Two Roads / Ask the Dust Trilogy

Cindy Bernard, Two Roads, 1991, installation, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

If Ask the Dust deals obliquely with the difficult relationship between art and life, the new work does so more insistently. Here art is not envisioned as a crystallization of life – more full, more complete, and more lasting: rather life emerges as the (perfected) imitation of art.

Turn to the left, and encounter the specter of Grace Kelley, actress, speeding about the French Rivera with paste diamonds twirled about her delicate neck; turn to the right and the reality is even more picture perfect – Princess Grace of Monaco, presiding at charity balls with her own multi-million-dollar tiara on her head.

Yet what is the nature of this “perfection” if it has no power to forestall death? What is the nature of this fantasy once it has been played out for “real”? What the installation creates is an eerie set of resonances between image and reality–the images winking at each other over the viewer’s head, the images half remembered from an old movie, and the reality of the death of a fantasy. – Susan Kandel, 1992