FRANCES STARK by Simon Rees FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon FRANCE September 22, 2007 * January 12, 2008

It's telling that Frances Stark's first major survey should take place in Europe instead of her hometown of Los Angeles, especially given her work's clear basis in English-language text, typography,

prose, and poetry. (Stark is justly famous for her numerous published writings and books.) A lover and hoarder of letters and words, a virtual and visual lexicographer, Stark oftentimes seems driven to repeat, reframe, re-visualize language in a glossolalia form reminiscent of lettrist poetry. In fact, Stark's art can easily be considered a linguistic version of Tourette's Syndrome (or equally the latter a verbal art form). So it's little wonder that her Portrait of the Artist as a Full-on Bird (2004) depicts Stark as a parakeet--one of the most verbose of the talking parrots, which doubtless also squawks Joyce. Elsewhere, the show refers to Flaubert, Gombrowicz, Henry Miller, Nietzsche, T.S. Eliot, and Nathaniel West, to name a few. Stark is less explicit in tracing visual analogues or forebears, but it's pretty safe to assume dada and fluxus artists, Warhol the diarist, Baldessari, and (logically) Richard Prince. And for what it's worth, we are shown a facsimile of her MFA thesis cover signed by her former Art Center teachers, Stephen Prina and Mike Kelley.

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Organized by Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven in collaboration with FRAC Bourgogne and Culturgest, Lisbon, "The Fall of Frances Stark" is structured both diaristically--a slap in the face to postmodernist authorial assassins--and chronologically, allowing the audience to grasp the artist's stepwise development from the early 1990s to the present. Given the logic of the exhibition, the "Fall" can encompass any number of lapsarian or Freudian interpretations (including the name of the legendary U.K. post-punk band referred to in several works), but I primarily read it as an autumnal metaphor for maturation and inevitability--perhaps stock-in-trade behavior for an artist just turning 40. It's pretty simple once you get it: life is one long free-for-all or slide in currency. Frances gets a degree. Frances gets a life. Frances gets a boyfriend. Frances gets a dealer. Frances gets a higher degree. Frances has a baby. Frances gets a job. Frances gets another life. Frances loses the boyfriend. Frances gets increasingly busy. Frances gets nostalgic for her old life. In fact, Stark's series of petty falls achieves a rhythm that's real hard to resist, charting a topography of routine and desire that is recognizable to all of us, emblazoned by her effortlessly titled Free Money (2004). My guess is that she'd make a great reality TV producer and could definitely turn a quick buck if she wanted.

The survey is accompanied by a handsome artist's book, Frances Stark: Collected Works (Walther Konig, 2007), whose cover reproduces a collage containing a drawing of an apple emblazoned with the text, "Agonizing yet blissful little orgies of soul probing" (the apple stalk is rendered photographically, with a chrysalis of a penumbral butterfly attached to it). The book is like an audio guide to the exhibition as a whole, which inexorably slides into the major fall of Stark's life, as she sees it. That fall--the worst of all for an American--is monetary. Stark has apparently fallen afoul of her student debt, the $85,000 her master's degree cost her (a repo man wised up to her teaching job and career). In the book, she racks up a narratological balance sheet for all the work in the show, listing her output (artworks, writing, and teaching) versus input (her education). Nothing much measures up. Oh, the agony. Yet she still manages to rub the art world's face in it--even truck drivers are better off in the end. Oh, the bliss. I hope that Stark who, like St. Francis, to quote the title of one of her 2002 works, "hasn't a brass farthing," is at least as successful in her poverty, and doesn't go the way of the U.S. sub-prime mortgage market. Fingers crossed, hers is an American story with a second act.