Polar bear blinking in the snow

Result #1

Polar bear blinking in the snow) begins to suggest a human-sized figure that transforms its shadow into the snow, a comparison reinforced by the works title, which is borrowed from an old sign-board advertisement for Schlomo Dinaleros (The bathroom door), with its, The Master is here! The figure, a nude female, reaches out to touch the snow-covered figure, and as it does, it becomes a body within a body. In the bottom section of the installation, the female figure rises from a supine position. While in the top section, the body moves forward, falling down the stairs, the body coming up again to the ground. The concept of coming and falling is central to Bertoia, which reflects the change in perspective that happens when two different views are taken at different times in the same day, and hence allows a play of reversal.Bertoia invites the viewer to explore the space between the living body and the snow. For example, the white-painted trees are like digital panoramas of a forest, and this insertion of a physical experience into an abstract painting brings into play the space between reality and the image of the imagined forest. The snow is a representation of an ideal form, an ideal form for the body, a perfect representation of a perfect form. This ideal of a perfect space and the perfect representation of it are fused in the figure that is partially visible through the antlers and the ice. The white trees, however, were abstracted from reality in order to suggest the winter landscape. Bertoia implies that the presence of the snow represents the natural world as a perfect self-sufficient entity. This snow is also the actual snow, the snow that is visible in the real world, the reality that we experience as either in our physical world, through our seeing and seeing things, or in our mental world, which only through our intellectual understanding can we perceive the real world.

Result #2

.The works of Donald Orr, William Evers, and Robert Barchan, among others, appear intermittently in the exhibition, but the strangeness of their presence is unerringly strange and often funny. Such is the case with the plaster head of Oedipus, 2009, an indolent, hoof-sitting, flute-playing brat whose face is in a marshmallow pink, whose body is covered with a mottled blush and whose eyes are tattooed with a red-orange heart. Orr has always been a fan of childrens art, and his films, which he shot in the same short time frame as his paintings, are bursting with whimsicalness and irreverence. The interior of the bedroom where Oedipus was found, 2009, is strewn with discarded laundry and household clothing. The infant who looks out at the viewer is the artist himself.The show suggests that even the most passive of photos can be very evocative—we find a Rabelaisian infant with a brown head, a childs first name, and an image of Oedipus, just as the most risqué images have a perverse sexual charge. This suggests that we might be able to make images that go beyond the things we see or think we see, that we put our own stamp on, that contain their own history and myth. It is a testament to these rare efforts that the exhibition is more than just a brief retrospective of photos.

Result #3

. Placed on the floor, a partially full-sized yellow ball has been placed on the ground, about three feet high and on the side. Its smooth, light and placid, and a perfectly square eight feet long. On the balls surface is a slab of yellow paper—a square and a half—brought to us by the wind. The picture is a static one, but its quiet, its quiet and calm, and it is soothing, and one feels it has something to do with the prosaic reality of the everyday. It is more reminiscent of a spectator than the chaotic images of protest that he saw during the Vietnam protest of the 60s. Many of his pictures are rendered in ink or crayon, and, as a result, they are more emotionally silent, and they are less dramatic.The word tableaux has been added to my vocabulary of reference here; these are wry pictures, and they are complemented by the slender white porcelain statuette on which they hang. It is not as easy to make fun of as it was to make fun of me, I have to say, but it is not a bad joke, and it certainly doesnt make one want to leave the gallery, let alone burn down the house. One can only respect the skill and honesty of the artist and the commitment to humor, and feel a certain sadness in the fact that she can still make fun of herself.

Result #4

Polar bear blinking in the snow. The images thus lie on the surface of the image like so many flags. Here is more art, not as we might expect, but as it is: a must of the vortex. But the images are not images of another culture, but of a diverse, alien culture. The paradoxes of this work are that they are dominated by the influence of art traditions, but there is no recognition of art as such; they remain corrupt and alien.Marilyn Manson and Thelon Gray are becoming more interesting again. Manson has been dismissed as a con man, and in the same way that they have been dismissed as self-important. I like the way Manson talks; the look of his bald head is very charming. He has been criticised, however, for speaking in a high-relief style. This may be the point, although Manson never seems to cross the line into irony, and that is one of the main achievements of his art. The ironic is used as a means of justifying an art that is detached from any experience of reality—which is a natural after-image of life. It is thus used as a method of absolving an art of its realism, and thereby undermines art. The point of art is to make sense of the world; Manson has made a good showing of that.Gyan Panchal, like Manson, exhibits a preoccupation with masks and masks. However, Panchal has not been paid much attention, and this is where his interest lies. It is important to remember that masks and masks are not a sign of escapism or of the end of abstraction; they are meant to do something. Panchal displays them to convey something that has never been totally renounced, however subtly. They are a way of communicating, and in Panchal there is something to be gained, for example, in a juxtaposition of huge and small faces. The huge ones are united with a masklike embroidery.

Result #5

? This is surely a comic conceit, but it is the sort of sublime image that once went down well with the somnambulists on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, who loved the rhetorical energy of his advertisements. And though I like the graphic side of his work, I never thought that the artist could keep his audience from laughing—that he was literally just making fun of himself. He was always looking for something to laugh at and everyone who came to see him was a serious viewer. His efforts may have become overdetermined, but in his stead the jokes got better.