For ‘Time Out New York’ Magazine
Mai-Thu Perret’s first solo exhibition in New York aims to mine past avant-garde movements for newly provocative images and ideas, but provides little of either. What you do get are lots of arcane references underscoring the video, sculpture and diagrams. Take for instance, the show’s centerpiece video of young female dancers in utilitarian garb which, according to Perret, is inspired by artist Varvara Stephanova’s set designs for Vitalii Zhemchuzhnyi’s 1924 agitprop theater piece ‘An Evening of the Book.’ You wonder whether knowing any of this is worth the piece’s slim rewards.
The front gallery offers an oddball assortment of artworks, including a ball of neon tubing looks like a wadded up (rejected?) version of props the Geneva-based Perret has previously shown, a carpet with a Rorschach pattern and large wall diagrams of dance steps. But nothing quite sums up the pointlessness of this show better than the eight gigantic, cardboard commas – which tellingly resemble quotation marks – that line a wall leading to Perret’s take on Zhemchuzhnyi’s homage to revolutionary literature.
The same commas, along with a huge blank-paged book, appear in the video as part of a set, around which the aforementioned cadre of young women performs synchronized movements that see-saw between energy and lethargy. Apparently unable to sustain the stamina to convert past ideology to present-day meaning, the characters convey the disappointing message that such attempts are better in theory than practice.