ROBERT BLANCHON
The conceptual artist Robert Blanchon, who died of AIDS in 1999 at 34, was fortunate in his friends. One of them, the fellow artist Mary Ellen Carroll, worked assiduously to preserve his work after his death, placing it in the care of Visual AIDS, which published a fine catalog. The material was then transferred to the archives of the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University, the organizer of this small but exemplary survey.Blanchon’s art is materially spare, mostly texts and photographs, often combined. An early and recurring subject was art itself. He created his own versions, which fall somewhere between send-up and homage, of signature pieces by successful older contemporaries like Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Gober and Félix González-Torres.
The elaborate syllabus Blanchon prepared for a class he taught at the University of California, Irvine, remains an astute distillation of the themes and issues that shaped American art in the mid-to-late 1990s. (His annotated copy of the syllabus is in the show; its contents are in the Visual AIDS catalog, which was edited by Tania Duvergne and Amy Sadao.)
The issues Blanchon addressed in his teaching frequently centered on sexual differences, and so did his art. He approached the rituals and clichés of gay culture with wicked humor in the 1995 video montage of nonsexual scenes from vintage porn films. He made prints based on the colored handkerchiefs worn by gay men in the 1970s to signal preferred sexual practices. He posed for the soft-core magazine Honcho, and when his picture didn’t make the cover, he designed a cover of his own.
Much of the strongest work was autobiographical, and it feels even sharper now than when it was new. For one piece, he exhibited painfully uncomprehending letters he and his mother exchanged on the subject of his homosexuality. For another, he printed business cards with firsthand accounts of growing up effeminate and bullied. As his illness progressed, he photographed his underwear stained from incontinence; he designed an absurdly impractical set of eyeglasses as he lost his sight.
What’s most remarkable is his ability to infuse politics and mortality with a mordant, gallant wit. This quality is lovingly reanimated in this show, installed and documented by two New York University graduate students, Sasha Archibald (sic) and Bethany Martin-Breen, working with Ms. Duvergne.
It puts the work created two decades ago by a very
young artist in its best light. And a sense of the terrible loss he was
part of is brought home yet again. HOLLAND COTTER
Tracey/Barry Gallery,
Bobst Library
New York University
70 Washington Square South
Greenwich Village
EXTENDED through March 25, 2010
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*Correction: Sasha Archibald has an interdisciplinary humanities MA degree from NYU, as well as a degree in Museum Studies, and was a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2005.
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