| SHIRLEY TSE,
"Polytocous"
Murray Guy, through May 4
Many artists go through their lives asking a variety of questions
to which Shirley Tse’s answer is unusually clear: plastics. In
her ongoing examination of capitalist production and consumption,
Tse takes plastic and its myriad forms not just as the medium but
as the message. She designates plastic as the commodity substance
extraordinaire—at once product (from Saran wrap to high-tech
computer chip), packaging (bubblewrap and Styrofoam) and trash (after
the substance’s usefulness has expired)..
Given her past critiques of commodity culture, Tse’s current
exhibition may at first seem anomalous: On view are eight canvaslike
squares of vinyl. Any similarity between the pieces and the paintings
is illusory, however, even while they perform a sly twist on Greenberg’s
sanction of flatness, and also nod, if ironically, to Lucio Fontana,
who, in the ‘50s, sliced and perforated his paintings in order
to investigate space beyond the picture plane.
Like Fontana’s canvases, Tse’s vinyl squares are slit and
punctured, albeit with an incredibly steady hand. The plastic has
been nipped and tucked with almost surgical precision. On each square,
she’s made a different pattern of incisions that reveal patches
of wall behind it. Meanwhile, the raised portions of plastic are kept
in place and used to create three-dimensional designs out of the vinyl.
Freeways, for example, offers a vertiginous aerial view of
crossing expressways in the form of a clogged knot of lines rising
from a smooth, flesh-colored surface. In Handle, three sets of slits
suggest places where a viewer might want to take hold, though doing
so would entail standing with one’s nose to the wall..
Appearances to the contrary, Tse’s poly paintings are probably
best described as sculptures that demand a kind of bodily engagement.
Just as Fontana’s spatial explorations prompted questions about
perception, politics and illusion, so too does Tse offer her perpetual
answer—plastics—as a way of reinvigorating those same questions
with a particularly millennial slant.
- Johanna Burton
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