ART IN AMERICA, January, 2002~Carol Kino

MARNIE WEBER
At Fredericks Freiser

Should artists doggedly devote themselves to a single medium or shuttle among several? Los Angeles performance artist and musician Marnie Weber, who began making visual art in 1996, makes a persuasive case for more media being merrier. Like her previous solo shows, this one- her third in New York- included some sublimely surreal collages, as well as several sculptures and a performance video. All but one were made in 2001.

According to the press release, the show- called “Who’s the Most Forgotten of Them All?”- offered a “post-existentialist fairy tale” about a princess and her animal attendants. Entering the gallery, one first saw seven department store mannequins costumed to suggest clumsy, fanciful fauna. For Sheep, Weber dressed a female mannequin in the skimpy outfit of a magician’s assistant, a white curly wig and a ewe’s mask. The dummy in Bear was completely encased in a lumpy white fur suit; it further supported a blue tutu and carried a violin. There was also a turreted and onion-domed blue castle made of blue-painted, glitter-strewn Styrofoam. A nearby monitor played a video with dim footage of the animals- now impersonated by people- cavorting in a dark mysterious garden.

Weber’s miraculous collages were the high point of the show. The constituent images are culled from fashion and Japanese porn magazines, as well as museum photographs and the artists own shots of contemporary Los Angeles, and are put together with the same backhanded psychosexual logic that animated early Surrealist collage. In Blue Bed, a nude Asian girl is ravished by butterflies on a brocaded, drapery-hung bed. Pink Bed features another nude, coyly perched on a pink divan and surrounded by all manner of pink and white creatures, including rates, bunnies, lambs, an Alsatian dog and a pony. The walls behind her are covered with pink fleur-de-lis fashioned from photos of women’s nipples. In Stone Garden, swan-draped models lounge around a mausoleum, as rose petals float through the air. The Cavern pictures a 17th-century French room whose walls are inlaid with precious stones. A shrouded nude cowers on the parquet floor, as stalagmites poke up around her. Compared with these delectable images, the sculptures and video could seem relatively pallid. But all contributed to the show’s pleasing air of zany illogic.