On the Road Again by Lyndal Jones (review)

half-mannekin fashioned from a dressmaker 's dummy, with a bald, fashionmodel head the artist could turn by inserting his hand into its back. This creature was at once grotesque, funny, and profoundly meaningful. A green, plushcovered toy snake dangled beneath its torso, bizarre representation of its androgyny , that matched the artist's strapped-on plastic breasts. Perhaps what enabled McCarthy to create a powerful work that, in less skilled hands, could have been merely chaotic or egocentric, was his sense of intuitive balance. He moved back and forth between comic moments (but these were, again, complex: the violent and pathetic tenderness as the artist kissed his creature, crushing its face in the process) and profound gestures (when he moved into the audience, space was obediently maintainOd ; from time to time, he struck unmistakably classic poses). By using careful timing and framing throughout, McCarthy presented a complicated and poetic work examining cultural violence and confusion about sexuality, while relying neither on scripted dialogue nor gratuitous shock. Nancy Buchanan Lyndal Jones, On the Road Again. I10 Chambers Street (May). Within the mode of "performance," a pressing problem for the most committed artists has been the negotiation of narrative . The temporality of performance imposes a condition of sequentiality which must be addressed: to ignore the implications of this represents a lack of awareness which can result in an uncritical aesthetic. Lyndal Jones is a performance artist from Australia; since 1977, she has created a series of pieces under the general title of At Home. While in New York City this spring, she presented the third piece in this series, On the Road Again. Working in a highly self-conscious (in the sense of reflexive and self-critical) manner, Jones sets up a situation of simultaneous information systems, relaying a set of variations on the thematic material of a voyage . A series of slides detailing familiar sights of travel are projected; short narratives are read by the artist at intervals; an audiotape with a message which recurs at intervals is played; the artist enacts tasks relating to travel (packing, carrying suitcases, etc.): these systems appear in a variety of conjunctions and disjunctions , generating a multiplicity of interrelations and interpretation. In work of this kind, the question posed involves the integrity of the possibilities offered; as Jones herself notes, one of the aims of this work involves "'the search for an audience position somewhere other than voyeur or physical participant (in particular, as decision maker rather than art consumer)." The deployment of "mixed means" remains interesting only in so far as the means prove expressive, a genuine extension of an artist's sensibility and imagination. With Jones, her natural tact ensured the distinct pleasures of elegance , discretion and exactitude. On the Road Again was a becomingly modest performance, enabling the viewer to share in the process of construeting /deconstructing one of a number of narratives about the state of being "on the road." That state of being negotiates between arrival and departure, a (literalized) metaphor for a performance proffering an investigation into supposition and signification . Moving between contingency and continuity, Jones distends, extends, extinguishes, distinguishes and dissembles the temporal perimeters of her performance , thereby creating a trajectory remarkably open at every point. Daryl Chin Stuart Sherman's (Language) plus some short films. Artists' Space (June). Twelfth Spectacle 3 sound pieces and Richard Gallo/Sheryl Sutton, A Killer's Loose but Nobody's Talking. The Kitchen (May). Stuart Sherman Stuart Sherman brings an intense concentration to the act ot performing. His object constructions are personal. Their accessibility to the observer is frequently through a kind of visual punning or humor-the incongruity in the juxtaposition of images, a perversion of their normal relations. ...