Michael Bishop, Fettered Desire
San Francisco Bay Guardian
Review by Lindsey Westbrook
September 9, 1998
Joseph Chowning Gallery, San Francisco, CA
August 8th to September 17th 1998
At an impasse between frustration and fulfillment, Michael Bishop's sculpture installations show how complicated desire can be. Every piece but one in his latest Joseph Chowning 
Gallery exhibition wears a patina---a thick metal wall, it seems, between human viewer and coated, imprisoned object, hiding the color of the fruit, obscuring the eyes of the head, and immobilizing the galloping horse. This metaphor of frustrated visibility and motion is even spelled out in I Think Madge Knew, with its well-gnawed apple core and stream-of-consciousness text: "I think Madge knew I don't know how she found out she just knew..." But in another sense, that metal layer preserves and protects just as much as it constrains. The plastic Bakelite head in The Marquis of Some Place, for instance, threatened with imminent attack from a suspended bronze baguette, needs its metallic "helmet" to keep its brains intact. And those bananas in Bananas with a Bound Full-Mouth and Timer will be forever shiny and perfect, never turning mushy and black. Bishop sums up all these contradictions in Clueless, Cyclical Not Linear Time, with its air compressor and eight cast-aluminum Scooby-Doo figurines. A hose attached to the compressor writhes among the dogs, taunting them in their frozen immobility, as they realize that they are eternally doomed to wear the same goofy expression, stuck to the same spot on the hard cement floor. Never willing to spell out a meaning but always happy to suggest another complication, Bishop makes mobile confront fixed, and frustrated confront free, with all his best understated joviality.