BEING A NUISANCE

(3 of 3)

The best piece in the show, both horribly vivid and weirdly distanced, is the room-size Carousel, 1988. Four motor-driven arms swing on a pivot. From each hangs what appears to be the flayed carcass of a deer or a wolf. (They are, in fact, hard plastic-foam molds.) These casually suspended mock bodies are covered in graphite paint, and they drag on the floor, producing an unremittingly irksome scraping noise and leaving a silvery circular trail behind them, round and round. You don't feel empathy with the dead animals--the molds are too blank to evoke much more than the merest ghost of pathos--but you shudder at the gratuitousness of their posthumous torment. It's like a brief glimpse of animal hell, going on forever.