Rona Pondick
Supervert's review of an exhibit featuring the Freudian works of contemporary artist Rona Pondick. Originally published in Artforum Magazine (November 1993).
Exhibit at the Jose Freire Gallery, New York
Reading the massive pile of critical literature on Rona Pondick is like crawling naked through psychoanalytic razor wire. All the vague allusions to oral and anal fixations, the specious bandying about of terms like "repression," "compulsion," and "fetish," the detection of penises, vaginas, and breasts in every artwork — it's painful to read, not because it reveals uncomfortable psychic truths, but because it's so full of bad causal reasoning, outmoded shrink jargon, etc. Not that Pondick doesn't ask for it; any artist who has made a career using beds, baby bottles, and shoes as her signature materials is obviously tempting her viewers to play Freud. But should we really play along?
On the surface of things, the principal works in Pondick's brilliant new show certainly do appear to invite psychoanalytic readings. Grouped on the floor in one corner of the gallery, Milk/Milk, 1993 consists of seventeen roughly basketball-sized objects covered with saggy breastlike forms terminating in baby-bottle nipples. Scattered around the floor, Mouth, 1992-1993 consists of six hundred roughly tennis-ball-sized objects covered with black flax that looks like pubes. Six of the little things have nipples, but the rest have mouths with rubber teeth. (In the Village Voice, Elizabeth Hess called them "cunt/mouths," though they look less like cunts than like scrota dentata.) Hanging from the ceiling above these works was Legs, 1993, twenty five polyester-filled shafts covered in pink lace and terminating, at either end, in a brown men's shoe ("leg/penises," according to Hess). These works seem to include all the right elements — milk, mouths, and genitalia — how could they not be trappings from the Oedipal triangle, souvenirs of the primal scene?
To the person who asked me what magazine I was writing for so you could find out what Pondick's work "means": you're starting out from the wrong assumption. Listen to the other person in your tour group who thought that Pondick's little mouth-balls somehow reminded her of the creatures in the film Gremlins. What exactly is a gremlin? Something that produces malfunctions, a little devil in the machine. Pondick's works are just that: gremlins. They take up objects from psychoanalysis' bag of tricks precisely to produce short circuits in its magic act of "meaning." As is true of the Minimalist aesthetic that has always exerted a strong influence on Pondick (she studied with Richard Serra at Yale), the forceful literality of her sculptures often overwhelms the suggestive nature of their materials. It's as if the artist gives you the pieces of a puzzle that don't quite add up: rather than a nice clear picture of Oedipus Rex, you get a fractured image — a mouth here, a genital there. The result is deadly funny, too, unlike bona fide Minimalist works, and you get the sense that Pondick's humor serves less to reveal the unconscious in jokes than to play jokes on the (viewer's) unconscious. For in the final analysis, though Pondick may bait you or tempt you to play Freud, her works lie on the floor not on a couch.
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