"I Won't Grow Up".

Cheim & Read, New York NY June 26 * August 29, 2008

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Skyrocketing prices, global franchise galleries, and hardcore celebrity artists have all conspired to foment an art scene turned industry that is more adult than adolescent. Now a game for grownups, the main action in the art world takes place in the boardroom and auction house, usually involving management consultants.

On paper, Cheim & Read's "I Won't Grow Up" (curated by Beth Rudin DeWoody and Donald Baechler) functions as protest against this recent development, calling instead for a return to childlike wonder. Group shows are a challenge at the best of times, and this unruly bunch is no exception. The exhibition's Bourgeois-inspired premise--that art is an "acting

out" of unconscious "terror"--is elastic enough to encompass just about anything, including artists whose work often seems infantile or even jaded. Thus the ineffably ingenuous Jeff Koons, whose whimsical Inflatable Flower Sculpture (2000) is an obvious stretch. The same goes for Jake and Dinos Chapman's Platinum Joey (1997), which shows an erect penis bursting through the spliced neck of a two-headed, naked girl. Bad-boy photographer Ryan McGinley turns up as well, this time in the guise of a male Playboy bunny in Ski Mask (2001). While, it is true, children tend to play obsessively, by working a narrative or procedure to death, this repetition compulsion is never as schooled as what comes across here, which mainly has a forced quality, though it thus also reflects the important difference between transference and early object relations, which Melanie Klein singled out as the outside chance of therapeutic success in analytic treatment.

Hence a number of the artists in "I Won't Grow Up" aspire to a kind of natural innocence, while inevitably admitting that children's games are not usually so imbued with self-awareness. Scott Reeder's Robot in the Wild (2004), showing a pale-blue block figure standing flatly against a lush green tropical background, aims at a raw, almost Matissean spontaneity, but ends up being permeated with a sense of superiority instead. In Kembra Pfahler's Baby Linda in Coffin (2008), a sexed-up drag doll with bouffant glitter hair lying, legs splayed, in a macabre miniature coffin, innocent suggestion gives way to full-frontal fantasy that the artist's band, The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, captions, but which her name, which in German suggests one who drives a stake into the adolescent at the heart of undeath, directs. Other pieces, though, seem informed by adolescent fears and trepidations. In Beka Goedde's Motive (2008), bits of plastered paper cascade down from the gallery's skylight over a roughly hewn wooden pedestal. Up above, several miniature, wafer-thin toy houses hover precariously, as if about to fall down. Misaki Kawai's freestanding sculptures and wall art also successively capture the cartoon character of most kids' games. Carved chunkily out of acrylic, fabric, cardboard, Styrofoam, and wood, the play-dough imperfections of her brightly dressed figures and animals perfectly conjure the profound malleability of children's emotions that adolescents share in their special mode of awkwardness.

But nothing "covers" childhood more than story time. Brian Belott's Books on a Table (2008) presents the ultimate library for today's grownups. Books of all sizes and shapes stand propped up and open, with pages made of collages pasted together from magazine ads that have been irreverently painted over. Bits of text appear here and there, leaving no clue as to whether one should read from the front or the back. It is memory unbound, the screen of imagination itself, reminding us once again that the happiest ending of development through phases--whether in or out of the art world--is no ending at all.