Alex Hanimann and Marlene McCarty at the Kunsthalle

Strange twittering sounds confronted viewers entering the newly built spaces of the relocated St. Gallen Kunsthalle. The first room was filled with an immense, wood-walled, 8,122-cubic-foot structure resembling four enlarged work cubicles affixed back-to-back, closed at the front, and linked internally by square window openings. After squeezing into one of the two small, screened doorways on opposite sides of the construction, visitors discovered the source of the music: a flock of 100 colorful, live finches. The chambers, painted respectively black, white, red and blue, are traversed by rope perches. Groups of birds appear to favor certain colors, gathering in one space or the other. Or perhaps they are randomly seeking peer unity in this abnormal environment--one that recalls Donald Judd and Barnett Newman, but certainly not any standard aviary.

It is the work of Swiss artist Alex Hanimann, who also creates text-on-the-wall works featuring abstruse, surrealistically poetic sentences, as well as letter-sized drawings with scattered rudimentary delineations of borrowed images. The avian installation fuses the appropriationism of his drawings with the lyrical conceptualism sought in his text works. Here, borrowings from Minimalism tackle ethical questions in an event of multi-sensory beauty. One enjoys the gorgeousness yet worries about the birds' quality of life and about the appropriateness of art as prison, and one wonders who is trapped here, bird or viewer?

The large drawings by New York artist Marlene McCarty are also appealing at first glance yet discomfiting upon longer viewing. Averaging 9 by 12 feet each and nailed directly to the wall in three groups, the nine drawings are executed in pencil and ballpoint pen on paper. The impressive images, depicting ordinary yet attractive teenage girls, are drawn with an elegant, illustrative hand. Contradicting these pictorial charms are the cheap drawing materials as well as the aggressive appearance of nipples and vaginas through the clothing, exposed as if by perverted X-ray vision. The extensive information supplied on wall labels reveals that these young women were involved, usually as perpetrators, in violent murders. Adolescence, sexuality and power combine in images of submerged brutality that implicate viewers as voyeurs. Looking long makes one a quasi-sadistic Peeping Tom; looking away replicates the actions of witnesses who refuse to help the victims of crimes such as those named in the labels.

Hanimann's and McCarty's works are stylistically disparate, yet both raise difficult, uncomfortable questions of brutality, observation and, most importantly, responsibility.--Mark Staff Brandl

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group