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By now, you've probably seen Steven Klein's much-hyped Madonna spread (and "spread" is a good way to describe it) in W. The real show, however, is at Deitch Projects. Using the same seedy W vignettes that, taken together, portray the Material Matron as a yoga-addicted dominatrix pole-dancing her way into a masquerade ball, X-STaTIC Pro=CeSS is like a Freudian immersion into the spectator sport that is Madonna.
Klein and New York architecture firm LOT/EK have transformed the pitch-black gallery into a post-industrial, post-apocalyptic cavern of theaters hoisted on scaffolding and covered in duct insulation. As she chants in the background, one theater shows a video in which Madonna crawls around a stripped metal frame bed, sticking her head through the bars of the headboard like a poster child for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In another, she gyrates around a pole as wolves growl from either side. Elsewhere, a masked Madonna hunches over in a room with a burning wedding dress, contorts her body next to a pulsating kidney, and stares out in full baroque opera regalia.
"Madonna's always been more of a performance artist to me," Klein says. "So I created a landscape for her to respond to, using things she's explored in the past, like the wedding dress, the pole, fire, death, the bed, religion." They're all symbols, in other words, that she's used in her more illustrious past, reworked in sublime, stop-motion video loops that, like Madonna’s career, feed back into themselves. Madonna has maybe made us all wonder a little recently, what with all that "Mrs. Ritchie" stuff, the accent, and that "Oh!-ing" on Oxygen ads. But more than just an overpunctuated phrase, X-STaTIC Pro=CeSS brings back a little of the old Madonna who has been a little bit of everything to become some other creature.
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