Friday, May 29, 2009

Art in Review

Home Front

Francis Cape’s installations of built-in cabinets and paneled walls use fine carpentry to conjure up past times and values (the Shakers come to mind), while creating site-specific spatial conundrums. Things are less mute and more forthright in this show, which expands on a piece he exhibited in “Prospect.1 New Orleans,” the new biennial inaugurated last fall.

The morality of Mr. Cape’s work is newly and organically apparent. For one thing, framed color photographs of the debris and damage of Hurricane Katrina serve as captions for his latest efforts, creating a context of chaos, loss, incompetence and indifference that the objects play — and rail — against. For another, these efforts are unfinished fragments whose interior structures are visible.

The displays features individual pieces of furniture: chairs, occasional table, bedstead, sideboard and chests of drawers. There is also the more characteristically Cape-like “London Avenue,” an impeccably framed-out section of wall with a built-in wardrobe and writing table.

A printed handout on the table informs us that these forms are nothing new. They are all part of “The Utility Furniture Scheme,” in which licensed designs were issued by the [British] government in 1942 (during World War II) to “conserve scarce resources in a time of national emergency.” The designs were expanded in 1946 and 1948 and discontinued in 1952. They dwell in sensibility, principle and history somewhere between the Bauhaus and Ikea. Beautifully remade by Mr. Cape, the furnishings are transparent, self-evident, with nothing to hide. We can see that
they are good all the way through.

An idealized past, or a time when government worked? You decide. The photographs of shattered furniture and ravaged houses, not to mention a FEMA trailer anchored like a dinghy to an enormous wheelchair ramp built of two-by-fours, all speak for themselves, like daggers in the heart. ROBERTA SMITH