Keith Edmier
One of the coolest things about being an artist is that you get to make objects that do exactly what you want them to do. As a bonus, you can also bare your soul, expose your frailties and indulge your unpopular passions and unpleasant fetishes with nary a peep of protest from the moral cops who dog more popular creative outlets. You're an artist, after all, and you're supposed to be weird.
Edgar Degas knew this. One of the weirdest (and most popular) things the French master ever made was his Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen (1880-81), a 1 metre-high bronze sculpture of a barely pubescent ballet dancer, outfitted in a real tulle tutu, with a satin bow in her bronze hair. If you ever thought there was something fishy about Degas' sketching of all those lithe little girls, this is the hard proof.
I saw Little Dancer... again recently at the Metropolitan Museum, and it's still as twisted as ever: arms bent back, head uptilted, eyes closed in blissful trepidation, lips - yes, slightly pursed. At the Met it was shown in a tall vitrine, but if it were placed on the floor, it would be about thigh-high. Or just below belt level, if you were a diminutive French aristocrat.
Degas originally made his little friend out of wax (the bronze editions were cast much later); by the 1880s, his eyesight was failing, and he increasingly turned to hands-on sculpting for solace. As the ultimate expression of the artist's irrepressible, unknowable urge, Little Dancer... is an exhilaratingly perverse public monument, and I hadn't seen anything like it until I encountered Keith Edmier's Jill Peters (1997-98).
Like the Degas, Jill Peters is a clothed wax sculpture - this one about life-size, depicting the now-30 year-old Edmier's grade-school crush, a big-toothed girl who resembled Amy Carter (the junior-counterculture's only real sex symbol back in the late 70s, versus the foxy hegemony of Jodie Foster and Brooke Shields). Again like the Degas, it's not Jill Peters the human who is evoked, so much as the fetishistic accretions in the shameful cubby-holes of Edmier's memory: her white culottes, white turtleneck sweater, clunky white earth-shoes, and crowning glory - a cascade of feathery, blonde Farrah Fawcett hair. While her facial features fade into the dead white wax of the sculpture, those delectable triggers in wool, rayon, human hair and leather float above, like an angel's gossamer shift (as designed by Sergio Valente).
Degas' sculpture privileges the archetype over the individual; so does Edmier's, but then he goes ahead and names the object of his affection. This act is not all it seems, however: though real, 'Jill Peters' sounds like a sitcom-star name, a generic TV moniker along the lines of 'Jan Brady' or 'Jamie Sommers' (a.k.a. The Bionic Woman). Edmier's schoolgirl therefore departs from Degas' dancer and settles into a subset of American heroic sculpture that can be called the 'particularised anonymous': like the moustachioed Civil War troopers and tin-hatted Doughboys that stand grim watch on grassy small-town squares across the land, laying subtle guilt trips on generations of draft-age teens.
Posed astride a mound of polyvinyl snow, her Jif-eating grin a mocking mile wide, Jill Peters is thus not a private doll wrenched out of the artist's cold, dead fingers, but a public testament to ineffable, unattainable purity.
It's a cruel fact that girls mature faster than shy boys, a universal tragedy that - why not? - deserves a monument. Rock-and-roll and movies have only given us ubiquitous fantasies of a more perfect world. It's up to art, unbeholden to the commercial demands of the dream-factories, to tell it like it is.
But to do this, Edmier paradoxically has to brave the slings and arrows of an art world that prides itself on being above legibility - even if extravagant metaphor is as often as not a beard for ordinariness and fear. Jill Peters is far more brave, for example, than any of Matthew Barney's recent smoke-and-mirrors, in-or-out extravaganzas; it comes closer, really, to Robert Gober's metonymic memoryscapes, unique (in an art context, at least) for their commingling of sexuality and subtlety.
There are two further pieces in this show - a pair of three metre-tall waterlilies, cast in pink polyester resin; and a smattering of chunky, polyurethane-prism snowflakes glued to the gallery's sunny shop-window (titled Astrology, Sexuality, & You, 1998). The lilies are a tour de force of fabrication, their dhurrie-sized pads effortlessly suspended in the air above our heads; in effect, we become big fish and frogs, nosing around the hollow receptacles of one and the pollen-smeared stamens of the other. The crystal-clear snowflakes, each apparently handmade and unique, look like a kindergarten project cranked up to an industrial level. Both pieces flesh out the floating dream-world of 'Jill Peters', which is just the real world submerged in a heady broth of late 90s sophism: angst tinged with optimism, polite repression coupled with proud indulgence. An expiring American Century, in other words, as ripe for art as France was at the end of its own.
