March 11, 2004
Willie Doherty at Alexander and Bonin
An Artforum.com review of the Willie Doherty exhibition now on view at Alexander and Bonin. The link dies two months from now, so here is the full text:
At a moment when many artists are retreating from political issues into abstraction, mysticism, or play, Willie Doherty—in "Non-Specific Threat," his austere show at Alexander & Bonin—presents five photographs and a video that focus on implicit violence, the dangers we project onto unknown figures, and language's ability to alter what we perceive as menacing. Doherty is a native of Derry, central to Northern Ireland's modern civil rights movement, and it is easy to let biography color our understanding of his work. Yet the "non-specific" in the title is key. His last New York solo presented a photographic detour to Berlin, and the dingy, decrepit locations he uses here signify the underside of a generic metropolis. Each photo shows the same vaguely thuggish-looking man, with a shaved head and an impassive face, from a different angle; in the video, the camera slowly circles him while a monotone voice-over alternates between confidential declarations—"I am your invention," "You manipulate me," "We control each other"—and predictions of a bleak future devoid of TV, radio, airplanes, music, and other things that constitute modern life. The confluence of intimacy and apocalyptic vision is uncommonly distressing.