Simon Leung A Call to Glory.... or Afternoon Tea with Marcel Duchamp, 1996 Antechamber, 1996 Door, 530 West 22nd Street, 1996 Pilgrimage, 1996 Packing Fountain, 1996 Calling, 1993

simon leung at pat hearn by Elisabeth Kley Since his appearance in the 1993 Whitney Biennial, Simon Leung has become known for his political approach to issues of sexuality, and in his recent show at Pat Hearn, he presented a reinterpretation of Duchamp from a distinctly Queer perspective. The exhibition consisted of two video works, a large walk-through installation, two mixed-medium wall pieces and two works on paper. The show's title, "Call to Glory...or Afternoon Tea with Marcel Duchamp," sets up a pointed word game. "Glory" refers to the famous"glory holes" found in public bathroom stalls and used for "tea parties," or anonymous sex in the gay sexual demimonde. In this context, Duchamp's notorious peepholes and doors (particularly his Porte, 11 rue Larrey, in which the two colliding doors that separated the bedroom from the bathroom in his Paris apartment were replaced with a single one that could be simultaneously open and closed) are given a new emphasis. Leung's Antechamber is an alternative version of Duchamp's final and most explicit work, Etant donnes, now installed at the Philadelphia Museum. Peering through two peepholes drilled through an old wooden door, the viewer of Etant donnes is forced to become a voyeur. The peepholes reveal a brick wall pieced by a large jagged hole, though which can be seen the outspread legs and body of a waxy model of a naked woman, lying in a grassy landscape, holding up a lantern in her one visible hand. In Leung's installation, a curtain hangs from an empty door frame in a freestanding wall. The curtain is stenciled with a photographic close-up of the peepholes in the door to Etant donnes. Years of oil from viewers' faces pressed against the wood has formed the shape of a face around the holes. Staring back at us from the curtain, it offers no view, but the fabric can easily be moved aside to enter the installation. Inside, a stool is placed by a jagged hole in a black wall, a copy of the gap in the brick wall of Etant donnes. Through it we can see a tiny photo of Duchamp's diorama, glued to the gallery wall. Though the miniature image can be touched, it merely stands in for the real thing. Antechamber is completely open, not only to the gaze, but to the entire body, yet it denies us the pleasure of Duchamp's palpable creation. A second work, Calling, offers more seductive possibilities. Projected on the wall of a dark room, a large video image of a streaky surface pierced by a hole again suggests the wooden door of Etant donnes. Behind the hole, a huge mouth approaches and retreats, opening and closing. A vision of Duchamp's peephole as glory hole, the projection is an illusion, yet it is arguably closer to reality than Duchamp's nude woman. In the video installation Packing Fountain, a videotape shows Duchamp's urinal sculpture, Fountain, being carefully wrapped and packed into a wooden crate. The tape plays on a monitor diagonally facing a mirror. Once a common object used in a public bathroom, Duchamp's urinal is now a valued work of art. The mirror maintains our distance from the fetishized urinal as we simultaneously are faced by our own reflection. For Leung, as in related works by Robert Gober, the anonymity of Duchamp's urinal becomes, through its reference to the body, a metaphor for acts of anonymous sex. While Leung's previous works include messages pricked into paper by hand, in this exhibition he concentrates on mechanical reproduction. The work is intellectually poetic and passionate, but it appears cold to the touch and the eye, avoiding the human warmth embraced in Gober's sculptures. Still, Leung insists that hidden human sexual encounters, marginalized by society, are actually glorious experiences worthy of public celebration. Simon Leung, Pat Hearn Gallery, 530 W. 22nd St., NYC, NY 10011 June 15-July 26, 1996 Elisabeth Kley is a New York artist who writes on art.