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"Anxiety as Style" is the theme of Jay Younger's installation. The anxiety in her images is not real. Though a woman walks blindfolded on a narrow wall; though the tension in a rope is causing it to break; and though the clock, frozen at the "witching" hour, says that time is running out - this is all just so much cliché. The images yield themselves up passively as so much beautiful surface, so many glossed poses.
The gloss and velvety texture of the giant Cibachromes seduce the audience and capture the gaze. But, in postmodern fashion, the images reveal only reflection, cliché - a lethal romance. The exhibition exposes the nadir of postmodern feminism. Can feminist art afford to play the postmodern commodification game with its self-reflexive irony? Won't this strategy always turn in upon itself? Feminism risks the commodification of its own language. These images beg a new aesthetic, a new language, and a new value system.
The exhibition flaunts the futility and inherent contradiction of a postmodern "style" (particularly of neo-conceptualism). The full-blown images burst the boundaries of narrow aesthetic discourse, but are left in empty space. One of the Cibachromes displays a magnet suspended in space. It is a powerful symbol of the patriarchy. The magnet emits lines of force, ordering free space into phallocentric binary thought. Feminism is left, between delusions, as so much commodified style.
A woman walking alone in an empty stairwell, looks behind her, perhaps to see if she is being followed. There is nothing there, only her own anxiety. But she is dressed in a very fashionable tightly tailored suit and the look cast over her shoulder is a classic fashion pose