Lynne Cohen, "Untitled" Office with fish on wall, 1978
RECOMMENDED
Travel back to the 1970s hip scene—think Talking Heads. There you will find Lynne Cohen who gained fame and acclaim from the photographic cognoscenti for her deadpan, straight-on black-and-white images of depopulated institutional interiors that come at you as starkly delineated stage sets for the absurd rituals of modern life, after the illusions of the sixties have been dispelled. There is no romance in Cohen’s shot of the targets in an empty shooting range that face you at the end of a wooden floor, inert and stagnant, waiting to be riddled with fire power, only to remain for the next round. Cohen felt a bitter nostalgia for the failed counter-culture that left sensitive souls like hers with only the plastic world against which she recoiled. Stop trying to make sense, says Cohen, there is none. Where have we moved from her position? (Michael Weinstein)
Through December 24 at Stephen Daiter Gallery, 230 West Superior
