NY Times | Sep 09, 2005 | Ken Johnson

Few young women happily embrace the term feminist these days, but one of feminism’s legacies is still alive and well: the trend famously heralded by the New Museum’s 1994 exhibition ‘‘Bad Girls.’’ The all-women show ‘‘Bonds of Love,’’ organized by the curator, artist and performer Lisa Kirk, could be seen as a modest bad-girl update. What love has to do with it is hard to say, but what clearly animates the show is a cheerfully defiant determination to pursue interests and pleasures without regard for traditional strictures of feminine propriety. Or, in the immortal words of Cyndi Lauper, ‘‘Girls just want to have fun.’‘

Viewed in that light, not everything in the show is actually all that much fun, partly because some of the strategies of provocation have gone stale: pictures from pornographic magazines rendered in needlepoint by Maria E. Piñeres, for example, or nuclear missile models made of stacked consumer goods by Aleksandra Mir. Fiona Banner’s ‘‘Nude,’’ a painting consisting entirely of hand-painted words exhaustively describing the image of a naked woman, is too dry; and videos about a disaffected high school girl by Laura Parnes are tediously arch.

There are, however, enough good things to warrant a visit. Kati Heck’s video ‘‘and the green hell!!!’’ is hilarious. In it, two women in beige tights, wearing gorilla masks, hands and feet, mime mechanical, German-speaking figures inviting people to visit an amusement park attraction called the Green Hell. Marilyn Minter’s blurry photorealist painting of a woman’s dirty bare heels in glittery high-heeled shoes is lush and poetically poignant. Laura Anderson Barbata’s polychrome wooden carving of a female saint cut off at the shoulders has a fine sculptural and ambiguously religious presence. Camille Norment’s black-and-white photographic portrait of a beautiful young woman is strikingly vivid, in part because of treated glass that brings the image into sharp focus when viewed from the side. And although Tara Mateik is not as magnetic a performer as Michael Jackson, her gender-blurring video of herself in a Peter Pan costume lip-synching and dancing to ‘‘Pretty Young Thing’’ is certainly entertaining.

John Connelly
526 West 26th Street, Chelsea
Through Sept. 24

Ken Johnson