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A member of the Royal Art Lodge, Drue Langois's "Palsy with Polio" is a sculpture from his own repertoire as opposed to the work he does in the aforementioned collaborative artists' group. Nonetheless, the work conjures up themes heavy on the agenda of the Royal Art LodgeÑthe slapstick of Groucho Marx, the balletic drama of Buster Keaton, and the desired faux iconography of a drugstore cowboy. The title plays with the sculptural treatment even further: both Palsy and Polio are debilitating muscle ailments, and the two characters in Langois' sculpture are made entirely of felt, a material which seemingly would not be sturdy enough to hold the figurative, upright, unparalyzed forms. By poking fun at our sense of what a sculpture is, in the most traditional figurative sense, the soft "Palsy with Polio" even creeps into the viewer's consciousness of the frozen form as sculpture, as well as the sculpture as commemorative portraiture. Then again, given the artist's and the collaborative's penchant for narrative of the absurd, maybe I'm reading too much into it. Devon Dikeou |