“Cop Sculpture” was an exhibition I mounted with Lincoln Tobier in 1993 — or, as the poster said, “one project, two installations,” at two galleries across the street from each other.
For several years I had haphazardly clipped newspaper and magazine images of police presenting contraband they’d confiscated — weapons, drugs, currency, art, forgeries, animal or cultural artifacts, smuggled plants and food, and so on. I was fascinated by the ritual of law enforcement agencies staging temporary displays of what amount to fetish objects because, by most measures, they were indistinguishable from contemporary art. The materials (or, if you like, media) were found objects. They involved an improvisational collaboration between the cops and criminals, gangs, or terrorists who’d collected these things and the police who arranged them. They were presented as arbitrary assemblages, and in that sense were installations; but the photos almost always featured actual policemen (yes, men) standing by — so in that sense they were also a kind of performance. Who “curated” them? What aesthetic principles did they apply to arranging them? And, ultimately, what did these strange assemblage-performance-installation “cop sculptures” mean?
These two installations were shown at two of the most significant galleries in New York at the time, the Pat Hearn Gallery and Colin De Land’s American Fine Arts. Both installations featured the same collection of appropriated photographs. The Pat Hearn installation was, in essence, a gallery within the gallery — a model of a gallery with low walls and tiny pedestals with images mounted on them. Viewers could (indeed, had to) walk around in the “gallery” to see the works, but they were too low and small to permit the customary equality implied in viewing works at eye level. The AFA exhibition took a different approach to disorienting viewers: it was upside-down. A grid of “pedestals” descended from ceiling, with the images mounted on the bottom and lit from below. Two sides of each pedestal were extended a foot or so to just above eye level with acrylic panels featuring some quotation; but which sides changed from one pedestal to the next, forming a sort of labyrinth that viewers had to walk within to see the images and read the texts.
The Pat Hearn installation later appeared in the 1995 Temporary Translation(s): Sammlung Schürmann : Kunst der Gegenwart und Fotografie exhibition in Hamburg’s Deichtorhallen, which featured works — this was pretty exciting — by Diane Arbus, Karl Blossfeldt, Robert Capa, Larry Clark, Walker Evans. Robert Frank, among others.
“Cop Sculpture” got quite a few notices, including a big review in Artforum (Thad Ziolkowski, “Openings: Ted Byfield and Lincoln Tobier”, Artforum 32.9 [May 1994]).
