Art Papers Magazine
September/October 1999

Peter Frank, Los Angeles

Calame's exhibition could be seen up a flight of stairs from Prieto's in what has become Los Angeles' hottest gallery location, the 6150 Wilshire building, hard by L.A.'s "Museum Row." The prevalence of TNCA in this vest-pocket West-Chelsea is as clear an indication as any that the tendency is trés chic. One storefront down is POST, the "midtown" annex of the downtown artist-run space which has emerged as a launching pad for young artists (Calame debuted there two years ago), and a mainstay for certain older ones as well. POST can no longer be thought of as a farm team for galleries such as those clustered at 5150;it's joined the Wilshire league and is playing for keeps. And it led the league with its show of Didi Dunphy's "upholstery" sculptures (February 12-March 13).

In career if not age, Dunphy is just slightly older than Prieto and Calame, but comes from a lot more self-avowed feminist roots-second-wave, 80's feminism, in which patriarchal structures and icons are not so much attacked as deconstructed. In Dunphy's case, in fact, da man is veritably tickled into submission. She used to appropriate modernist male artworks (is that redundant) and feminize them, as when she created knitting-kit versions of Frank Stella and the like. In her most recent work, however, Dunphy recapitulates modernist tropes much less frontally. Across the floor of the gallery she scattered several pieces of – well, as she calls them upholstery. Built of wood, stuffed with foam, and covered with stitched naugahyde, these objects resemble furniture but, for the most part, are too small, and/or too oddly shaped to function as footrests or pillows. They are decidedly sculptural, in their spatial disposition as well as their form, and the hark back to all sorts of 1960s sculptural tropes – the Minimalist elementalism of Robert Morris and Donald Judd, Funk eccentricity (one piece resembles the legendary Slant Step), and even kinetic sculpture(who remembers Robert Breer?), as well as Claes Oldenburg's gargantuan consumer thangs. Oldenburg's first wife, Pat, used to sew his mid-'60s kapok pieces, and with these stitch intensive works Dunphy pays oblique homage to this female hand hidden in Pop history. And, of course, she tweaks the menfolk with her disruptions of their scale and their formal vocabularies – and their color. Dunphy has dyed her naugahyde the most intense, even garish solid colors – hues that would look outré in a kid's room. But in the context of this neo-minimalist subversion, such hot pinks and powder blues and fire engine reds hit just the right wrong note. And, in the context of the burgeoning New Color Abstraction movement – there I called it a movement – Dunphy's color sense, as well as her arch sense of recent art, is right on time. Even more than for Prieto and Calame, for Dunphy, art history repeats itself, the second time as farce.