Renee Cox at Robert Miller - Brief Article

Visitors to "American Family," Renee Cox's recent show at Robert Miller, entered the gallery to find themselves facing a row of three giant Cibachrome prints, each depicting Cox's toned, muscular torso tricked out in fetish gear (a black lace garter belt, a rubber corset and a white fur G-string, respectively). These photographs, which were shot against sour-yellow backdrops and mounted on aluminum, have a harsh, garish quality that seems deliberate. Like Andres Serrano's photos of female bodybuilders, they present an almost antierotic vision of the female groin; they conjure images of grimly endured Brazilian bikini waxes more readily than images of sex. In their confrontational, tongue-in-cheek tone, these new photographs fall right into step with Cox's previous explorations of sexuality, race and representation.

The exhibition was divided into several "rooms," or sub-galleries, in a layout that suggested the floor plan of a house. One room contained a series of small black-and-white diptychs and triptychs that juxtaposed sexually charged self-portraits against photos from Cox's family album. For example, in the diptych titled Mother, a 1960s snapshot of a woman in a modest bathing suit was matted next to a photo of Cox dressed in tiny jean shorts and nipple-revealing bra. Another small room featured one of the show's strongest works, an enormous video projection entitled The Kiss. It consists, simply, of a close-up of a seemingly endless kiss between Cox and a black-bearded man. Relatively innocuous at first, the video becomes increasingly disturbing with extended viewing, as the physical boundaries between Cox and her partner seem to blur.

The exhibition's showstopper was the "Salon," a large room containing Cox's photographic re-creations of four canonical works of art: Manet's Olympia and Dejeuner sur I'Herbe, Ingres's La Grande Odalisque and Andrea Mantegna's St. Sebastian. In these crisp, vivid C-prints, which range in size from merely big to Brobdingnagian, Cox poses along with her family members and friends. Cox uncrowns each of these famous art works through her idiomatic titles (Dejeuner sur I'Herbe becomes Cousins at Pussy Pond, for example, and Olympia becomes Olympia's Boyz) and shakes up the sexual and racial hierarchies of the originals. In Cousins at Pussy Pond, for example, Manet's pair of fully clothed white male artists have been replaced by scantily clad black men.

Unlike the photographic tableaux of, say, Jeff Wall, Cox's images do not invite viewers to suspend their disbelief--quite the contrary. She uses bright, clinical lighting and anachronistic props (shoes that scream "SoHo 2000" rather than "Paris 1850," for example) to explode her own fictions. Burlesque-with all of its implications of bawdiness, antiromanticism and critique--seems to be at the heart of Cox's project, and, like a latter-day Mae West, she appears to have a sure sense of how to use burlesque to achieve her own critical and esthetic ends.

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group