(Continued from previous page)

Those links have been likened to a museum's curated exhibition and as an attempt to see past events “as they were.” The former is a suitable analogy, given that Bove's objects are displayed in the gallery; the latter conception holds traction only if we take into account the retrospective nature of her (re)constructions. No matter how enveloping her aggregate environments become, we cannot shake loose the accumulated weight of events that have taken place between then and now: The present is the lens through which we will always view the past. The strength of Bove's sculptures lies in her ability to view a wider spectrum of this past activity—to place her artifiacts in a more productive tension—as a means of reviving the complexities (and contradictions) smoothed out by time.

Take as an example What the Trees Said (2003-04), one of her largest shelf sculptures to date. Its main element is a vintage George Nelson-designed modular shelving unit with a rectangular storage component and open shelves. Placed on and around it are a selection of period publications, including Germano Celant's Art Povera; Gayle Graham Yates' What Women Want; Herbert Marcuse's 5 Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia; The Tibetan Book of the Dead; the Brian Doherty-designed box of Aspen magazine issues 5 and 6; Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space; the Kama Sutra; and Lehmann Hisey's Keys to Inner Space. In a manner akin to her other sculptures, What the Trees Said combines stacked, propped, and open elements that balance form, image, and text. The three spreads of soft focus black-and-white nude photography chime with the inclusion of the Kama Sutra and contrasts with the geometry of the instruction sheet for a model of Tony Smith's The Maze, pulled out of and placed next to the box containing Aspen. Associative links abound: for example, the “utopia” in Marcuse's subtitle resonates with the utopian aspirations of the antiwar activists who set up the communal farm described in What the Trees Said (the book). The analytical merges with the metaphysical, the rational with the psychedelic, and a fuller portrait of the age of Aquarius emerges than if Bove were to focus in on any singular discipline or genre.

In her recent work, Andrea Bowers focuses on early 1980s feminist environmental activists who picked up the embers of 1960s radicalism and fanned them in the face of nuclear power and weapons. The largest protests, enacted by diverse networks of women, took place at the Pentagon in 1980 and 1981, and throughout the decade at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in Nevada. Whereas Bove appropriates objects to make her work, Bowers appropriates media depictions of the protesters, and, perhaps more radically, restages some of their acts. A series of medium-scale graphite drawings, delicately rendered, isolate figures from newspaper photographs of the protests against an expansive white ground. They typically depict groups of women, often in the process of helping each other out—over a fence, weaving a web across the Pentagon door, arms and legs locked together in nonviolent direct actions. Bowers' emphasizes the normalcy of the women; these protestors could be you or me. They've simply risen to the occasion.

Bowers attempts to do the same: Witness Defense of Necessity (2003), exhibited in “Magical Politics,” the artist's 2003 solo show in Berlin. The artwork, made of sewn and embroided strips of cloth hung on a tubular steel frame, acted as a barrier at the entrance to the exhibition space; threaded across its surface was a network of spider webs, symbolically linking it to the brightly-colored yarn webs strung across the Pentagon door in November 1980. Barbara Epstein, in the chapter of her book Political Protest and Cultural Revolution from which Bowers derived the exhibition title, notes that the original action—blocking the Pentagon door—was one of the very first to move activist strategies into the realm of the aesthetic. Bowers, by recreating their action, pushes her aesthetic gesture toward the realm of the activist. Since the object is still located within the white cube, the efficacy of the gesture may be questioned. But consider Vieja Gloria (2003), Bowers' hourlong documentary about a tree-sit by environmental activist John Quigley. It has not only been included in this year's Whitney Biennial, but also distributed freely to activist groups for use as promotional material.

Another example is offered by Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Training (2004), a twenty-minute two-channel video projection that pulls double duty as an instruction manual in nonviolent protest tactics and references to mid-1960s film and video documentation of dance performances by the Judson Dance Theater. (Filmed in a California church fellowship hall, Bowers' video literalizes its connection to the Judson Church.) The left-side screen offers a Q&A-style tutorial for a group of trained dancers while the right-side screen shows the dancers, tentative yet elegant, as they apply what they've learned. Bodies lock together and are pulled apart; individuals go limp and are dragged across the floor. The didacticism of the lesson and the abstractness of the movements are held in perfect balance.

Can a generational self-definition emerge from these engagements with recent history? It may be too soon to tell. Pamela M. Lee, commenting on the Whitney Biennial, expressed concern about a lack of decisive argument “for any particular approach to that encounter or [identification] of what those alternatives [for the future] might actually be.” Bove makes an argument for inclusiveness and open-endedness with her nuanced exploration of the era's overlapping concerns; Bowers, in her attempt to engage contemporary problems through adopted radical tactics, pushes aesthetic concern, often limited by the boundaries of the gallery, out into the real world. Without jettisoning (art-)historical awareness, both seem to implicitly offer a way forward.