The New Yorker
GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN: ART
MARY REID KELLEY
January, 2012

 A late-breaking contender for year-end top-ten lists: the stupendously smart black-and-white video “The Syphilis of Sisyphus,” by the thirty-two-year-old New York artist. (The alliterative title recalls that of Reid Kelly’s 2009 film, “Sadie the Saddest Sadist,” about a First World War munitions worker.) The highly stylized eleven-minute piece—a kind of feminist-steampunk French-history lesson—opens in 1852, with a Parisian prostitute (Sisyphus) seated at a vanity in a garret, her face made up to resemble a skull. She launches into a blistering monologue, recited in rhyming couplets; the scene soon shifts to the streets and then to a hospital, as the recitations skewer everything from Jesus Christ and Baron von Haussmann to French-theory-besotted academia and the culture/nature divide. Just one example of the razor-sharp wordplay, which visitors can track on the page in an accompanying booklet: “Nature’s so foul she makes mushrooms A-morel.” Through Jan. 7.