Untold Story

To the Third, Bonnie Collura at Janice Guy Gallery, New York, Summer 1997.

It is difficult to properly examine any first show; the artist has no past, only a future. Everything is invested in the moment that the body breaks surface in the choppy critical sea. But it is also a moment when the artist is most honest. All the ambitions and blind spots are as yet undisguised. An ambitious artist can serve as a cultural barometer, recording our aesthetic temperature. In Bonnie Collura’s first show To The Third at the Janice Guy Gallery, the recent fever of narrative revival seemed to be breaking.

Collura’s show revisited and revised the cthonic legend of Persephone, fusing it with the story of Snow White in a single large and extremely ambitious work. A series of highly determined forms interlocked to make something less than an installation but vastly exceeding the terms of a conventional sculpture. Reminiscent of unfinished model kits, the stumpy silhouettes of Roman statues, key chain mascots, and the debris of childhood games, the semi-organic shrouded fragments and gesturing limbs left a sense of something incomplete, a giant’s ritual interrupted. Despite the complex imagery of the work there were no videos, texts or soundtracks, no temporal elements at all. It was pure sculpture, operating with the thoughtless efficiency of history.

The only clue that this might not be the end of the story was a color-coded drawing, a kind of flow chart, depicting various characters, none completely present in the piece. Snow White, the virgin bride, makes an alchemical passage through puberty, becoming Persephone the Red (remember that pomegranate-apple?), a fertile woman who will in turn age into the Black Witch, nurturing, envying, and assaulting the younger versions of herself. Persephone is a variant of the fertility myth, sharing her origin with the stone age triple goddess: The Maid, Mother, and Crone; the spinner, the weaver, and the cutter of the thread of life. It is a self sufficient cycle, a cyclical pattern of birth and death. If the triple godess is the mother, then Walt Disney becomes a kind of magician-progenitor in Collura’s work. Disney based his drawings for Snow White on an earlier project, an animated adaptation of the Persephone legend, and she draws on his utopian fantasies for the slick, seamless surface of her sculpture and for the immaculate, cartoon-like color scheme of her work.

Figure 1.

Bonnie Collura, To the Third, 1997. Foam, plaster, gauze, 960 x 570 x 630. Photo: Courtesy Basilico Fine Arts, New York.

Figure 2.

Bonnie Collura, To the Third, 1997. Foam, plaster, gauze, 960 x 570 x 630. Photo: Courtesy Basilico Fine Arts, New York.

Disney and the triple goddess play point and counter-point, synthetic fantasy pitched against organic legacy. Collura’s female protagonists are sometimes pursued by a hunter, “Green,” his arrow seeking the circle, the target. It is right here, at the insertion point of a circular narrative, an endless thread, into the “progressive” arterial system of formal sculpture that Collura’s work takes the contemporary temperature and finds it wildly fluctuating, as the body of art shifts between the past and the present.

For cultures and for people, identity is delineated by time; with enough time we are all shape shifters, shedding our skins, looking daily at strangers in the mirror. The tale of contemporary polymorphism is a story of accelerated evolution and devolution, of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. If the “high” conceptual art of the 1970s represented the mind’s final escape bid from gross corporeality, the “body” of the art world, then the 1980s was about reanimating it. Since it was never really dead, a Dybbuk was born. Representations of the human body quickly began re-appearing in the eighties, animus to body art’s anima. By the early nineties it could be spotted skulking around in installations, videos, and “body referential works,” drawn out of hiding by what Mike Kelley described as “the wonderful feeling of making a corpse walk.” But with simple...