Dark O’Clock: Stephen Andrews, Doug Ischar, Mathew Jones, Wanda Koop, Glenn Ligon
January 17 – February 18, 1995
a response to the exhibition by Alison Gillmor
When I started to write about Dark O’clock, I had to check the spelling of the word “glamorous” (g-l-a-m-o-u-r-o-u-s? g-l-a-m-o-r-o-u-s?). The Collins Concise told me that the word comes from an 18th-century Scottish variation of “grammar,” meaning a magic spell, because the occult was associated with learning; the magic spell eventually evolved into the idea of alluring charm, leading to our contemporary notion of glamour as a slightly supernatural force, an aura of beauty, sexiness and power that allows certain people, certain objects, to draw us in. 1 Glamour and grammar, sex and ideas — recently these two things have not been much connected. The puritanism of a lot of 60’s and 70’s radical art and politics banished glamour, seeing it as shallow, distracting and frivolous. Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel, Kiss of the Spider Woman tries to re-integrate radicalism and pleasure, ideas and sex, grammar and glamour — as an earnest, bearded Latin American Marxist, shares a cell with a gay window-dresser, who adores the over-the-top melodramas of the 40’s and 50’s. 2 A lot of art in the 90’s, like the work in Dark O’Clock, recognizes the need to turn away from the joyless, sexless daytime clarity of “sociological” art, toward a night-time dynamic of darkness, intrigue, desire and danger. Dark O’Clock artists don’t lose radical content; they use glamour to make me want it even more.
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