HIxson K. New York in Review / Kathryn HIxson. // Arts Magazine.

Ludmilla Skirpkina and Oleg Petrenko (Ronald Feldman, September 10-October 12), a.k.a. The Peppers, failed to make a point in this exhibit, on several levels. Maybe it was the unfortunate timing, coming two weeks after the coup in Russia. An impasse is created in their work between form and content (large-scale charting of “participation of working youths in creative activities,” for example) that is potentially revolting; but the way of crossing the information gap, by means of forms of horses and rubber tubing, is obscure, to say the least. Elsewhere, the volley of chartable options is divided off into a face of Hitler and rather mastectomied-looking breast, both peeking out of piles of peas. There is no material logic here. The Peppers stage a kind of monomania of material culture more effectively in a sideshow gallery in whch all the art and related paraphernalia is made out of potatoes: real, as in heaped in the corner; imaged, as in “abstract paintings”; and also fermented, as when corking some bottles. This strange, dark place nearly breaks out into Kabakovian fields, studying the mental and cultural compressions caused by a shortage-ridden economy; but once again the material restraint, leaping beyond raw potatoes to a very cooked hitech rendering thereof, closes the ideas within the work. Potential pulse thus slowly rots: a backward repeat evidenced by a faint potato-rot smell in the chamber at my second visit. In another gallery, the Peppers mix gynecology and the agricultural in a very Russian-peasant way. Stacks of wheat serve as multiplication signs and negotiate a crude pun on the interaction of the two fields in something related to “yeast infection,” but otherwise this intercourse of Soviet science and famine is also opaque. Loaves of bread set on a table, all signified, do open up to something, however. And the 16 Handkerchiefs, genre scenes of the world invaded by the alien social math of potato, pea, and charting, do distance us enough form the material artistry, so that an alternative dystopian future is eerily envisioned. It is only in the immaterial fantasy surrogate for a retired sneeze at life that the Peppers’ work makes contact with a vision of change in the real world.

KATHRYN HIXSON.