LA Weekly Calendar: Art Picks of the Week
March 15-March 21, 1996
Peter Frank

Didi Dunphy, Linda Besemer, Casey Cook

The deconstructive parody of Didi Dunphy's "modernist samplers" is as pointed as her tools: she fabricates her genericized compositions with needle and thread, embroidering tidy little designs into cloth swatches measuring less than a foot in any direction. In their intricacy, the designs, markedly smaller than the swatches and thus framed by expanses of cloth, conjure various classic abstractions. (Mondrian's Broadway boogying and Frank Stella's concentric squares are among the more readily recognized images.) But Dunphy isn't just manufacturing fuzzy postcards of modern museum pieces; she is distilling their visual characteristics into generic formulations, shrinking all that down from once commanding dimensions, and turning it into so much dollhouse-size handiwork. The earmarks of male intellectual and pictorial bravado have been upended, turned inside out, thoroughly effeminized ‹not just translated into women's material, but transformed into girl stuff. Like Lewis Carroll's Alice, facing down the Queen of Hearts' troops with the dismissive cry, ³You're nothing but a pack of cards," Dunphy challenges the authoritative resonance of abstract painting with a simple, even "dumb," process of appropriation.

Linda Besemer's modus operandi is similarly straightforward: she paints beautiful abstract smears in acrylic treated so that it dries without benefit of a canvas support. Besemer's previous work solidified individual monstrous brushstrokes into rubbery trails of pigment. Now she formulates expansive veils of intense colors whose brilliance is perversely enhanced by their glossy tactility. Also in the show are circular whorls of acrylic, Besemer's newest work, which quite clearly evince the method of their making: a rotating brush or squeegee leaves concentric streaks interrupted by the bent line where the applicator has been lifted, the resulting image suggesting a radar screen converted into lurid Technicolor.

In their industrial-strength amplification of the manual gesture Besemer's paint-things render their own critique of pure abstraction by pumping its physicality to the jumping off point. Casey Cook¹s painting-collages on panel advance the opposite tack. They bristle with detail confined to particular regions of otherwise monochrome fields. That detail is the kicker: obsessive doodles, awkwardly illuminated words, collaged-in wallet portrait photographs, and other elaborations seemingly lifted right out of a seventh-grader's social studies notebook but ordered into compact, rhythmically ordered and peculiarly engaging cartographies. Cook's paintings work as abstractions but are anything but pure, loaded as they are with intimate, oblique, playful forms and specific, profane, emphatically trivial information‹more girl stuff.