New Art Examiner May-June 2002 Volume 29 Number 5
by Ben Davis

  In just a short period of time, this space has established itself as a prime venue in the Twin Cities for sophisticated, concept-based art. True to form, "Abjectify" fixed the terms of its critical address in advance with a moniker that made reference to the psychoanalytic idea of the "abject." This concept, which was inevitable when discussing the work on display here, has been important to the art of the last few decades. Associated with the Freudian unconscious and often used in connection with those aspects of (usually bodily) experience that have been disavowed by "normal" thought, the abject positions itself in opposition to the seemingly rational and objective. One famous example of an artist making use of the concept would be Mary Kelly’s incorporation of her son’s fecal matter into her Post-Partum Document, calling attention to an aspect of material experience normally unacceptable within the idealized concept of art.
In this particular show, the reference to the abject made for a lot of allusions to organic matter in all its oozing splendor. (The opening reception featured a carnival barker hawking bricks of meat.)...

Sandy Maliga’s video "Double Grind" showed a miserable-looking housewife doing chores, the repetition of scenes and disintegrative editing effects implying a Hades of madness and boredom...

What makes any show centered around the abject interesting is that the concept, as defined by French theorist Julia Kristeva, refers not merely to refuse or viscera, but more broadly to that which, because disavowed, cannot be confronted without threat to one’s sense of coherent identity. But rather than offering a wild embrace of the rejected, curator Suzy Greenberg’s "new abjectivism," with its post-Dada insistence on the ugly and tactile, edged curiously on nostalgic. For example, Maliga’s video installation echoed Martha Rosler’s 1975 Semiotics of the Kitchen, ....

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