Artforum International November 2001 - print edition - page 140

"Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences"

curated by Guy Cogeval and Dominique Paini

[This exhibition] originated at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and traveled to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. I've never seen a more synapse-popping art show than this, which imaginatively juxtaposed Hitchcock production stills, storyboards, props, film clips, movie posters, sound-track sequences and set re-creations with famous and not-so-famous instances of modern painting, sculpture, photography, and literature.

The show was arranged thematically with galleries organized by topics such as voyeurism, dreams, terrors, idols, anxiety, and fetishes. These topics inevitably overlapped one another, and thus the experience of proceeding through the exhibition was one of deja vu, or repetition with difference, for the viewer kept returning to the same place, figuratively speaking.

The final gallery of the exhibition was devoted to the birds. It included art by Braque, Ernst, and Magritte, as well as a large-scale 1997 photographic diptych, No, by Canadian artist Eldon Garnet. The left-hand panel offered an extreme close-up of a bird's razor-sharp beak, angled apart like a pair of scissors and slathered with blood. The second panel presented a nude female torso, its pubic hair shaved away to expose a slit of flesh that seemed at once a gash or wound caused by the adjacent beak but also, in its sharp parallel lines, a visual analog to the beak, thus rendering the implied meaning of the photograpg indeterminate: Is woman sexual victim or castrator, innocent recipient of male violence or cause of it? The question is perfectly Hitchcockian, posed in one form or another throughout his oeuvre-and throughout the exhibition.

This review has been shortened. To read the entire article please refer to artforum.com