"Legend In My Living Room" plays with the ways in which notions of decoration-- a term used pehoratively in many contexts to this day -- intimately structure viewers' interaction with various types of art objects. Its title comes from a recently-released song by Annie Lennox who has been popular music's most capable artist at providing a space for a multitude of constructed identities, both for the artist/star and the viewer/voyeur. The exhibition furnishes a perverse and stable framework for the complex sensual and conceptual quiverings that are bound to occur between the stuborn objects it presents: extravigantly animated sculptural bodies wearing highly referential trappings on skin (Apfelbaum), flesh (Pondick) and bone (Levine); dramatic stage lighting for the sustenance and pleasure of both heart and soul (Gonzalez-Torres); loaded text made sharp and performative (Rosen) and/or camp and commemorative (Johnson); and unquenchable painting living the doubly fufilling life of celebity and anonymity (Halley) or perpetuating the cycle of birth and death, with love (Pitman). Any space that is uasually forced between such things as Hard and Soft, Abstract and Representational, Manufactured and Hand-Crafted, and/or Decorative and Essentail, is made "androgynous" in this exhibition in order to recognize and celebrate the ability of the decorative to leave each of these terms wanting-doing so not as a force of destruction, but rather as an agile, inextricable provider.
TRM, New York, September 1993