Schwendener, Martha. “Carol Bove: Experiment in Total Freedom includes a variety of works.” Artforum. October 2003: 174.

Carol Bove: Team Gallery - New York Experiment in Total Freedom includes a variety of works

By Martha Schwender

The 1960s--by which we usually mean the late '60s and early '70s--have been mythologized in a number of ways; exploited by conservatives, who have adopted the insurrectionary tactics originally developed by the Left; eulogized by the popular-music industry; and skewered by writers like Michel Houellebecq, whose novels explore the fallout of the sexual revolution. Artist Carol Bore was raised in Berkeley, California, the place bearing the most vivid date stamp from that era, and has said her interest in this period stems from a need to "think about" her family. Here, rather than assess the triumphs or failures of the period, she created a sort of anthropological rumination-by- exhibition, gently strumming the popular chords of the moment.

"Experiment in Total Freedom," which included a variety of works, from wall drawings in silk thread to sculptural installations, focused on how the cultural and political becomes personal, particularly by being aestheticized in the home. Adventures in Poetry, 2002-- three natural-wood shelves laden with books, including a volume of John Giorno's poetry, a 1969 edition of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, a text by the Radical Therapist Collective, a copy of Civilization and Its Discontents, Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore's The Medium Is the Massage, Dial Press's Revolution for the Hell of It, and issues of the London-based journal Anarchy--spelled out the sociocultural proclivities of bourgeois hippie-liberals circa 1971, the year Bove was born. Two other shelf works, Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges, 2002-2003, and How People Get Power, 2002, as well as the 178-book floor installation Touching, 2002, were embodied out of equally eclectic mad inspired reading lists. Minimalist furniture--Knoll tables, to be exact--in The Look of Thought; The Ways of Love, 2002, and Vegetables (Land and Sea), 2003, further emphasized the idea that every cultural movement has its attendant (or guiding) aesthetic. Oriented Plane, 2003, a curtain created out of tiny sterling-silver balls and aligned along an east-west axis, evoked (and upgraded) the plastic bead curtains found in love dens. Celebrity culture also put in an appearance: on the show's invitation card, a mug shot of Jane Fonda from an arrest at a war protest; in the gallery, ghostly framed drawings of Mia Farrow, Bianca Jagger, and Twiggy.