With life, sometimes you just have to laugh, which Martha Wilson learned long ago. In the early 1970s, she dressed up for the camera and portrayed herself as several things she wasn’t — a glamour girl, a housewife, a guy, a goddess — and at least one thing that she was: a feminist, trying on for size every off-the-rack social role she could lay her hands on.
A few years later, she took the rock star route in the all-female, all-words-no-music, all-politics punk group called Disband. (Her stage name, during the Reagan presidency, was Alexander M. Plague Jr.) Finally, she became a downtown arts impresario, as founder and almost budgetless proprietor of Franklin Furnace, an alternative-to-the-alternative space she operated out of her home. Artists under, over and beyond the mainstream radar found a berth there; the list is luminous, long and still growing.
In her current solo show at P·P·O·W, Ms. Wilson is still dressing up for the camera. She impersonates artist-heroes like Ad Reinhardt and van Gogh, and in the triple homage “Mona/Marcel/Marge” poses as a mustached Mona Lisa with a Marge Simpson ’do. She continues to probe politics, literally embodying the color line in the two-toned “Martha Meets Michelle Halfway.”
She is in her late 60s, and everywhere draws attention to her age. In one portrait, she draws wrinkles on her wrinkles. In another, she arranges for gravity to give her a face-lift by having herself photographed while hanging upside down. In a third, she appears as an oddly buxom skeleton, wearing a T-shirt with the words “I’m Going to Die.” Playing mistress of ceremonies to her own existential vaudeville, she is funny-absurd and something more.