprehending the artist's obsession with perception, we're more likely to be struck with the variety of materials, techniques, and approaches Raetz employs. A quick glance around the gallery makes you feel that you've landed in a group show. The handsome installation showcases schematic paintings on fabric, a sculptural floor work of hefty timbers, a witty Polaroid "sculpture," carved basalt figures, wall works of twigs and eucalyptus leaves, abstractions in tin, keenly observed watercolor depictions of the Alpine landscape, notebooks of paintings and drawings, models of wire and clothespins, works composed of mirrors, and one "carved" in corrugated cardboard.

More than thematic consistency unites this kaleidoscopic output, though. There's an intimacy and sweetness that makes Raetz's art appealingly accessible despite its emotional neutrality. His passionate interest in perception is evident; it liberates him to apply a nearly Zen (or perhaps Calvinist?) yearning for economy and intellectual clarity to the materials at hand.

Unlike many conceptual artists for whom the idea is everything, Raetz is attracted to the manipulation of particular materials. He wants to tease as many nuances as possible out of his simple materials and spare forms. Raetz is probably best known for his works crafted from twigs or eucalyptus leaves (materials likely to guarantee him supremacy in a field of one), and the simplest work in the show is made from just six twigs. Kontur (1987) pairs an abstracted female midsection with an eye seen in profile. (Eyes are everywhere in Raetz's art.) It's a Matissean drawing made nearly three-dimensional. Wry and open-ended, it's a reminder that less can still be more.

Staley, a Texas Maverick, New York Newsday, April 6, 1984

The New Museum in Manhattan has consistently championed nonmainstream art. Given that the mainstream tends to get defined in the media and museum-rich Manhattan, this brave, relatively new institution makes a habit of showing art not likely to be seen elsewhere in New York. "Earl Staley: 1973-1983" is just such a case.

Staley is a middle-aged, Illinois-born Texan who now divides his time between Houston and Rome. Although he is sometimes trotted out for occasions like the Whitney Biennial or Hirshorn New Directions shows as an exemplar of the vitality of Texas art, his work has rarely been seen in quantity outside of Texas. What a surprise, then, to discover this stunning sleeper of an exhibition.

The selection of the past decade as the time period under consideration here was anything but arbitrary. In 1973, by Staley's account, "I decided simply to stop making 'art' and make pictures and tell stories." At that watershed moment in his career, he started to make narrative art with a vengeance. He apparently had so many stories to tell, and so many voices to tell them in, that this exhibition looks more like a group show than a retrospective survey of one artist's work.

Comprised of 33 drawings and 66 paintings (many of them massive), this very large exhibition takes possession of the New Museum's loft-like space as no previous show has. Even the lobby houses four paintings. In Staley's case, however, these first glances may be a bit misleading.

Each of the four paintings--"Ceremony at Etla," "An Encuentro," "Joseph and Potiphar's Wife" and "The Ship of Fools"--is an extraordinarily theatrical depiction of a mythological scene. Cecil B. De Mille might have orchestrated these muted but invariably spotlit compositions filled with milling crowds, swirling storms and a turbulent sense of the post. One may wonder about the precise nature of the stories depicted and may also find the canvases more like 17th-Century Baroque paintings than those of our own day.

That anachronistic quality is not what is so misleading about these works, though. It is the partial view of Staley's sensibility that they communicate, which may make visitors want to turn on their heels and select another destination for their afternoon's outing. Walking a few more feet to the gallery entrance proper provides a thrill that brings to mind Howard Carter's breathless proclamation at the climactic moment of the discovery of King Tut's tomb. "What do you see?" his colleagues asked. "Wonderful things," he replied.

On the nearby wall to the right hangs a wonderful canvas, indeed. Called "The Fall of Man" (1977), this enormous painting depicts Adam and Eve in the most colorful, most gorgeous, most Edenic garden imaginable. The original couple seem oblivious both to the serpent and to the avenging angel about to swoop down on them. Staley has chosen to depict the most dramatic moment of this Old Testament story just prior to the expulsion from Eden and borrowed Adam and Eve's exuberant poses and diamond motif markings from Picasso's harlequin paintings. The freshness and lyrical breadth of this monumental work bring to mind Rubens and Bonnard, as well as Picasso.

Such comparisons are not out of line. Staley is a veritable magpie when it comes to borrowing themes, compositions and anything else he can use from artists and artworks of the past. Perhaps the most beautiful paintings in the show are two versions of Leda and the Swan tip their hats to Fragonard and Watteau. It is unlikely that an American painter has ever ransacked the history of art more promiscuously than this former instructor of art history.

Next to "The Fall" hangs "Adam and Eve" (1977). Here Eve reaches for the apple in the serpent's mouth while Adam looks on. As in all allegorical or narrative paintings, much of the meaning resides in the gestures of the figures. Eve's frozen attitude--coupled with the glowing, golden back lighting--make it clear that this is a symbolic event.

While biblical and mythological subject matter is important to Staley, it constitutes just one part of his output. Ten feet from "The Fall" and "Adam and Eve," a small canvas depicts a skull in a Mexican folk-art style suggestive not only of Staley's Texas home, but of the time he has spent living in Oaxaca.

Other nearby canvases portray garishly colored animals--a crocodile, for instance--in rather straightforward fashion. Staley also paints astonishingly fresh and naturalistic landscapes, metaphorical maps, Indians but not cowboys, and imaginary beings--demons and women seen as mermaids are two of his favorite varieties. His own life enters the picture not only in curious self-portraits as artist, shaman, king or fool, but as one of a pair of "Lovers Eating Skulls" (1980), a reference both to the Mexican custom of eating candy skulls on the Day of the Dead and a meditation on his own troubled personal life at the time.

To further complicate matters, Staley paints in a variety of styles. His range extends from extremely loose to relatively tight brushwork and from rather abstract to precisely delineated forms, sometimes all on the same canvas. In a talk last week at the museum, he said, "I want the style to fit the subject."

One key to his gift is a certain awkwardness. He borrows compositional formulas and devices from Old Master paintings, but tends to adapt them with total artlessness. Somehow, in his hands, this is not exactly a problem. Should he be forgiven these lapses because--as some of his drawings reveal--he works so hard? Or because he may be one of the great colorists and landscapists of this era? Or is it his faith in his audience, his genuine interest in communicating, that makes him so endearing?

These are difficult questions to answer. But one thing that is clear is the extraordinarily apt timing of the show. Staley, like the Chicago and Bay Area expressionists, makes the current crop of neo-expressionist painters look like johnnies-come-lately.

Rage, desire and other overheated emotions in need of expression are not what fuel his art. As exhibition co-organizers Linda Cathcart and Marcia Tucker note in their catalog essays, Staley's narrative impulses connect him more closely to the southern literary tradition of consummate storytellers like Eudora Welty or William Faulkner than to current expressionist painting. Staley himself put it more simply the other night. "I want my paintings to be ravishing," he said. He has little to worry about.

Viet Redux from The Village Voice column Scene & Heard, December 8, 1992

Viet Redux

Since God is always on "our" side, Bill Clinton's election is not likely to ease the trauma of the Vietnam War--especially for Vietnamese now living in the U.S. But based on a Bronx Council on the Arts exhibition at the Longwood Arts Gallery (through December 19), seven Vietnamese-born artists have come to terms with the war a tad more effectively than the joint chiefs of staff. Organized by artist Fred Wilson, "Here and Now, Now and Then" is a healer, but its conflation of war memories with race and gender politics also sparks plenty of heat.

Several of the mostly twentysomething artists in the show have only recently turned to their Vietnamese pasts for subject matter. Dinh Le told me that he got interested in the war from the movies, "and it pissed me off that Oliver Stone is rewriting history when we need Vietnamese voices." Le's exhibiting maquettes for his "Hyperhistory" series--constructions topped with transparent photo-images of the war--and a just-finished project called Accountability?. For these Creative Time-sponsored posters and postcards, Le couples photos and horrific statistics from the war (300,000 South Vietnamese orphans, 18 million gallons of Agent Orange, and the like). He also sent a postcard to every member of Congress.

With Home, Dahn Cao simultaneously carries on a Vietnamese oral tradition and destabilized the meaning of iconic 1968 photo of General Loan shooting a kneeling Viet Cong in the head. Cao's text, superimposed on a computer-generated print of David's Oath of the Horatii, recounts that as a child the artist frequently heard that the martyred Communist soldier deserved to die for using South Vietnamese children as human shields. The international press, in other words, got it backward. An Ngoc Pham's painted female nude set against a jungle-y green backdrop shares the canvas with a Vietnamese text about the colonial pillage of villages by the French, which was translated for me by a Vietnamese refugee service worker at the opening. His unofficial presence was a reminder that Vietnam's lack of diplomatic recognition also means that there is no Vietnamese cultural infrastructure in the U.S. Until this show was put together, most of the exhibiting artists didn't know one another. Or as Cao excitedly put it, "I've got peers!"

Warhol in Absentia from The Village Voice column Scene & Heard, February 2, 1989

Even more interesting than the odd-coupling of Steve Martin and Paul Simon at MoMA's Andy Warhol opening was artist Margia Kremer's opening of Andy's FBI files. Kramer is the artist who created installations from the FBI file on Jean Seberg that revealed the agency's harassment of the actress/Black Panther supporter. Warhol's 71-page file (33 pages of which have been completely deleted) primarily spans the period from February 1968 through December 1969. It focuses on the silver-haired one's activities as filmmaker of Lonesome Cowboys and--in the eyes of the FBI--as a pornographer. The file was opened on the basis of a single complaint about obscenity at the Arizona ghost town that had supposedly been a John Wayne(!) movie set and in 1968 became the location for the filming of Lonesome Cowboys. Possible charges by the FBI? Interstate transportation of obscene matter.

Like almost everything having to do with Warhol, his FBI file lives on. In 1977, the Carter White House requested a summary of it, although it is unclear if any action was taken by the president or his staff. In 1988, Kramer published this material in an UnSub Press book called Warhol Et Al., and in May, Kramer will recontextualize it in an installation called I a WOMAN: The FBI File on Andy Warhol, debuting at Art Space in San Francisco.

Named after another Warhol movie, I a Man, the installation makes gallerygoers choose one of two doors, marked either "men" or "women." Each will offer access to one half the file's existing material. Kramer notes that the installation "takes off from where Warhol's suggestive sexual pluralism, and the FBI's sexual segregation, leave off . . . [It's] about sexual self identity--naming--and crossing over . . . A series of 'sexually oriented' pathways blocks half the information until the viewer enters the paths of both genders. I'm trying to draw viewers closer to Warhol's sexual focus and to thinking about the institutionalization of sexual identity."

Thank goodness for an intellectual perspective on Warhol. Andy has been unconscionably sanitized by the MoMA retrospective, which offers us only some very good paintings from the early '60s--virtually no prints; installations; stage sets; photographs; evidence of the artist as court portraitist; or as magazine, TV and rock band producer, and certainly no homosex. Despite its focus on his early career, it manages largely to bypass Warhol's origins in illustration.

There are alternatives: to see Warhol of the '50s, visit the Grey Art Gallery's "Success Is a Job in New York: The Early Art and Business of Andy Warhol," which even includes calligraphy by the artist's mother. (It opens March 14.) To recall Warhol the pop-culture renegade, stroll by Barneys Seventh Avenue window homage which evokes Warhol's ambivalence about high art. To consider the Conceptualist participants in the L.A. County Museum of Art's epochal "Art and Technology Program." drop by the Ronald Feldman Gallery's exhibition of the Daisy Installation, the world's largest holographic shower curtain and a standout at the 1970 World's Fair in Osaka. The gallery's "Andy" opening February 18 also features Christopher Makos's photos of Warhol in drag.