REVIEWS

ERIC BAINBRIDGE: CULTURAL AND PERSONAL RECOVERY IN AN ERA OF REACTION

Arts Magazine, Summer 1987

by Raphael Rubinstein and Daniel Weiner

Although interpretations have accrued to it over the years, the meaning of Mleret Oppenheim’s fur-covered cup and saucer was originally the plain hock derived from the conjunction of two normally discrete categorie . Quite often for the Surrealists, the achievement of bizarre effects was the beginning and end of their work. Value was coefficient with shock. The danger of this strategy, of course, is that the shock gives way to familiarity and the once anomalous work of art is eventually incorporated into an established category; in Oppenheim’s case the category of Surrealist objects. Since 1936 not only have the Surrealist methods of inducing shock been exhausted, but the very experience itself is almost extinct: shock no longer shocks. Aa result, today’s inventor of acategorical objects must be resourceful as never before.

It was therefore an unusual surprise to feel taken aback at the sight of the English artist Eric Bainbridge’s sculptures. Entering his recent show entitled “Holemasters,” one was confronted by a half-dozen awkward bulky assemblages-between six and thirteen feet in height—0f bizarre objects in bizarre combinations, all covered in a variety of fake fur. However inured one might have become to strange sights in art galleries, the glimpse of a six-foot purple mouse with its head supporting a long black tool, the other end of which rests on a large, irregularly shaped, leopard-skin whiffle ball, cannot be brushed aside with a casual “so what else is new?” Stepping out of the elevator at Salvatore Ala, the first inhabitant of Bainbridge’s world one met was Statue (of Tommy Ferzackely). In this piece a tiger-skin table serves as a pedestal for seven forms piled together in a kind of inhuman pyramid. The foundation is a caricatured monkey’s head in yellow fur with black spots next to a toothlike object in white fur with black spots. Balanced on these is a black biomorphic shape partially supported by a jester’s cap sprouting from the monkey’s head. Two pastel-colored fur balls are attached to the biomorph and at the apex is an overstuffed mouse in tiger skin. It helps to know that Tommy Ferzackely was a figure—invented or real, he never knew—that Bainbridge’s grandmother used to threaten him with as a child. From a child’s point of view this precarious mountain of oversized toys could well be terrifying and just as easily be a source of fun. It is at the ambiguous intersection of such contrasts that Bainbridge situates his work, moments when categories fall apart and the symbol loses its clarity of evocation.

The compositional connections in Statue bring to mind George Sugarman’s sculpture of the sixties. (Other culptors of that period also come to mind: the soft enlargements of everyday objects by Oldenburg and the fur-covered biomorphs of the lesser known Italian artist Pascali.) Bainbridge shares Sugarman’s demonstrative color as well as his meta-logical linking of unexpected elements. While both use syntactical concatenation, Bainbridge replaces Sugarman’s linear syntax with circularity. One’s eye travels around and around his jumble of forms, mentally rearranging and explaining. In The Hole Through Which All Things Must Pass an Arp-like volume, which turns out to be an enlargement of a porcelain Madonna, sits on a yellow shag box. Both the fur-covered spheres attached to it and the lavender Madonna look as if they could pass through the cylindrical hole at the center of the yellow box. While the allusions to sex and excrement need not be spelled out, one suspects that they are the postulates of Bainbridge’s circular algebra. It is with such postulates, as well as the emphatically cultural source of his forms and materials, that the comparison to Sugarman must end. Like most artists of his generation, Bainbridge has fallen irrevocably into a world of psychologically charged, thoroughly acculturated imagery.

Despite the size and nature of Bainbridge’s forms, the fur is still what one notices most. For all the fun and games artists have had with materials recently, there remains a residue of propriety, an expectation of what high art should be made from. But if the tackiness of Bainbridge’s material impresses us strongly in the fust round, we soon realize, thankfully, that it isn’t an end in itself. Bainbridge doesn’t deny the cultural associations of fake fur but by exploiting and adapting them he has made this difficult material his own. While he may not completely avoid the risk of becoming known as the “fake-fur artist,” for the moment he has found his voice with it as naturally as another might with wood or bronze.

In the age of Reagan and Thatcher we have seen a return to the expensive authentic. That paradigm of sartorial opulence, the fur coat, has reappeared on our streets in droves. Not only on the backs of Upper East Side matrons, who probably never gave them up in the first place, but on younger women both uptown and downtown, even occasionally on men. While the chief function of the fur coat remains the signification of wealth, it can also mean something more. When purchased by a man for a woman, it shows not only his financia prowess but also his dual power over both women and nature. The pelt and the woman wearing it become a single hunting trophy. The fur proclaims atavistic sexual energy and civilized techniques of mastery, the woman in fur is at once wild and domesticated, the man at her side at once hunter and herdsman. As so often, talk of a return to traditional values really means a reversion to the law of the jungle. In contrast to these vicious dreams of the expensive authentic, Eric Bainbridge pipes up with a carnival of low-budget artificiality. In so doing, he thumbs his nose at partisans of the expensive authentic while deftly exposing what is hidden by the fur-covered elite. Bainbridge is a hunter, but his prey is neither the woman as object nor the animal as luxury item. Like many of his contemporaries, he seems to be attempting a cultural recovery in an era of reaction (his work puts one in mind of the Pop sixties: Richard Lester films, leopard-skin pillbox hats, L.S.D.) and also, more urgently, a personal recovery. His work evokes not so much the innocence of childhood, as a time before categories solidified, when no combination was too strange to be attempted, no substance forbidden by taste or education.

It should be noted, however, that despite the blatant mischievousness of Bainbridge’s work, he is addressing himself to the most traditional and staid type of sculpture, the statue. By modernist standards the statue became as kitsch as fake fur, an epitome of bourgeoisie sentimentality and arriere-gardism. By gluing and stapling a patchwork of fur to his outlandish erections, Bainbridge seeks to resurrect statuary’s narrative and memorial functions. This is a case not of appropriation but of reappropriation-taking back what has been stolen. As Bainbridge stakes his claim on the statue, he may also be reaching out for another lost property, sentimentality. In one of his last books Roland Barthes played with the idea of the sentimental returning as a transgressive element in works of art, it being the one thing that all modernists agreed to condemn and prohibit. Bainbridge is not alone in his rediscovery of the heart, but he may be one of the most unabashed about it. That Bainbridge’s work comes through the syrupy realm of adult sentimentality and infant sexuality with its integrity intact must be counted as a significant victory. He wins this victory with the help of a good sense of sculptural dynamics and what an English critic, Stuart Morgan, has called his “dumb insolence,” typified by his unsubtle gibes at the Henry Moore-Barbara Hepworth school of sculpture. After two shows at Salvatore Ala and one last year at the Walker Art Center, Bainbridge’s unwieldy, annoying, and gleeful assemblages seem more than ready to be let loose among us.