Phyllis Green
at the El Camino College Art Gallery

Phyllis Green, Boob Tree (1975). Image courtesy of the artist.

If you’ve never been to the Art Gallery at El Camino College in Torrance—in that beachy swath of Los Angeles known as the South Bay—then Phyllis Green’s exhibition Dress Up: Constructing Other Selves, 2014-2021 won’t be the reason you do. Green’s exhibition, though partially installed on-site, has morphed into a 30-minute online video that is viewable only from the safety of your off-site screen. This is a perplexing level of mediation, especially for an artist whose longtime sculpture and performance practice is so invested in the tactility of objects: crocheted body parts; wearable faux tree trunks with leather straps; supple clay orbs; upholstery fringe. And while the video’s ongoing narration doesn’t leave much room for interpretation—potentially flattening the playful, subjective qualities of her sculptures—the inclusion of fabrication and performance documentation, paired with Green’s keen and sincere insights, has created an exciting hybrid form wherein Green renews her career-long project of constructing and projecting a multifarious identity.

Continuing her propensity to use her body simultaneously as scale and subject, Green’s exhibition-as-video proceeds with an image of her in thong Birkenstocks, smiling up at her massive mannequin-like sculpture, Fall 12: An Autobiography Considering Charles Ray’s “Fall 91” (2012). We learn the title of the work, as well as the work’s significance for the artist (a “flashpoint” in her career) through that pensive but decisive voiceover that haunts throughout—part artist statement, part lecture, part exposé. The sculpture is exemplary of how Green’s commitment to second-wave feminist materials and ideas has progressed into a more contemporary, less gender-focused (but still feminist!) play with form. An antidote to Ray’s Fall ’91 (1992), which combines dramatic scale with mass-market femininity to impose a gendered, psychological smallness (woman-as-blank), Green bases her oversized sculpture on a precise 3-D model of her face, presenting a larger-than-life, empowered self-portrait invested in the complexities of identity (woman-as-revelatory).

The rest of this lengthy piece of media is a similar first-person foray into what Green describes as works inspired by the early feminist idea of costume as a way of constructing the self. For example, Boob Tree (1976), a crocheted tree with a brown trunk in which pink fleshy breasts with bright-red nipples make up the tree’s lush foliage. In the film, the work is photographed in situ in Green’s verdant front yard. This work is a whimsical, fetishistic mind-bend; in this image, the boob tree is so many things—flourishing, soft, blanket-like, pretty, in-full-bloom, erect—but also so obviously unnatural, conspicuous, posing, passing, flaccid. Boob Tree’s idyllic backdrop ensures that nearly 50 years later, it still foregrounds the crushingly awkward and destructive double bind of acting natural when identity is so obviously a (crocheted, in this instance) construct.

The last artwork Green describes is from the IRL installation of her exhibition at the El Camino College Art Gallery—Lion/Lamb (2020). The work is a life-sized, convex, wooly sculpture that hangs from the ceiling and is both armature (a hollow body initially intended for the viewer to stand inside of) and armament (á la the Trojan horse)—soft-looking but potentially suffocating, stoic in its lifelessness, tempting in its tactility. All of this constructs a truly apt and humbling metaphor for our new normal—an itchy mix of rage and vulnerability not waiting beneath the surface, but on it, like so many constricting garments.

Sitting just above the terror of Covid is its goofiness—home-sewn masks from worn out T-shirts; dining alfresco while freezing your ass off; and in this case, taking an exhibition of serious works of cultural criticism from a prolific and talented artist and squeezing them into a piece of time-based (almost instructive) media. This pivot is an informative (and fun! What fun!) way to see A LOT of Green’s work without really seeing it. But more poignantly, it is another self-construction, the auteur, necessitated not only by the logistical hellscape of Covid, but the need to give meaning to a life lived in art. This is the new kind of feminist material—that is, to make one’s work accessible, understandable—persisting in one’s truth, craft, and calling, even as the world would tell us to stay home.

Phyllis Green: Dress Up runs from October 29, 2021–February 13, 2022 at the El Camino College Art Gallery (online).

Phyllis Green with her sculpture, Fall 12: An Autobiography Considering Charles Ray’s “Fall 91” (2012–13). Polyurethane foam, steel, fiberglass, and silk, 97 x 45 x 30 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.

Phyllis Green, Fall 12: An Autobiography Considering Charles Ray’s “Fall 91” (detail) (2012–13). Polyurethane foam, steel, fiberglass, and silk, 97 x 45 x 30 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.

Phyllis Green with her sculpture, Lion/Lamb (2020). Aquaresin and fiber, 70 x 107 x 36 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.

Phyllis Green, Five Sheaths (installation view) (2017). Wood and fabric, five garments, each 48 x 18 x 4. Image courtesy of the artist and Chimento Contemporary.

Georgia Lassner is a writer and critic in Los Angeles. She has been a contributor to X-TRA contemporary art quarterly since 2018 and was the author of UNPUBLISHED (2017–2019), a blog featuring deep-dive texts into the work of unsung artists.

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