Howardena Pindell at Kenkeleba and the Alternative Museum - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

A Howardena Pindell retrospective, making a two-year-long orbit mainly through university art museums, split into two sections as it passed through New York City, where two alternative spaces divvied up the show's contents and added additional works to emphasize their supposedly contrasting views of the artist's achievement.

Kenkeleba emphasized Pindellas-abstractionist in a large, handsome installation that included nearly 70 paintings and works on paper, most dating from the 1970s and '80s. The presentation made a good case for Pindell as a painterly Minimalist with a flair for sensuous surfaces. A couple of large, untitled acrylics from 1972 reveal her pointillist roots: one marshals green, blue and brown dots on a purple ground, while the other assembles rose, aqua and mustard dots on a midnight-blue ground.

By 1974, Pindell developed a more three-dimensional and more personal form of pointillism, wielding a paper punch to cut out multitudes of confetti-like disks, which she dispersed with varying degrees of premeditation and randomness over the surfaces of her pictures. Some of these compositions, particularly the smaller works on handmade paper, suggest grids that are deconstructing even as the viewer scrutinizes them.

Pindell displayed a cagey ambivalence toward her grid formats, apparently liking their organizational framework while also seeking to undermine it. Her deconstructivist bias led her into seamstressing, cutting unstretched canvases into many sections and reattaching them with coarse thread, making them suggest a rudimentary patchwork. Untitled #17 (1977), for instance, consists of a grid of 476 pieces of fabric, each piece about 5 inches square, all handsomely stitched together, painted a pale mauve and embellished with colored paper dots and glitter. The bluish-gray Autobiography: Memory: Past (1980-81) has 66 vertical strips, each roughly 2 inches wide, also garnished with colored paper dots and glitter. The handicraft is luscious, but, as Pindell progressed, her paintings acquired increasingly eccentric formats and sometimes overworked surfaces.

The Kenkeleba show also included many intricate collage-paintings, incorporating touristic postcards and/or color photographs cut into sections and alternated with painted strips that portray the same scene. Additionally, there were many "video drawings," soft-focus (and uniformly boring) color photographs variously accessorized with inked arrows and numbers. On the whole, however, Pindell's abstractions of the 1970s and '80s hold up extremely well.

The Alternative Museum cast Pindell in the role of sociopolitical-activist, a crusader against racism, sexism and (to quote a handout) "global conflicts." This show consisted of approximately 40 works, including paintings, works on paper, a dozen or more "video drawings" and an installation piece. The problem with most of these ostensibly political works is the way in which they incorporate a variety of buzzwords. Pindell seems to assume she can collage the word "homelessness" on an essentially abstract composition and make an effectual statement. Her 1988 painting Autobiography: Air/CS560 is an eye-catching work with its silhouettes of four life-size and perhaps lifeless human bodies, but what are viewers supposed to make of its scattered assortment of screaming-headline words, such as "ASSASSINATION," "DIAMOND TRIANGLE," "SLAVE MARKET" and "INTRAUTERINE FETAL DEATHS"?

Buzzwords in isolation ultimately are not very meaningful, but they are not the sole reason that this category of Pindell's work fails to come across. Probably it's a mistake to take on so many global conflicts (including AIDS, starvation, napaim and suttee)in just one show. The real problem, however, could be that Pindell has nothing of a specific nature to say about any of these issues, other than that she is aware of them. She has not yet found a way to merge her political conscience with her picture-making skills.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.
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