The Museum of American Art of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Fabric Workshop and Museum. Philadelphia

(Art in America, December 1997)

Christenberry began as a painter, but with the encouragement of Walker Evans (whose "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" was set in Christenberry's own Hale County) began pursuing photography seriously in the 1960's. His laconic studies of old Alabama churches, stores and back-country huts, many of them abandoned and in some stage of decay, announce his ongoing meditation on the past, its loss and recapture through remembrance--a classic Southern theme.

His meticulous reconstruction of some of these buildings, as small cardboard-and-wood models set on red earth, form a further act of memorialization. Oddly, they feel somehow less embodied than the photographed buildings--funerary portraits that confirm the ephemerality of their subjects.

This memorial theme is underscored with Christenberry's photographs of monuments from Civil War battlefields, and his more abstract series of constructions, the "Southern Monuments." These compact pieces, with their Euclidean deployment of cones, cannonball-like spheres, tiny ladders and small dried gourds upon cubic structures, have a greater felt and psychic weight than the faithful building models.

The "Dream Buildings," another series begun around the same time (1979-80) and also continuing into the 1990's, have a feeling all their own. Begun in response to a dream image, these tall, elongated structures, with square bases and steep pyramidal roofs, adorned with collaged advertising "signage" and sometimes spiked with protruding nails, feel distinctly African. It's as though his southern buildings had dreamed of their own roots in the old country, the unacknowledged, shadow old country.

For Christenberry, who is white, this imaginative re-Africanization has both irony and a certain feeling of necessity. It runs through his strangest and most powerful series, the accretion of several hundred objects, assemblages and drawings collectively called the Klan Room.

The first Klan figures, made for himself in the mid-1970's, were G.I. Joe dolls dressed in white satin Klan robes. Many of them are here, posing grandiosely in small, dramatically lit tableaus. Later figures undergo grim, sometimes grotesque transformations. Lost in their dehumanizing garments, these hooded lumps are bound, lashed to stakes or tree branches, or further obliterated with wax drippings, or stuck with pins.

With this voodoo-like magic, Christenberry has neatly disappeared the boundary between the hooded torturer and the hooded or blindfolded victim of torture (directly depicted in Nancy Spero's work, for instance)--both are equally dehumanized. Yet these objects also attract with their chill, Kabuki-like beauty, and in this attraction lies the artist's acknowledgment of communal complicity. Morally, these works are as deeply knotted as the bound figures themselves.

--Miriam Seidel