Opinion: Carved Books And Wild Animals, A dreamed menagerie at Pritam and Eames

By Robert Long

Animals real and imaginary - antelopes, rabbits, swans, an ibis, an anteater, a "wild beast" - are the subjects of Judy Kensley McKie's furniture, on view at the Pritam and Eames Gallery in East Hampton. The gallery has shown Ms. McKie's work for a quarter of a century.

Craftsmen have always been fascinated by creatures, perhaps because recreating their appearance in wood is a way to freeze their spirit, to tame them, and it is also a way to acknowledge extra-human sensibility, for religious or sentimental purposes.

Ms. McKie's animals are stylized for aesthetic and functional reasons - rabbits' ears are flattened so that they can hold up a table top - but they retain a wildness that is sometimes disturbing.

The expression of a "Timid Dog" whose back has been planed to form a bench suggests that were you to actually sit on it you might be bitten - or, at the very least, the dog would bolt and leave you on the floor, limbs waving, like Gregor Samsa.

Ms. McKie's brilliance is to emphasize the ambiguity of our relationship to animals, to question sentimentality. Those elegant, stylized antelopes, carved in pearwood, that decorate the head and foot of Ms. McKie's bed - could they invade your dreams? Is it right to turn a snapping turtle into a stool?

A cast bronze bench with a reddish-brown patina has a little tail at one end and a drooping animal's face at the other. The creature's ears are back, like the peeled skin of a banana: It has heard your approach. Its four teeth are bared and two little nodes sprout from its forehead like the beginning of horns.

An ibis, legs flexed, wings spread, looks as if it would spring into the air (or lunge in your direction) if it weren't otherwise occupied, holding up the surface of a demilune table. An opossum, also in cast bronze, with a verdigris patina, has been transformed into a door handle, and foreshortened horses with flattened heads are andirons.

The pieces are distinctive and attractive, and as long as you remember that the base of your new sideboard is merely a cast bronze version of elongated bunnies with monkeylike tails and enormous ears, not the real thing, you will be very happy.

Ms. McKie's work has been exhibited and collected widely, and this, her seventh solo show at Pritam and Eames, is one of the highlights of the year. It can be seen through Tuesday.

"On the Books"

Guild Hall's Spiga Gallery is the site of a terrific small show of collaborations between Randall Rosenthal and a number of his artist and writer friends.

When Mr. Rosenthal, who has shown paintings in several South Fork galleries, was commissioned by Norman Jaffe some years ago to carve a book rest in the shape of a book for a lectern in a Seattle church that the architect had designed, Mr. Rosenthal found himself fascinated by the process, and eventually began work on a series of carved books.

Now, those books have been "illustrated" by a number of Mr. Rosenthal's acquaintances. The photographer Tim Lee has made his copy into a kind of cheesecake magazine, with four photos of "Miss East Hampton," and Dava Sobel, the author of "Longitude," has applied cartographic skills to her longitudinally themed tome.

Casimir Rutkowski's book bears an oil landscape on its carved pages, and Audrey Flack's volume is illustrated by pastel and chalk drawings. Jesse Rosenthal made the most literal (and most endearing) contribution, hand-lettering a poem called "Jew Food on Fifth Avenue" onto the pages of his wooden book.

I don't think that these were active collaborations - that is, it appears that Mr. Rosenthal essentially handed each of his artistic partners a blank slate, rather than working with them. So you don't sense any genre-crossing or brainstorming, no evidence of a "third mind" at work. Still, the results are refreshing and fun, and at least a degree out of the ordinary.

"On the Books," as the show is called, also has contributions from Dennis Lawrence, Faith-dorian Wright, Berenice D'Vorzon, Caren Rosenthal, Li-lan, and Dan Christensen, among others. It can be seen through Oct. 24.