[1]
[2] [1] [2] (1) "Untitled #189", canvas/wood/metal, 81 x 81 x 22",
1995.
(2) "Un titled", acrylic on wood, each 3 1/2 x 4 3/4 x 2 1/2",
1996.
(Newspace Gallery, Hollywood) Reticent,
self-contained and impersonal, the minimalist object once insisted on its
literalness and vehemently denied possessing any content. But there are
no such things as pure ideas, only dissociated ones. Minimalism's purity
was always disingenuous, its characteristic qualities being identical with
those which for ages past have defined an idealized masculinity.
Inevitably the belated recognition of minimalism's implicit masculinity
provoked a feminist backlash which over the past decade has manifested itself
as a sterile obsession with degrading the minimalist canon by dressing it
up in drag. Typically this has involved refabricating minimalist forms in
suitably inappropriate materials such as lipstick and chocolate, the variations
being as endless as the basic idea itself is monotonous. As part of the
general trend toward appropriation, this response--which ironically forces
those women artists who employ it into a totally dependent relationship
with the male egos they wish to deflate--has served no other purpose than
to reveal that if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, envy is the
most abject.
Tiffanie Morrow's more fruitful response to the legacy of minimalism has
focused on developing the minimalist object's evocative potential. This
potential was always there. Indeed, it was the unacknowledged source of
whatever engagement or interest the otherwise blank minimalist object could
generate.
Morrow takes the opposite tack, exploiting the ability of the simplest geometric
configurations to suggest, without ever representing, a range of natural
and man made objects and phenomena. Her first show three years ago was a
meditation on the mutational possibilities of that most severe and masculine
of all minimalist forms, the black rectangle. At that point Morrow was still
hedging between painting and sculpture. Her laboriously painted, sanded
and repainted works were wall-mounted, and she seemed to be offering a feminine
reworking of the finish fetish aesthetic (handbags and polished nails say,
as opposed to surfboards and cars). Since then her objects have come off
the wall, onto the floor and into the domain of sculpture.
The most exciting works in the current show are two room-sized installations
that form closed tracks replete with linear vertical and horizontal extensions
which suggest the sparse roadside structures and signage to be encountered
on a solitary desert drive. If, as has so often been claimed, min- imalism
is an aesthetic of silence, it seems only appropriate that it should lead
Morrow to allude to the heartland of silence itself.
