Summer Love.

"The first feature by the conceptual Polish artist Piotr Uklanski, Summer Love is a mock spaghetti western that manages to be both parody and homage, albeit less western than spaghetti," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Or rather 'kielbasa,' to use the term that's been applied to the 50 or so amateur oat-operas made over the past two decades by Uklanski's countryman Josef Klyk."

"If it sounds like a bad joke - think 'Once Upon a Time in Poland,' 'The Good, the Bad and the Polish' or even 'A Fistful of Poles' - it isn't, quite," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times.

"Mr Uklanski is a serious artist," she continues, "or at least a semiserious artist, whose works have been exhibited around the world, including at the Museum of Modern Art. Among his most well-known is The Nazis, an installation (and later a book) of photographs of actors like Clint Eastwood, Marlon Brando, Yul Brynner and David Niven glammed up in National Socialist costume, a project that owes a strong debt to Susan Sontag's important 1974 essay 'Fascinating Fascism,' if without the corresponding intellectual rigor and moral unease.... There's a flicker of a political critique embedded in Mr Uklanski's playful intervention and mocking tone, something about the displacement of the American cowboy ideology, though the film finally weighs in as more cynical and detached than passionate and engaged."

At the Whitney through December 9.

Posted by dwhudson at October 18, 2007 9:19 AM