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Marjorie
Strider Critical Praise |
It is reminiscent of many things, ranging from the sublime to the mundane: volcanic magma, The Blob, primaeval plasma, water, snot, semen, glue. One then becomes aware that the container is a painted Plexiglas facsimile of a shipping box, complete with "Made in U.S.A." and "Use No Hook" imprinted on the sides. The box itself is hand-made but passes as a rough copy, recalling Jasper Johns' Ballantine beer cans of the '50s. and Andy Warhol's paintings of Campbell's soup in the 60'. Initially, any dog walker, jogger, student or junkie passing through Washington Square would think Big Box a forgotten piece of trash. But, on closer examination it reveals itself as a whimsical artifice, inviting a double take at the very least, and for the more curious, actual physical interaction with the tactile amorphous substance exploding out of its top. Big Box incorporates many of the recurring features that have made her œuvre so enigmatic and paradoxical. Though most often sculptural, it is often defined by, if not enclosed by a frame, the traditional accompaniment to a painting. Many of her earlier pieces, called Streetworks, involved the framing of street signs, people on the sidewalks, or views of the city using pre-fabricated picture frames of the kind most often seen surrounding oil paintings in museums. Strider has always wanted her work to be seen by a large audience. If this meant using the street as a subject as she did in the Streetworks Series placing installations on the street as with Big Box, or in her later work, squeezed out of buildings like toothpaste; it was a way to be noticed by a non art-going public. In this way she could share her delight in the spectacle of the misplaced and unusual. Strider's smaller works, often representations of the perceived world, spill out of the sides of their mounts and often push toward the viewer in an exaggeratedly foreshortened way rather like 3-D movies that threaten to burst out of the screen. In her popular 1964 Installation at the Pace Gallery in New York City, she placed a variety of three-dimensional organic forms on flat mounts, which served as frames. Tomatoes hang heavy and ripe, as if ready to fall on to the floor of the gallery, while flowers jut outward almost usurping the viewer's space. Alphabet Soup (1973) depicts a recognizable brand of instant powdered soup pouring out of its bag in reconstituted form, the pasta letters floating in the blood red liquid becoming larger and larger, creating the effect that they are flowing close enough to spill on to the viewer's shirt. Window Work (Blinds) (1970) uses venetian blinds as a frame while quantities of pigmented urethane foam burst through the slats. This use of foam in a non-representational way anticipates the larger spills and pours that were to come. Although this inclination on Strider's part can be seen as abstraction, her settings were always recognizable as actual places. There have always been references to the tangible world in Strider's work, in contrast to the Minimalists. Strider often used the formlessness of poured foam in counterpoint to subjects from the real world. This is seen in a number of works from the '70s and '80s such as Peel III (1977), the peeled skin of an orange made from aluminum or The South (1984), one of a series of pieces using the U.S.A. as a theme. In Strider's larger pieces, in which her use of vast quantities of urethane foam as a medium becomes part of her signature, an entire room or the floor of a building becomes the frame, which even then cannot contain the inexorable flow of Strider's cascading foam blobs. Also central to her œuvre is the representation of organic objects and immediately recognizable elements of the world; fruit, vegetables, water, flowers, prepackaged food, clouds, windows, splashes, and of course, the cascading foam, which itself recalls the properties of most of these things. They all move, grow and spread on the surface her canvasses in three-dimensional sculptures, in installations and in her performances, which use another organic form, the human body. Her pieces often represent soft or malleable things, yet are often fashioned from materials that set hard like bronze or urethane foam Her work is often subtly and sometimes overtly sexual and the sensuality of the natural world is exploited for its libidinous symbolism. Strider brings techniques from her various media into all aspects of her art, sometimes repeating herself to a certain degree thematically, but with different juxtapositions. Repetition of themes or techniques is not a cardinal sin in Strider's art; in fact she drifts away from and back to motifs over decades, depending on her needs concerning the piece in question. Her œuvre doesn't divide conveniently into "periods" in the way that Picasso's did (blue, cubist etc). As soon as the process of creating a specific piece becomes labor instead of being driven by its own energy, she moves on to something new and more interesting. Art, for Strider, is fun, not the cerebrally motivated outpouring of a tortured, angst-ridden soul; it is a means of expression as far as the physical nature of the materials allows it to be so. Marjorie Strider's strength and long lasting commercial success is in large part due to her refusal to be bogged down by the constricting methodology imposed by the naming of movements or trends. Although she works very much within the art community of New York City her work is categorically her own, distinct and often radically different to the work of her peers. She has sometimes found herself the subject of criticism for not doing what was expected of her. After two sold out shows at The Pace Gallery in New York in the early '60s, she stopped exhibiting there. "When I didn't want to repeat myself we parted ways" she says in reference to the prompting of the gallery management for her to do more fruit and vegetables in the vein that had initially popularized her. Strider refuses to be categorized, as does her art, but her contribution cannot be ignored or trivialized in spite of this. It is too big, too passionate and too off the wall to be insignificant, whether it plays by the rules, or doesn't break them enough. View Photo Gallery |
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Copyright © 2005 by Hard Press Editions |
