Arts & Entertainment

Tongue on Wry?

FAU's "Delicatessen" show circles squeamishness and lurches into profundity

By Michael Mills 

In her catalog introduction to the quirky group exhibition "Delicatessen," now at the Schmidt Center Gallery on Florida Atlantic University's Boca Raton campus, the show's guest curator, Latvian-born Diana Shpungin, an adjunct professor at FAU, declares the title "a peculiar word." She then goes on to ask, "How can a word that sounds and feels so elegant, is so orally and aurally enjoyable, be commonly defined as a corner store that sells lunchmeat and common staples? This exhibition returns the word to its Latin root delicatus, meaning 'to give pleasure or delight...' "

Well, maybe. For every item that's as pleasing and delightful as a good Reuben sandwich or some smoked lox with cream cheese and a bagel, there's something else that might make some of us a little squeamish, much the way we might be put off by a deli's more exotic fare. (Tongue sandwich, anyone?) Take Roxy Paine's Head Cheese (Loaf and Slices) (2004). Please! Working with pigmented cast epoxy resins, the New York artist has re-created the title substance, a conglomeration of the odds and ends left over after an animal has been slaughtered. He then encases the goods in a semitransparent sheath that lets you see the random meaty bits in all their awful, or offal, glory. The loaf sits on a pedestal, with seven cross-section slices hanging on the walls nearby.

Or consider the equally unappetizing A Viscous Predicament (2006) by Miami-based Cristina Lei Rodriguez. It's a freestanding tank-like construction topped with what Shpungin characterizes as "the Garden of Eden... smothered in an indiscernible gelatinous goo." The medium is identified as "plastic, epoxy, plexi, paint, and selected objects." What the whole piece brings to mind, however, is a toxic waste dump.

And then there's a pair of sculptures by Randy Wray: Dark Matter, which hangs from the ceiling near the gallery entrance, and the nearby earthbound Chapter and Verse. According to Shpungin, these assemblages "appear to be relics of mysterious origin." No, the only mystery is how these messy works — incorporating such ingredients as quartz crystals, resin, oil and acrylic paints, glass glitter, sewn canvas, and papier-mâché — ended up here.

Fortunately, most of the rest of the menu at this deli is much more appealing to the senses. The exhibition features 40 pieces by 22 artists (by a cool coincidence, 11 men and 11 women), and with these few exceptions, it's largely a bracingly eclectic body of work. True, the three acrylic canvases by Boyce Cummings aren't especially cutting-edge, but at least they demonstrate that painting can still hold its own in a show that's preoccupied with more idiosyncratic modes of expression.

Works by Diann Bauer, Chloe Piene, and William Cordova do much the same for the more traditional medium of drawing. Bauer, a New Yorker transplanted to London, takes classical-looking subject matter for her Beheading and Fluid Massacre Study (both 2007), then gives it a contemporary spin. In George Laughing (2003), Piene portrays her subject by stripping away his flesh and presenting the remaining skeletal figure in startlingly graceful charcoal strokes, generating eerie echoes of Egon Schiele's emaciated figures. And Cordova's Me Against the World (2004) impresses simply by accrual — what must be thousands of small disks (they might be record albums or game chips) accumulate in stack after stack, with enough minute variations here and there to invite closer inspection; almost as an afterthought, the drawing has been crudely stapled to the wall.

But "Delicatessen" 's most effective art pushes the envelope to one extent or another. For his "Untitled" Portrait of Dad (1991), the late Cuban-born American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres specified that about 175 pounds' worth of white mint candies be piled in a corner of the gallery. It's the sort of work that all but dares you to dismiss it, and I almost did. Then it occurred to me how subtly such an assemblage can summon up the personality that inspired it. With a disarmingly simple, single bit of information, the artist conveys something ineffable about his father.

Remove Gonzalez-Torres' white mints from their cellophane and you have the basic building blocks for another piece that works thanks to oblique suggestiveness. Luisa Caldwell's site-specific installation Color Falls III (2007) consists of nothing more than hundreds of colorful candy wrappers strung on ceiling-to-floor thread. As they react to the lighting and air currents of their environment, they resemble a magical gathering of butterflies.

Jane Benson's Naked Swan (2006) combines accumulation and subtraction by juxtaposition: a real taxidermied swan with feathers plucked is set against a two-mirrored plexiglass panel so that its image is multiplied endlessly. Even more unsettling than the countless reflected swans is the original swan itself, which comes uncomfortably close to looking like a turkey or a goose or even an oversized duck ready for the oven — appropriate for a real delicatessen, perhaps, but disturbing in a fine-art context.

Provocative creatures of an entirely different sort — paper — populate Jon Rosenbaum's contributions to the exhibition. Booth (2007) focuses on a small, fairly detailed replica of an octopus reaching for a spiky form that hangs within the title object. And the ironically titled Fallow Field (2006) features an array of amazing insects swarming over a flat landscape. Some appear to be attacking or devouring one another; others burrow into or emerge from the ground. All are intricately, beautifully rendered.

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