Rona Pondick: orchestrated obsessions; Rona Pondick introduces a new group of stainless-steel sculptures delineating a disturbing fantasy: they show the artist's body caught in the midst of metamorphosis into animal forms - mostly

It's been five years since Rona Pondick had her last solo show in Manhattan, and those who saw her mid-'90s works at Jose Freire or the 1997 exhibition at Sidney Janis could be forgiven for not recognizing the new sculptures at Sonnabend as the work of the same artist. For those five years, Pondick has been struggling with a new primary material, stainless steel, and a new theme, the combining of her body with those of various animals. What links the new work to all that has come before is the tension of obsessiveness.

The story of her work is told in pictures in a new book that accompanies this show and her other exhibitions this year--it's like a coming-out party--at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris, the Galleria d'Arte Moderna of Bologna, the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Mass., and the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands. The book consists of two introductions, an interview and excerpts from previously published writing about her works, but most fascinating is the visual narrative of the documented work itself, with its psychological motivations spilling out in very different materials and forms. Infantile, juvenile and adult desires and fetishes are the heart of Pondick's work.

Her earliest sculptures were unmistakably fecal forms. Brownish accumulated globs, made of wax that gave them a lustrous attraction, were shown in pairs or even in a precious, seemingly hoarded, 2-foot-tall pile called Mine (1987). From there she moved to beds, making them of white pillows, black cloth and wood, as well as a sweetly turned-down expanse of lead sheet (a pun, but not really one to laugh at). Milkman (1989), a grimy pillow cushioning a pair of white shoes in which stand milk-filled baby bottles, introduced two new forms that would occupy her for some years: shoes--the classic fetish object--and nipples. She strapped baby bottles to a featherbed with a grid of ropes; she made turdlike piles of flattish, sagging, teated sacs shaped from paper towels, plastic and wax. Shoes were combined into frenzied balls or became the termination of pieces of humanoid furniture with haunchlike legs.

By 1991, Pondick was creating installations of single, vastly elongated lumpy legs that end in a man's black shoe or a baby's white one, combined with large numbers of hand-size irregular balls of various materials and colors whose most prominent characteristic is a large set of teeth. The wax teeth of Little Bathers (1990-91) are big and irregular, with a nasty yellow color; in many other works of the period she used joke-shop plastic "chattering teeth," which are bright white with equally bright red gums. These mouth/balls represent existence reduced to appetite. They appeared on platters, in candy jars, in floor installations by the hundreds. The yellow teeth reappeared in yellowish balls dotted with bristly black hair; an installation of these monstrous entities in 1992-93 included a few truncated baby bottles with the same coarse hair around the nipple. In 1997 she showed similarly oral Dirt Heads made of earth, wax and thermoplastic, strewn about in installations including several tons of soil.

Other motifs in Pondick's orchestration of obsessions are ears and words. Ears, which are both erogenous body parts and functional openings of the self to the world, were major features in her 1995-96 production called Mine (the same title as the fecal sculpture, and for this artist a significant word) staged in the Grand Lobby of the Brooklyn Museum of Art as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's "Artists in Action" series [see A.i.A., Sept. '97]. Some 300 ears, made of urethane and paper pulp, littered the floor during a dance performance conceived by Pondick. Another important feature of that set was an enormously elongated hard bed covered with the repeated hand-written words "I want." Pondick here seemed to be stating in the clearest way an essential fact of human nature. She concurrently used this kind of basic expression in an artist's book for which she hand-lettered the words thousands of times. In this practice she is not so much mimicking a child as revealing the child that remains within the adult.

In the late '90s the mouth/balls became apples on metal trees. Perhaps that use of metal led her to the recent stainless-steel works. Stainless steel is an unusual artist's material. One thinks about its hardness and wonders how it is worked. Whereas Pondick's themes up to this point had to do with elemental urges--to suck, to eat, to shit, to sleep, with auto- or other eroticism as a subtext--the new works address a fantasy rather than an urge. Here Pondick combines cast parts of her own body--head, arms, legs--with replicated parts of monkeys, a dog, a fox, a marmot, a pine marten and a cougar; in one piece, she also gives her head the horns of a ram. For the animal parts, she worked from taxidermy specimens. The sculptures ate made in editions of six, and most are shown on the floor.

Pondick's combinations of human and animal castings don't project human consciousness into the animal, but rather suavely fuse the disparate parts. The animals are always polished to a shine that looks utterly liquid and are generalized into rounded, nonspecific forms. By contrast, the matte human skin looks gray and dull but is very finely detailed and tactile. Considerable discomfort is implied by the physical combinations. The cougar's foreleg, for instance, turns into Pondick's right arm, but the angle is entirely wrong: the arm looks broken and rotated, and a swollen-looking joint bridges the two incompatible parts. The only human part of Fox (1998-99) is the head, but it's too large and heavy-looking for the fine-boned, furless body, and it sags to the floor.