Onscreen Angst, Straight From the '60s

With "Because of Him," their new exhibition at Cheim & Read, the collaborative duo McDermott & McGough have finally arrived in the 1960s. About a quarter-century ago, David McDermott (b. 1952) and Peter McGough (b. 1958) became known for living, dressing, and making artwork as if they were Victorian gentlemen. It was a strange effort, which nonetheless captured the torporific nostalgia high of fin-de-siècle America — the hangover from which we've still not recovered — and landed them in two Whitney Biennials in the early '90s. But the 19th-century thing eventually got old, and in their last show they camped it up in the 1950s. Now, their equally campy 1960s are restricted to the buttoned-up, tie-wearing milieu — the Pop art rather than the psychedelic scene.

This is a show of clever pairings and reflections. It is one's own image that first greets a visitor, fractured on the far wall of the gallery's project space. There, one enters the show's title piece, a spare yet ornate, room-size installation of mirrors and a box.

Set against the four walls, mostly at shallow, oblique angles, the mirrors — all rectangular but of varying sizes — establish something of a chaste boudoir or jewelbox, rather than fun-house, feel. On the floor in one corner stands a Campbell's Soup carton filled with two stacks of comic books, the trick here being that the box and books are all carved out of wood and painted to look "real."

Elegantly simple, the installation is rife with reference and commentary. The carton, of course, alludes to Andy Warhol's early-'60s Brillo boxes and Campbell's Soup can paintings, while the comic books conjure Roy Lichtenstein's comic-strip paintings of the same period. And the industrial look of the whole — the box sculpture along with the mirrors — reminds us that it was during the 1960s that artists first began outsourcing the labor of art to skilled workers. Not only Warhol, but Donald Judd and his Minimalist gang also began fetishizing a mechanized and manufactured look for art, which in turn mirrored the prefab culture spreading throughout the country.

This "cool," industrial, anonymous look has a counterpart in the style of the paintings occupying the gallery's other two rooms. One group of paintings pairs scenes from two movies, one black-and-white, one color, stacked vertically. The top portion of "YOU SAID YOUR LIPS WERE MINE ALONE TO KISS, 1966" (2008), for example, depicts, in color, a woman with short, dark hair awake and alone in bed, appearing worried. In the bottom, black-and-white portion, a man in the background sits on a sofa with his back to a woman in the foreground, who faces us. She has flowing blond hair and anxiously pulls at a ring on her finger: The pairing causes the two women to seem as though they are thinking of each other.

The style of this as well as the other paintings here can be described as industrial photo-realism — a type that has become tediously common today. But here, at least, it has a function: anonymous mirroring. Cool, style-neutral representation, allows us to focus on the interplay of those other representations, the pictures within the picture. It also reminds us that '60s art wasn't about painting as expression; it was about concepts, specific objects, film, screen prints masquerading as paintings, performance.

Individually, however, the paintings follow a formula, the upper part serving as a kind of thought bubble (as in a comic strip) for a woman in the lower. Thus, a woman (in color) sits on her luggage, pensively smoking in a Hollywood-gorgeous room, in "AFTER ALL MY PRAYERS ARE ANSWERED, 1966" (2008), while above her, in black-and-white, a man and woman — she clad only in a bra, her hair perfectly coiffed — lie in bed, about to kiss. In "I WANT YOU SO, 1966" (2008), the formula is made almost too explicit. The lower, color portion holds a tight close-up of a woman's face — brooding eyes, red lips, a hint of blond hair — and above a shirtless man and bra-wearing woman kiss, as they sit uncomfortably on the edge of a bed.

Instead of coupled images, the other group of paintings here uses images of old '60s-era television sets to produce frames within frames — the sets in color, as we would see them, the images of women onscreen in black-and-white. So "LATE NIGHT #3: LIZABETH SCOTT, 1967" (2007) shows the actress with a cigarette in her mouth, a male hand with a match about to light it, playing on channel five on a Motorola. We see the actress in "LATE NIGHT #4: ANN SAVAGE, 1967" (2007), once from behind and again reflected in a mirror as she applies makeup in the ovoid screen of a green-tinted General Electric.

These TV-frame pictures do not, to my eye, transcend the gimmick quite as successfully as the dual-image pieces. Then again, nothing here feels transcendent. "Because of Him" might be smart, snappy, neatly self-reflecting, and highly polished, but it seems inevitably to blame its shiny shallowness on the other guy.

Until April 26 (547 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-242-7727).