Installation view
Trisha Donnelly, Untitled (Breaker II), 2007
Trisha Donnelly famously rode in on a horse to the opening of her first solo show at Casey Kaplan in 2002. She announced that she was an envoy sending word of the capitulation of Napoleon, and then she left, saying "and with this I am electric, I am electric."
Not surprisingly, therefore, Donnelly's opening at Kaplan's gallery recently was busy and expectant. Nothing, sadly, occurred (maybe that was the point: at the opening of her 2005 show at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, the performance was reduced to the manufactured rumour of a performance). And it sent the audience back to her art, which was - as has become her habit - just as mysterious as that first appearance.
A large white banner hung in the entrance-way, drawn with what might be schematic symbols for a set of speakers. Further inside, an untitled series of variously tall, short and wall-mounted panels were sheathed in gold covers, looking like they might be speakers (though the sounds of Indian music echoed through the galleries from other sources, and, at a later visit, I was met by bells). Black and white c-prints depicted the head of a woman, someone with the air of a modern, if maybe outdated, Indian actress. Her head appeared to be on a poster which was curved around poles which had been altered and reshaped with the aid of a computer so that they sometimes twisted and turned in the manner of a horse's leg (the Satin Operator series). The barest, almost abstract drawings hung on other walls (some had the sense of speared banners). There were C-prints depicting the end of a trumpet, a flame. And piled in one corner was a scattering of branches from a pine tree, whilst hanging from the entrance to another gallery was more of the same.
All this was so oblique that it is worth quoting in full the few poetic lines Donnelly issued for the press release: "I incline towards the minds of others/ and all it is/ all it is - is/ the vert panic/ the mind mass/ of cantled freaks/ th. constant triple knock of/ 3 parallel pains/ I am the all star epileptic truth-/ x4 x4 x4/ africa take me in your form."
Those lines might be Donnelly's, or they might be borrowed from Robert Creely, the American poet she refers to - again, obliquely - on the cover of one of those golden sheaths. They're somewhat flashy, and put alongside the difficulty of the rest of the show, they might encourage one to lose patience with Donnelly altogether. She doesn't even try to off-set the fragmentariness of her work by allowing it to add up to an ensemble with an atmosphere one might recognise - everything here is foreign.
Nevertheless, remarkably, audiences do not seem to be tiring of her in the least, so she must be giving them something. And she does: the text is at least skilful and evocative, bringing to mind a strange kind of ecstatic mind-reading; and the work suggests the mentality of a media-age Graham Sutherland, an imagination filtering visions of the organic world through a gothic, mechanical filter, giving everything hard edges and a cultish air. It may not be quite enough to make an excellent show, but it is more than ample to remain nagging in the mind until Donnelly offers up something else. Just don't expect that to hold any answers.
Morgan Falconer
Trisha Donnelly
until 16 June
Casey Kaplan
525 West 21st Street
Chelsea
New York
T: +1 212 645 7335
All images courtesy of the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York
Morgan Falconer is a journalist and critic. After an age spent immersed in 1920s New York as a graduate student, the result now props up his computer, and today he writes about contemporary art and culture for a variety of publications including Art Review and Modern Painters.
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