Frances Stark

The text in I must explain (again), 2009, covers a big sheet of paper that extends to the floor; it is held by the outstretched hands of a silhouetted woman drawn on the ground sheet—a figure nearly concealed by her own lengthy declamation. This drawing shared the show’s final room with works that are, in one way or another, nearly all time-based. The four examples shown from the series “Wisdom, Stupidity, Ugliness” (2008) each features the actual moving hands of a working clock, along with the image of a book and the profile of a progressively dejected woman, who proceeds from upright but leaning to slumped and then bent double: a day in the life. Toward a score for “Load every rift with ore” (2010) is a very large (nearly 80-by-90-inch) collage that centers on an image of a music stand and features several printed fragments that could serve, in a pinch, as scores. This work faced a freestanding black dress, its skirt adorned with a massive dial modeled on an old-fashioned rotary phone. Stark wore this costume in a 2009 performance, about which no information was given. As shown, it is among the least accessible works in a survey that otherwise mostly manages to avoid the annoying trait common in much strenuously casual, neo-conceptual work, of talking over the audience’s head.

Another time-based medium in Stark’s repertory is PowerPoint, which she uses to wickedly funny effect in the nearly half-hour-long presentation Structures that Fit My Opening (2006). Shown on a laptop, it offers, as in some loopy version of off-site higher ed, a rambling monologue, given in title frames, and a range of imagery dominated by photographs of the artist’s home. The intermittent soundtrack features a typewriter clacking in use, a ticking clock, a ringing phone and cymbals striking to note the occasional punch line. One droll anecdote concerns an exchange of letters between Stark and an editor requesting a text; the artist declines, but her (written) refusal is accepted as a contribution, for which she is paid before she can explain the misunderstanding.

In Stark’s boundary-less working life, such incidents seem to occur with some regularity. Mild confusion reigns, untidiness is accepted, things spill. Efforts are made to straighten out the mess, and duly documented: witness, perhaps, an otherwise hard to explain image of a vacuum cleaner, Hoover in a Corner (2006). But it remains a struggle, really, to keep it all straight—to maintain distinct professional and personal identities; to project a voice distinguished by its candor while protecting the speaker’s privacy and integrity; and to be sure that what is said matches what is meant.

The buzzing intertextuality of Stark’s work is more closely related to the densely referential installations of such artists as Rachel Harrison and Carol Bove than to drawings or paintings by other wordsmiths like Graham Gilmore and Raymond Pettibon. Stark’s kinship with rogue theorists/historians becomes most apparent in the writings collected in This could become a gimick [sic]. Ribas’s exceedingly spare and recondite interventions, none more than a few words long, make for an amusing contrast with Stark’s voluble and often diffident prose. In one essay she acknowledges being flummoxed when people ask me ‘What is your work like?’ upon my foolishly having revealed to them that I’m an artist. I feel like my non-answer is often misinterpreted as ‘I’m too deep to tell you,’ but usually I’m just thinking a description of what I do is going to make what I do sound really un-worth doing.

In the margin, Ribas writes, “A literature of refusal” and names the writers Robert Musil and Robert Walser; below, he adds, “Malevich and laziness.” But then Stark herself is just as likely to quote Musil (a touchstone), Stanley Cavell, Harold Bloom, Avital Ronell, Paul de Man and dozens of highbrow others.

Strikingly, the book’s last essay ends with a little meditation about the shaky hold our minds have on the information delivered by our senses. Stark’s friend Sharon Lockhart, who made a well-known series of photographic portraits of young adolescents at Pine Flat, Calif., mistook a suicidal teen who appears in a film by Larry Clark for one of her subjects. Lockhart “had to rewatch the scene many times before she realized, with some sense of relief I suppose, she was mistaken.” Stark concludes, “It is this double take, this impossibly unfavorable crossover between two worlds seemingly so far from each other that moved me to write what you just read the way that I did.” It is a conclusion of considerable ambiguity.

Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur (whence the marginal note from which the book and exhibition took its title) is, typically for the author, a shifty novel. Its protagonist is short on affect and lacks any grasp of temporal reality, but he has the visual acuity of a raptor. His experiences are described in hypnotic detail, an account that is repetitious, inconsistent and altogether untrustworthy. Stark, by contrast, invites our faith in her emotional and intellectual honesty. But she also lets us know that she’s not a completely reliable narrator either. And if, as readers of her prose—or viewers of her art—we are tempted to add our second guesses and interpretive digressions to Ribas’s and her own, we find ourselves in a peculiarly unstable position. It’s a very odd place from which to write criticism—which may be part of Stark’s exceptionally canny strategy.

“Frances Stark:This could becomea gimick [sic] or an honest articulation ofthe workings of themind” was on view atthe MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Mass., Oct. 22, 2010-Jan. 2, 2011.

NANCY PRINCENTHAL is a writer who lives in New York.