ART REVIEW : Sterbak Sculptures Flirt With Profundity

There’s really no preparing for the sight of Jana Sterbak’s “Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic.” Photographs don’t convey just how chillingly the seams joining the slabs of raw flank steak resemble sutures. Or how perversely elegant the dress appears, clinging to the curves of a silver mannequin. Or how repulsive the texture of the meat becomes as it dries, the fat growing waxen, the flesh stringy and leathery.

Despite its dramatic appeal, the dress falls short on enduring impact. Like too many of the works in Sterbak’s show, “States of Being,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, the flesh-dress feels encumbered by the visual jolt it produces. Its sensationalism prevents even the potent issues it raises from fully evolving and occupying the mind with any kind of strategic stealth.

Women as meat, humans as perishable, fashions as transient--all of the ideas couched within are neatly summed up in what, ultimately, acts as a visual one-liner. Such superficial theatrics come as a surprise--and a disappointment--in a group of works focusing on the schism between inner and outer realities and, particularly, the split between body and soul, or physical and psychic identities.

Thirteen works made between 1979 and 1990 are included in this traveling show, curated by Diana Nemiroff for the National Gallery of Canada. All are conceptually linked by the notion of duality, but formally they bear no allegiance to any particular style or approach to materials. Sterbak works in media as slick as glass, mirrors and billboard-size color transparencies, while she also makes small sculptures of a rawness and immediacy that can only come from being shaped by hand.

Born in Prague, Sterbak moved to Canada as a teen-ager in 1968, the year of the Prague Spring. She spent a few years in New York, but has resided primarily in Toronto and now Montreal. In her catalogue essay, Nemiroff notes that Sterbak’s propensity to “communicate critical opinions through humorous and ironic allusions” is characteristic of Czech culture. She cites the writings of Kafka and Hasek, both known for their subversive, often satiric, critiques of society.

Sterbak also has affinities with contemporary visual artists such as Kiki Smith and Charles Ray, as well as numerous performance artists who have focused on the human body not as the revered recipient of a divine spark, but as the confusing staging grounds for conflicting political, sexual and personal concerns. Sterbak dips into gender politics in works like “Remote Control II,” a massive aluminum contraption resembling a hoop-skirt on wheels. An accompanying video documents how the work operates in performance: a woman wears and maneuvers it, but only after two men help her put it on.

Mostly, Sterbak explores the dichotomy between the body’s mysterious, amorphous spirit and the absolutely unpoetic appearance of its organs. The installation “Golem: Objects as Sensations” addresses this split with unusual, transfixing power. On the floor, she has assembled a sequence of sculpted body parts in lead, bronze and rubber: a heart, penis, tongue, hand, stomach, throat and spleen. All are crudely rendered, lumpy, unremarkable objects, but together they evoke the synergistic fact that human life equals more than the sum of its parts.

They also present a vivid metaphor for the legend of the Golem. According to Jewish mystical tradition, a rabbi in 16th-Century Prague shaped a powerful man out of clay to save the Jews of his city from persecution. He gave the Golem life by inscribing the name of God on his forehead.

The rabbi had a more difficult time turning the mythical superman back into clay, however, and that arduous process is suggested by seven bronze hearts that crown the row of other body parts on the floor. While the first heart is plump and vigorous, each succeeding vessel appears squeezed by an invisible fist until the last looks extinguished and stiff.

While addressing the legend of the Golem, Sterbak implicitly suggests a parallel between the artist and her divine counterpart, God. The role of each creator is understood to be the transformation of raw matter into life--meaning, something that transcends its own materiality. By divesting the body parts of any appeal, even that of functional beauty, Sterbak reminds us from what base matter we derive. The puny, ugly body parts on the floor act as cues to keep our lofty ambitions in check.

With “Golem,” Sterbak’s work achieves a richness unequaled elsewhere in the show. Her “Standard Lives” takes a wry but simple look at the typical milestones and predictable periods of anguish in a woman’s life. In “Generic Man,” she stamps a bar code on the back of a man’s neck as an emblem of society’s urge toward uniformity and its suppression of the individual. “Attitudes,” a series of pillows monogrammed with such words as virtue , disease and reputation , makes blatant the subtext of the intimate drama that transpires between the sheets.

Only one other work in the exhibition has the staying power of the “Golem” installation. “I Want You to Feel the Way I Do . . . (The Dress)” pairs a free-standing wire-mesh dress with a text projected on the wall behind it. The passage is ripe with tension and anger.

It is about being uncomfortable in one’s own body, wanting to escape the self and inhabit another’s skin--though that, too, proves unfulfilling. Sterbak translates the seething resentment in the text into pure heat by wrapping the dress in electric coils that glow red hot as the viewer approaches. With her arms outstretched, the invisible wearer of the dress invites us to burn in her embrace.

“States of Being” repeatedly poses the question of what comprises identity--the parts, the whole or some intangible psychic glue that holds it all together? Sterbak’s own artistic identity is at stake in this dilemma. She unwittingly demonstrates that parts of her oeuvre can be stolid and mute, while others may confound and absorb.

The whole has merit, yet on occasion, Sterbak, too, wishes to inhabit another artist’s skin. Atop a preparatory drawing for “I Want You to Feel the Way I Do,” she asks, “Why Can’t I Be Giacometti?”

Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 700 Prospect St., La Jolla, (619) 454-3541, through Feb. 28, 1993. Closed Christmas and New Year’s Day and every Monday.