LA Weekly February 23-29, 1996
ART Picks Of The Week
Santa Monica Museum of Art
By Peter Frank

The installation work of Stuart Bender and Angelo Funicelli has long relied on metaphors even more elaborate than McCarren's, and certainly more hermetic. Bender and Funicelli do share with McCarren an appreciation for lucid, if not necessarily static, imagery and handsome calculated arrangement of elements in the space. You may have missed their latest room work, Induction, when you went to check out what all the hubbub over Kim Dingle's Norton Collection selection was about; Induction is in the back, not making quite enough noise to alert you to its presence. But the piece well exemplifies Bender and Funicelli's concerns and modus operandi. Beginning with a look at what they call "The popular tendency to assign roles to men (the Provider, the Savior, the Victim. The Bad Boy)," the duo encompass religious constructs and rituals, personal psychohistory (and our culture's obsession with it), neo-primitivism, tattooing, and a whole host of referents and digressions. All this is presented as hypnotizing multi-image surroundings reminiscent of (if darker-spirited and more narrative than) a '60's media bath, including single-monitor and multimonitor video components and projections on wall and floor.