The New York Times-20080127-Sex in the City

Return to: The_New_York_Times-20080127

Sex in the City

Full Text (410  words)

'As an art dealer, I've always liked to be involved in big productions, says the curator and gallerist Emi Fontana. I'm not particularly good at selling small things that end up in the living room. Fontana's current big production, Women in the City, which goes up Feb. 9, is the debut of West of Rome, her newly founded nonprofit arts organization based in Los Angeles.

On view in more than 50 locations -- ranging from video billboards along Sunset Strip to the Huntington Library's botanical gardens -- Women in the City, with support from the Broad Art Foundation and the Francois Pinault Foundation, presents breakthrough work by Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman. During the 1980s these artists utilized popular forms, cannily borrowing the look of movies and advertising, to articulate sharp questions about power, the representation of women and contemporary society. Sherman's poignant black-and-white photographs, Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980), featured the artist as an isolated character in some anonymous melodrama; Holzer's Truisms, aggressively hyperdeclarative phrases gleaned from everyday life, surfaced on posters, stickers and patches; Kruger's signature collages displayed a bold graphic style -- red, white and Helvetica -- and an unabashedly confrontational tone; and Lawler transfigured existing images to subvert conventional meanings.

In 1979, Lawler presented A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica. As the full-length soundtrack of The Misfits played, the silver screen remained unremittingly blank. In Marilyn Monroe's last performance, her final line wavered in the auditorium. How do you find your way back in the dark? she asked, a tentative voice without an image.

Of course, one of the inspirations for the show's title was Federico Fellini, says Fontana, a native of Milan and a former interviewer for cultural programs on the state broadcasting network in Italy. I interviewed him and went to the set of 'City of Women.' In Fellini's 1980 film, Marcello Mastroianni, the director's alter ego, encounters feminism in a Freudian phantasmagoria about male anxiety and fantasy.

When I watched it again recently, Fontana recalled, I noticed that all the women in the movie have cameras. They are the ones taking the pictures. SUSAN MORGAN

[Illustration]PHOTOS: PREVIOUS PAGES: A BILLBOARD OVER WILSHIRE BOULEVARD WILL FEATURE AN IMAGE FROM CINDY SHERMAN'S 'UNTITLED FILM STILLS' SERIES; OPPOSITE PAGE: LOUISE LAWLER'S 1979 INSTALLATION AT THE AERO THEATER IN SANTA MONICA IS RECREATED FOR THE 'WOMEN IN THE CITY' EXHIBITION. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY DWIGHT ESCHLIMAN)