Yearly Archives: 2015

Just a short message from Venus

This morning Ben Davis published a piece on Artnet entitled “Why Are There Still So Few Successful Women Artists?” Thanks to Ben Davis for addressing this issue and for his constant focus on important political issues in the art world.

As I wrote to him this morning, so much to say and so little time to say it if I want to get a few paintings done before I have to go back to my day job as an underpaid adjunct (Davis mentions the role of practical bread and butter issues and economic inequities for women as in some sense replacing Linda Nochlin’s historical focus on women artists’ earlier lack of access to academic training.)

Davis begins with the important primary question: “What will it take to finally put an end to sexism in art?” He questions the value of strategies of “counting,”, most recently used by Maura Reilly in her ARTnews text “Taking the Measures of Sexism: Facts, Figures, and Fixes”, and he takes care to try to bracket what we mean by “success” for an artist today.

I’ve written so much about feminism–most recently this previous post spurred by conflicting messages coming from the art world, between the sudden interest in the work of older women artists and the insulting absurdity of the Sackler Center giving one of its First Feminist awards to Miss Piggy, and earlier this year, Amnesiac Return Amnesiac Return, published in Kara Rooney’s Critic’s Page “A Feminist Response: Gender Games and the Art Machine” in the September 2014 issue of the Brooklyn Rail. I am very grateful to Davis for linking to my piece which he titled “Amnesiac Returns,” but as I wrote to him this morning, the political point of the title and its humor is in the repetition without punctuation, no plural. At the end of that text I explained the title’s genesis and significance: “The repetition in my title reflects the fact that in 1992, for a special issue of the art journal Tema Celeste dedicated to “The Question of Gender in Art,” I wrote a short essay entitled “Amnesiac Return.” I thought of the same title for this piece before realizing that it sounded familiar—because, in fact, I had used it before.” If and when I write another piece and am tempted to title it Amnesiac Return, I may indeed have amnesia by that point, or will title it to the power of three.

My point is that one writes and one writes and one asks why the situation of women artists (and beyond that of women generally) is fundamentally resistant to change despite the paradox of some visible change, and one asks the question again and again. And yet even that discussion, and the vast and important area of scholarship and theorization applied to the work of women artists and to gender representation, does not ultimately penetrate the art market and nor even the upper strata of academia which may have moved on to newer concerns.

My point is I could go on and on.

So today in response to Ben’s piece, I just want to contrast his article to Peter Schjeldahl’s review in the New Yorker of Albert Oehlen’s paintings. The beginning of one paragraph in that review seems paradigmatic: “Not for nothing is Oehlen a mighty influence on younger artists, showing them the rewards in freedom that may follow upon a willing sacrifice of propriety. (Witness, apart from outright imitators, the devilish impetuosities of Josh Smith, Joe Bradley, Oscar Murillo, and others in a recent survey at the Museum of Modern Art, “The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World.”) Testosterone testosterone testosterone bad boys bad boys bad boys patrilineage patrilineage patrilineage (for that you have to read the paragraph before, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, bla bla–for some reason this reminds me of one of my favorite book reviews in the Times several years ago, about a book a woman wrote about her dog, a German Shepherd as I recall, who spent the day out and about in her neighborhood in Cambridge, Ma., about how she decided to follow him in his unleashed peregrinations. She observed that his main occupation in life was to go to nearly impossible physical lengths to piss as high up as possible on telephone poles and trees so, she deduced, other dogs would know he was a really big dog.

When I read about the auction value of women artists, when I read Kenny Schacter’s devastating reports on the art market, the most recent being “Kenny Schacter on Why Art Basel left him Mentally and Physically Damaged,” when people suddenly “discover” some woman artist that women artists have known about for decades, and when so many young women still are drawn to using their naked bodies in their work because as the Guerrilla Girls ask, “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?” I see how little has changed in some respects.

Of course, and it is a kind of a triumph of feminism and feminist art there are tons of women artists active now around the world, and they are successful to a much greater extent than the moment before I entered the art world at the beginning of the feminist art movement, but the world I live in, where Louise Bourgeois was a great artist the minute I learned about her work from Lucy Lippard’s writings in From the Center and from seeing a drawing show at Max Hutchinson Gallery, when she was not yet world famous and a fetish, where the work of countless women artists including some of the artists who have recently been the subject of a wave of articles about older women artists (does 100 count as old enough I wonder?) was a central part of my image world, I mean these works are fundamental building blocks of how I see the world, not to mention of course what art is about for me (deep engagement with form, materiality, art history, politics, politics of representation and abstraction, discursivity–art, you know, not product), that work, that image world of women artists is of absolutely no interest to the men who make, promote and buy the work of the guys drooled over in Schjeldhal’s review. No interest? No, I mean it is invisible. It does not exist except for these little windows of fashion for old ladies who won’t be around much longer to inconveniently have something to say.

When I posted these thoughts on Facebook earlier today, artist Lauri Lynnxe Murphy wrote in a comment: “My first day of grad school at The Ohio State University I walked into the sculpture building and saw a list pinned to the wall for the undergrads of “sculptors they should know.” All of them male, and most of them over 50. I started writing names on it and the other female grads joined in – by the end of the term the entire page was covered with women sculptors. This was in 2010, btw. 2010.”

And meanwhile, and I think this is important to note, I’m putting up the postcard wall that marks a space as my studio, and all the works are by male artists, mostly pre-1600, because I live in a world in which art history was first presented to me as male, the women artists’ works that are so important to me reside in my slide/image collection and in my mind. My point is that any woman interested in art has absorbed and paid attention to work by male artists, you would be an ignoramus if you didn’t and you’d be cutting yourself off from a major part of the history of civilization, which I claim as my heritage no matter who did it, but the connection doesn’t flow the other way

Just a short message from Venus which will certainly never get over to Mars, and now I am going to try to get into the studio.

One of my favorite postcards for my studio wall

Miss Piggy and Madame de Beauvoir–A New Fable of La Fontaine: Cochon et Castor

There is a certain kind of news story that gets introduced by friends on Facebook as “Not The Onion.” This is a discussion prompted by one such headline.

Let me try to contextualize the recent announcement that the Sackler Center will give its 2015 Sackler Center First Award to Miss Piggy. The ceremony is June 3rd.

“Moi!” exclaimed Miss Piggy!

“Mais quelle cochonnerie!” exclaimed Madame de Beauvoir

It could be a new Fable de La Fontaine: since Simone de Beauvoir’s nickname was Castor, the beaver, because of her lifelong habit of intense scholarly studiousness and hard work (“it was while studying for the agrégation that she met École Normale students Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Nizan, and René Maheu (who gave her the lasting nickname “Castor”, or beaver. The jury for the agrégation narrowly awarded Sartre first place instead of de Beauvoir, who placed second and, at age 21, was the youngest person ever to pass the exam”), perhaps Cochon et Castor would be a good title for the fable. I won’t attempt verse:

Cochon, Miss Piggy, having been a television and movie puppet character, whose main characteristic is that she is self-absorbed and boy crazy and is always trying to get Kermit (a male frog) to marry her, one day encountered Castor, the eager brilliant philosophical and feminist beaver Simone de Beauvoir (who, it must be said, was crazy about Jean Paul Sartre who looked a bit like a frog). “I’m getting the 2015 First Feminist Award from the Sackler Center at the Brooklyn Museum on June 3. Gloria Steinem is presenting it to Moi, Miss Piggy!” “Vous vous foutez de moi,” exclaimed Castor.

Fables always have a moral. What is the moral of this fable? That second wave feminists have no sense of humor? This is a long-standing convenient calumny against women who actually care about human rights, based on the fear that what women’s humor might include is mockery of men. FYI: Just in the last month, these mordant videos were circulating on social media (+some research of my own going a bit further back in time): Tina Fey, Amy Schumer (with Tina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Rosanna Arquette), Amy Schumer, and Lily Tomlin, for good measure (a contemporary of Miss Piggy).

Tina Fey top ten Letterman

What was the Sackler Center’s awards selection committee thinking in making this selection? What would a feminist fly on the wall have heard as they came up with this idea?

Nothing against Miss Piggy, though in terms of her award from the point of view of her validity as a feminist icon, taking this perfectly seriously, take note that she has most often been performed by Muppet puppeteer Frank Oz as well as a few other male puppeteers over the years (and one woman on TV). There were two women significantly involved in her creation and her public image, principally Muppet designer Bonnie Erickson who created the character and based her name on her mother’s love of singer Peggy Lee and Calista Hendrickson was Miss Piggy’s costume designer and stylist. Neither woman is mentioned on Miss Piggy’s Wikipedia page, and her Official Muppet website bio is an in-character fictional performance. The fact remains that her character may have been physically shaped and originally imagined by a woman, but she is scripted and voiced by a man’s imaginary, not a woman’s.

Since calling a woman a pig is a familiar way of saying she’s a slut, can one interpret Miss Piggy’s name and persona as a feminist recuperation of a sexist slur in order to make it a mark of pride, the way the word “cunt” was revalued by early feminist pioneers like Judy Chicago and her students in the Fresno Feminist Art Program in 1970?

Miss Piggy is big, brassy, and loud, a relentless self-promoter. She is not embarrassed by her desire and she’s not shy about beating Kermit or anyone else upside their head if they get in her way. It’s a kind of do-me feminism, pig puppet style. So it could be argued that she displays feminist or certainly feminist-inspired traits. But she is also a kind of porcine Lucy Ricardo, always claiming talent she doesn’t have, with Kermit as a more patient and laid-back version of Ricky Ricardo. Given the historical situation of her birth in the mid-1970s, she is all at once a throwback to 1950s genteel oppression via The Feminine Mystique, an emanation of the Women’s Liberation movement of the 1970s, a sign for the 1980s backlash against feminism with its curiously confusing characteristics of ambition and entitlement, and since she performs femininity rather like a drag queen, in terms of the way she often dresses, she is an interesting model for gender play today. She is also involved in a trans-species romance, I will say no more!

Previous winners of this award have included Marin Alsop (conductor and violinist, director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra), Connie Chung (journalist and glass ceiling breaking TV anchor), Johnnetta B. Cole (African American anthropologist, educator, college president, and director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art), Wilhelmina Cole Holladay (founder of the National Museum of Women in the Arts), Sandy Lerner, Lucy R. Lippard, Chief Wilma Mankiller (posthumous, first female chief of the Cherokee Nation), Toni Morrison, Linda Nochlin, Jessye Norman, Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (Ret.), Judith Rodin (President of the Rockefeller Foundation), Muriel Siebert (financier), Susan Stroman, and Faye Wattleton (the initial awardees in 2012), Julie Taymor (2013), Anita Hill (2014)–all women whose names can be accompanied by the epithet “ground-breaking” and who mostly do not need a Wikipedia bio link, and, again, Miss Piggy, in 2015, who also doesn’t need a Wikipedia bio, though “ground breaking” is not so clear: “The 2015 Sackler Center First Awards honors performer, actor, writer, and icon Miss Piggy, for more than forty years of blazing feminist trails with determination and humor, and for her groundbreaking role inspiring generations the world over.” “The evening features Miss Piggy in conversation with Gloria Steinem.”

Here a thought occurs to me, a historical conjecture, namely how willing Eleanor Roosevelt was to embrace and use the platforms of whatever she could from and within popular culture of her day if it could help a cause she deeply believed in or where she thought her name would add weight to a cause or benefit the people.

Have I just talked myself or anyone else into thinking that Miss Piggy is a sensible choice for the Sackler Center’s First Award or do I still feel that this choice is emblematic of a certain devaluation of feminism or at the very least of a certain desperation in the face of popular culture? It definitely is desirable or, these days, imperative even to get mass media attention and it’s important to be fun and appealing, or, in the parlance of the day, to be “relateable.”. Like many things that happen, one is supposed to take it in good humor and take a positive point of view on everything. It is sometimes hard to remember what something really is or means, like feminism.

But why this choice now? The Muppets, now a Disney product, are returning to television in the fall, on the Disney Network, so the choice suggests some corporate synergy on both sides here: Miss Piggy gets a distinguished award for feminist pioneers and I hope the Sackler gets a generous donation. Mystery solved?

The background for my receiving the notice of the Miss Piggy Award are the numerous stories and publications pertaining to women in the arts and to feminism which have circulated in the media in hard print and online the past few weeks. On the statistical front, Maura Reilly’s “Taking the Measure of Sexism: Facts, Figures, and Fixes”, a comprehensive and dispiriting update of statistics on the status of women artists in the artworld, previously researched and exposed in recent years by The Guerrilla Girls, the Brainstormers, and Micol Hebron’s project Gallery Tally, is being widely shared on social media, along with all the other statements by major women artists and art historians featured in the June 2015 issue of ARTnews.

Meanwhile the May 15 Sunday New York Times published two, apparently uncoordinated, articles pertaining to women, particularly older women, whose simultaneity nevertheless held a chilling message for women. In T, the Times‘ glossy Fashion and Design magazine, one found author Phoebe Hoban‘s thoughtful article “Works in Progress,” about “A very small sampling of the female artists now in their 70s, 80s and 90s we should have known about decades ago.” These included Agnes Denes, Carmen Herrera, Joan Semmel, Lorraine O’Grady, Rosalyn Drexler, Dorothea Rockburne, Etel Adnan, Michelle Stuart, Faith Ringgold, Judith Bernstein, and Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian [nota bene, the long struggle to get some long deserved success was exemplified by the final ironic injustice that only 4 of the 11 women profiled in the article made it into the print version + 2 who had their pictures reproduced in the Editor’s note for the whole issue, the rest were online only, though I suppose these days that counts for more]. The article pointed to a phenomenon that has long been a source of internal gallows humor among women artists, that if you don’t make it big by age 30, (and if you’re not, as one friend of mine says, the one crazy woman the artworld allows in every decade), you have one more chance, maybe, if you live to be 80, or now 90 or even 100 to get some attention [because 90 is the new 70]. In fact the Times piece was followed by so many articles about older artists, female and also male, that it’s been hard to keep up with them, including in today’s Times, “An Artist’s Thoughts of Retirement, Quieted by the Constant Churn of Creativity,” about the painter Audrey Flack, who just celebrated her 84th birthday this weekend, and among several other examples, including in W Linda Yablonsky’s “Young at Art,” and on the Huffington Post, “15 Badass Art World Heroines Over Seventy Years Old”.These articles left out several prominent older women with recent or current notable exhibitions, including Joan Snyder, Joyce Kozloff, and Ida Applebroog, to name but a few. If any such artists feel left out of this “moment,” dubious a pleasure though it may be to be recognized as a neglected senior citizen but, nevertheless, at least that, maybe they should take heart that they are just too young to be included!

One has to wonder what is driving this sudden interest in older women artists: might it be the case that, aside from the general rules of market and fashion that create a herd-mentality trend once it starts, older artists are seen to and perhaps do indeed carry markers of authenticity, depth, and experience that are felt to be lacking in contemporary post-internet culture despite the more conventional point of view that only millennials and post-millennials can understand the contemporary moment. Is the current interest in old artists a fad or a genuine tropism of culture, a revenge of artists against “creatives”?

As one of the women included in one of the articles recently said to a friend, “too little, too late.” Artist Chana Horwitz worked in obscurity for decades, finally beginning to achieve some success in her last years. She received a Guggenheim award in 2013 shortly (like days) before her death at age 81. A retrospective exhibition of her work opened in Berlin this winter. And on artnet yesterday: “Carmen Herrera, Who Sold Her First Painting Aged 89, Turns 100 Years Old.” Herrera is being given an exhibition at the Whitney Museum in Fall 2016, when the artist will be 101 or even 102. Frank Stella’s major career retrospective will open at the Whitney in October 2015. Patience is indeed a feminine virtue.

To enjoy that late attention you don’t just have to have lived that long, but you have to have been able to keep your body, your mind, and the work you have done in your long lifetime in good enough shape to be there if and when the bottle finally stops spinning in front of you.

But it well may be that even if you live so long, when the late success comes, you may no longer be able to use it to leverage the production of more work–Louise Bourgeois is a rare example of a woman artist who was able to still have enough time left to really use her relatively late success (with a revival of interest gathering momentum in her 70s) for a twenty-five-year run of creativity at the grander scale that her late financial success afforded her, but apart from all other circumstances the fact is she happened to have had the good fortune to live to a great old age in a home she owned, filled with her work.

A more haunting note is struck in Lynn Hershman Leeson’s 2010 film !Woman Art Revolution when Nancy Spero, widowed and having suffered crippling chronic illness since mid-life and near fatal health crises in her later years, says: “All these hurdles to come up against, to try to jump up against. Now I’ve had a really long career. I can’t believe it but this last year in my career was the best I’ve ever had. Now just imagine if I hadn’t lived to see this, at the age of 81 and it’s like a torrent of wonderful things that happened last year, the recognition I’ve had, what that means in terms of acknowledgement.” She says it totally sincerely but given her character and experience also with full knowledge of the irony and raging unfairness of such a narrative. (link to Spero’s footage here, statement quoted here begins at about 5 minutes in). The interview was filmed in February 2008, Spero died in October 2009.

As an apparently unconscious dog whistle of how daunting it is to meet these conditions, the same day as the T feature on older women artists, the Sunday Times Magazine‘s cover article was “The Last Day of Her Life,” about gender studies pioneer Sandra Bem‘s decision to plan her own suicide, upon receiving a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. Even to accomplish that heroically depressing task, like the women artists who have had to keep things together until their ’80s and ’90s, she had to be able to do it when she was still able to do it herself so that no one else would be held legally responsible for her death, while requiring the financial wherewithal and the loving support of her family to accomplish her goal.

Keep in mind that all studies point to the exceptional economic fragility of older women, according to numerous studies including this from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research: “Around the world, women tend to be in poverty at greater rates than men. The United Nations reported in 1997 that 70 percent of 1.3 billion people in poverty worldwide are women, while American Community Survey data from 2013 tells us that 55.6 percent of the 45.3 million people living in poverty in the United States are women and girls. Women’s higher likelihood of living in poverty exists within every major racial and ethnic group within the U.S.”

But, hey, girls, you just have to “lean in.” That is the message propounded by most of the 62 women features on artnet in their “62 Women Share their secrets to artworld success”–part 1 and part 2. As one of my friends pointed out, secret #1 seems to be, don’t be an artist, since all the women are dealers, museum directors and power brokers of one kind or another.

The secret of success for women artists is evidently, live a really long life and don’t get Alzheimer’s. Miss Piggy is very fortunate that she is not prey to the entropy of the flesh, since as Tina Fey would put it, she is not a “human woman,” she is a puppet who can be replicated when necessary. By the way, today a Google search for images of pigs yields this headline and video, “Mini pot-bellied pigs love on Alzheimer’s patients”, about the use of therapy pigs for Alzheimer’s patients.

Meanwhile, as I pointed out in a post on Facebook last week,

Everyone is sharing the online material from the June issue of ARTnews devoted to women artists and feminism as well as many other links relating to struggles for women in the arts and to successful women in the arts — I have a browser window open to “62 Women Share Their Secrets to Art World Success: Part Two” on artnet. But here is one bottom line for me: complete nonentities and creeps like George Pataki — George Pataki for Christ sake, the absolute definition of nonentity–and Chris Christie get up in the morning, decide they’re going to run for President and people are going to throw *millions* of dollars in their direction even though everyone involved knows they don’t have a chance in hell of even being serious contenders much less winning. That’s literally what I think of every morning as I struggle to figure out how I will negotiate the challenges of every day: “and Chris Christie is running for President and getting money for it”

There is a pig link here and it isn’t just that Christie actually looks like a pig–sorry to malign pigs who can be very cute and who are genetically quite close to humans—but earlier this political season Governor Christie “vetoed a politically charged bill that would have banned the use of certain pig cages in his state, a move many observers see as aimed at appeasing Iowa voters ahead of a potential 2016 presidential run.” I’d like to think that Miss Piggy would take umbrage and would understand my frustration at the confidence Christie has in himself which is based on so little, compared to the doubts and struggles that so many talented women endure despite so much. It would be great if Miss Piggy could add a little bit of political relevance to the new Muppet show with a skit about Christie’s pig policy. Bring some politics in there to live up to your Sackler First Award.

So, to recap: Cochon et Castor? Feminists have no sense of humor? Corporate synergy? Wait until you are 90 years old? Fine. For next year’s Sackler Center First Award let me take the liberty of nominating some worthy funny feminists: give the award to Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Amy Schumer, and give it up for Kristen Schaal!

A Necessary Man: Leon Golub / Riot @ Hauser & Wirth

You walk into the room
With your pencil in your hand
You see somebody naked
And you say, “Who is that man?”

The thrill of opening the door of a gallery and immediately seeing a masterpiece. Just hanging there. No fuss. The thrill begins at the threshold, you are not fully into the room but the painting already fills your field of vision and the disruption between the elegant quiet street you are stepping in from to the drama depicted in the painting, performed by the painting, happens in a flash.

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In the room, the painting representing two men, naked, one living, perhaps victorious, the other mortally wounded, his guts spilling into a dried caked pool of cadmium red deep or caput mortem paint.

Victor and vanquished are both flayed to the bone by the complex violent painting technique of the artist, abstract strokes construct the figures and atomize their surface at the same time. The faces are in a rictus of pain and emotion, they show their teeth.

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The teeth provoke a violent interruption in the viewing, an angry thought: Fuck you if you don’t get it or think it’s overly emotive.

Why does that defensive/combative thought occur? Because Leon Golub was a widely known and respected artist and yet often found himself in a contested situation, his incredibly impressive vitae belied by anecdotal knowledge of disrespectful treatment of him and his work to the end of his life and by review of some important American museum permanent collections and exhibition records. Paranoid imagination? Well, let’s take as a current case in point, “Raw War,” the chapter of the Whitney Museum’s current inaugural exhibition, America is Hard to See, of work dedicated to the Anti-War movement in the United States. Where is Leon Golub? The museum’s collection does include one Vietnam era war-related drawing by Golub. And where is Nancy Spero in the same installation? It’s hard to see how you can not include them in that specific context. They were pivotal figures in the anti-war movement within the art community in New York. So why?

There is strong emotion in Napalm 1, from 1969.It is an overdetermined scene. One could call this work expressionistic though Golub relied on appropriative methods: this painting among others from this time period is influenced by ancient Greek sculpture, as well as based on Golub’s extensive archival files of war imagery from which he worked–a fond memory of Leon sitting on a little stool in his studio cheerfully cutting clippings from all kinds of magazines sources including magazines for mercenary soldiers like Soldier of Fortune–a current code word for a certain kind of academia-supported art is Research, much maligned because of its occasionally proscriptive aesthetic ideology, but what Leon was doing was research also, research is not reserved to any one type of artist or mode of artmaking.

(note for my subscribers that receive this post in an email, you will not be able to see this video in your email program, you must watch on YouTube or on my blog online).

The painterly style also emerges from expressionist painting movements of the time, including CoBrA Group and Art Informel, important movements in art in Europe near the time Golub lived in Paris, and abstract expressionism lurks in the strokes and the scrapes too. Golub is a painter. He is a political painter, consciously so. He strives for the heroic, via the anti-heroic, but irony is not his calling card and materiality, flayed scumbled paint on unstretched raw linen, is the embodied expression of his moral vision of the world. His sources are often photographic, but the body of marble aged by millennia, of paint applied expressionistically in action painting, are the means of communication. He is our Delacroix, our Gericault, our Courbet, not our Duchamp, our Warhol, or Koons, nor even our Haacke, but we have preferred to honor the artists who it is felt by some as having fulfilled the narrative of institutional critique, commodity culture, new imaging technologies. Despite everything that has happened since abstract expressionism, we still seem to be in a Greenbergian revolt against the political in painting, especially if it takes place within the language of abstract expressionism, of old fashioned painting. This gets close perhaps to the source of the curious case of Leon Golub, famous and honored yet not honored as he should be in his native land. End of diatribe.

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Upstairs two men fight to the death in Le Combat VII (1963). They are barely delineated. The painting is a delicate haze of shattered pink flesh. Pink is the color of femininity and delicacy and of shattered flesh. Golub is the IED, the improvised explosive device. The painting’s edge is peeling from the device meant to hold it to the wall: it is a contingency in the exposition of a contingent art work. Golub’s canvases are tough, resilient, but also unprotected by standard methods of support for painting. The peeling corner may provide a bit more information than the gallery would wish, but its revelation of the work’s contingency means something, it provides an intimacy with the artist and the work even if he isn’t there to fix it himself.

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In the next room, a larger than life-size figure crawls along the wall. This is a figure with barely any ground to speak of except the gallery wall and our space, the one we the viewers occupy. A Fallen Warrior (1968), he is on his knees, injured, barely alive but, slightly larger than we are, he is also monumental.

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Upstairs in a room suffused with daylight are some of Golub’s small works on paper, many of these works from near the end of his life. They are almost undefined in some cases, delicate but also defiant, infused with gallows humor.

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They are also youthful and gleefully sexual,

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For a while the title of this blog post shifted from A Necessary Man to a fragment of Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages,” “Ah, but I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now,” because really, how would you know the age of the artist from this work. I reverted to “A Necessary Man” because in the years since he died Golub’s absence is actively missed by anyone who knew his work and his political activism.

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On the way out, Napalm 1 is seen again, near the plate glass front window of the gallery. Interesting that Hauser & Wirth chose to place Golub’s sometimes large rough skinned works into its extremely refined Upper East side townhouse sized room, a gallery large through accretion of rooms and floors but not incomprehensibly humongous like their downtown space. This in the scale that early large scale abstract expressionist era paintings were intended to function in, where a large though not enormous artwork could dominate the space and fill the viewer’s field of vision. The work is not forced to inflate itself to compete with the space while crushing the viewers humanity in the process.

These combatants ask us, What is victory in a war? One is dead or mortally injured but both are naked, both have the flayed flesh characteristic of Golub’s work.

I wanted to take a picture of this work seen from the street, to imagine the impact on passersby walking their miniature poodles or going to lunch, but reflection renders the painting invisible. They would only see themselves. One has to open the door and walk over the threshold into the room to have the experience.

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Leon Golub: Riot at Hauser & Wirth, 32 East 69th Street, New York NY 10021
Tuesday – Saturday, 10 am – 6 pm , through June 20, 2015

Looking for Art to Love, in another city

The essence of love is that you never know from where Cupid’s arrow will fly.

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I went to Berlin for the first time last month, in part because I needed to find new old art to love, old great art that would be new to me. At the Gemaldegalerie I found many paintings to love, including several that I had loved in reproduction all my life, but the piercing arrows were cast by two paintings I either had never been aware of or had not fixed upon before: Lucas Cranach The Elder‘s The Fountain of Youth from 1546 and Pieter Bruegel the Elder‘s Netherlandish Proverbs from 1559. It is these two paintings that I want to spend some time with here, on the fifth anniversary of A Year of Positive Thinking.

My comments are based on my own observations and thoughts rather than upon research because no amount of historical background or exegesis can help in understanding the paintings at the level of their presence, as I was able to apprehend them in the moment with whatever knowledge of anything which I brought to my encounter with them. My writing can only mimic the fragmentary efforts of an ant crawling over a large area whose totality can only be understood in a partial manner, in fact those of an ant crawling over a formicarium teeming with ants, because each painting is filled with many small human figures and foils any viewer’s desire to take something in totally in one glance, our patience for detail bracketed as it is by the totalizing aesthetics of modernism and the shattered attention span of an Internet addict.

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I came upon Cranach’s The Fountain of Youth as one might come upon such a fountain, in a strange grove, “per una selva oscura.” It is a difficult painting to take in though it draws one to it. A large painting populated by many small figures, the museum has placed it between two monumental Cranach paintings of Venus and Cupid: in one, Cupid, caught stealing honey, is attacked by bees which seems to hamper his vision of the beautiful figure of Venus towering above him. These two large and bewitching nude figures are the honey pot that lure us in to the core of the installation, the curious horizontal painting for which they are the caryatids. As one draws closer, as close as the museum allows, which is never close enough for me, how strange is the representation, the degree of realism versus the traces of the Gothic: this is not a painterly painting and the figures are at first like charming figurines, then one begins to notice the verissimilitude, the proportional and extremely detailed representation of the aged body, sagging breasts, thinning hair, toothlessness, lines, exhaustion….like an ant I am crawling over the details, I don’t yet see the forest or the clearing for the trees. I don’t yet even see the trees fully, that is, the individual figures. That takes more time.

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Individual figures and vignettes begin to draw you in:

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You dive into the fountain of youth.

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Gradually you realize the painting is a narrative, represented by a horizontal progression from left to right. No, that’s not correct. I should say I gradually realize, because I have approached this painting in a kind of a daze, it has cast an immediate spell. Even reading the title hasn’t created the bridge between what I am seeing bit by bit and what the title says it is about. I must read the painting, not the title.

People arrive to a clearing in a rocky landscape far above and beyond the walls of a city. They come by cart and horse through a passage of boulders. They are carried on people’s backs and pushed in wheelbarrows. In the center of the painting is a pool filled with water springing from the fountain, a tall column topped by a small statue of Venus and Cupid. In the pool are women, only women: on the left of the pool they are old, the water and the figures are tinged with grey, on the right the water is mauve, the bodies pink and pneumatic (by 16th century standards). The women are young and frolic in the water, one swims, others wash their now flowing golden locks. Whereas on the left, the women have or are allowed no shame, as their aged failing naked flesh is examined by doctors, on the right while some girls preen without care and one poses and looks directly at us the viewer, another covers her pudenda in a classic gesture. At the right edge of the pool they are greeted by gentlemen and led to a red tent from which they emerge stage right beautifully dressed. The story ends in vignettes of celebration: a couple has a tryst behind a bush at the bottom right of the painting, and the narrative ends in a picnic and dance that takes place in the background right, above the main diegetic strip.

This is a philosophical journey through life in reverse, it is a dream: as in a sci-fi movie, the newly young do not look back, they do not remember the drama of their old age, just as in life when the movie is run in the right chronological direction, youth cannot really see old age as anything that will affect it, it believes itself to be immune to that depredation of time.

The painting is unified by a strip of earth that runs across the bottom of the painting, this area of the painting is perhaps darkened by time, its rich green and brown darkness with beautifully painted blades of grass, sets off the light of the principal scene, like the bank of lights in a proscenium theater as seen from the audience. On the left a tree stump with a few leaves grows out of the band of earth, on the right there is a vibrant full leaved bush where the couple meets. Nature too gets younger.

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This is a cinematic situation with the pool as a large geometric anchor. But the pool is slightly askew, or at least it appears to tilt downwards towards the right, a confusing error in the composition of the painting, a slight hitch in the newly acquired science of perspectival representation creating a constant disturbance in one’s ability to see the whole painting clearly, a kind of a punctum of instability within the straightforward left to right reading.

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For me one figure stands out, because she is utterly specific and completely universal. We see her in every picture of a refuge camp around the world since the invention of photography. She is alone with her thoughts and her sorrows. She is most certainly real. Perhaps the whole painting is her dream of her youth.

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I must leave this painting behind. I can’t take it back to New York.

But now, in another room of the museum another even more troublingly complex painting aims its arrow at me as I enter its chamber, Brueghel’s Netherlandish Proverbs. Again, as with the Cranach, it is hard to figure out what is the best distance or closeness with which to examine it, given the limitation imposed by the museum. Here is an overall composition even though, much as with the Cranach, most of the principal action takes place in the foreground, accessible through scale and proximity and the vagaries of lighting the work. I doubt if there is any perspective that would enable the total complete seeing of this painting. In this it is very much like one of my other favorite paintings, Ensor’s Christ Entry Into Brussels in 1889, which is filled with thousands of tiny figures, one of whom is Christ, but the viewer facing this huge painting mostly focuses on the life size sculpturally painted masked figures in the foreground. Ensor and Brueghel are intimately connected in their world view: fools abound, and the viewer also being a fool sees best what happens right in front of her.

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The first figure that catches my eye does so because it is in the foreground, near the center, and also perhaps because it seems to have crawled out of paintings by another artist, Hieronymous Bosch. I come towards the painting to investigate further.

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The picture above is taken off the internet. Everything is in focus and evenly lit. But this is not true of the situation for a visitor to the Gemaldegalerie, where reflection from the natural light filtering from the ceiling cut off some portion of clarity, re-enforcing the dominance of the figures in the foreground and middle ground..

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Three figures compel my attention. They are also in the front row, where I can see them well. Each wears a white smock, which makes them stand out in the crowd. They are, from left to right:

“He runs his head into a stone wall (to pursue the impossible recklessly and impetuously),” “To bang one’s head against a brick wall,” “To try to achieve the impossible”

“To fill the well after the calf has already drowned,” “To take action only after a disaster (Compare: “Shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted”)”

“He can barely reach from loaf to the other (he cannot live within his budget)”

I am particularly drawn to the figure on the left and the right, that is to say the two figures whose faces we cannot see. They are more abstract and it is easier to become them than the figure in the center whose face I see, it is so particular.

Really one figure compels my attention, the figure at the bottom right, his attempt to reach between loaves of bread a kind of crucifixion.

Folly abounds everywhere all the way to the horizon. At first glance it seems as if the painting envisages a happy ending, and in a way it does, for the sun also represents a proverb, “Everything, however finely spun, finally comes to the sun,” also translated as, “Nothing can be hidden forever.” But nothing is hidden, the painter sees everything, under tables, behind doors, in the attic, in the toilet, under water, in the far distance.

I am interested in how these two paintings are composed since they are populated with so many small figures.

Cranach’s composition is orderly and processional, and the fountain in the center anchors the painting in such a way that it takes another moment of attention to understand the transformation that splits the central form of the pool into two parts, the before and after of the transformation from age to youth. But soon you can follow the procession step by step. It’s a relatively easy tracking shot.

The Brueghel is a complex orchestration of chaos.The order and rationalism that one point perspective in painting represents is precisely the system of civilization which is being transgressed in very nook and cranny of city and country by human beings. Curiously, in another hall of the Gemaldegalerie, in the Italian Renaissance wing, that perspectival paradise is depicted in the Architectural Veduta (c.1490-1500), attributed to the artist and architect Francesco di Giorgio Martini, a painting of roughly the same dimensions as the other two, also ending in a seascape with a ship, but for spatial rationalism to exist and be presented, it is apparently necessary to remove all human presence. Absolute order is necessarily a world without fallible human beings, which means without any human beings at all.

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Yet Netherlandish Proverbs is organized: it is like discovering the activities on a very large operatic stage design, when the curtain rises and all the extras and the chorus teem onto the center stage from trap doors, attics, cellars, spilling in and out and being positioned so that they can be seen from the audience even when they are inside a chamber of the scenery. If there was no set design, no direction they would all crash into each other and we wouldn’t make sense of anything. There is a general dynamically asymmetrical division of the landscape into the foreground of the town center, and a river that runs through hills and fields to a sea and the horizon. But it’s up to the viewer to take in all the details while at the same time trying to intuit the architectonics of the painting as a whole. Each instance of folly is so engaging that it distracts from conscious recognition of the underlying structure that holds the image together. It is a wild dance, a jumble, and a journey without a departure or arrival point.

This video is helpful in taking one through each proverb–some images represent two or three proverbs. It allows you to see details not easily discernible to the ordinary viewer. It is also interesting because the authors had to chose a path around the painting so they opted for a spiral trajectory. But a path is not given and in that sense it is one of the first all-over paintings of art history, one of the first truly modern paintings.

Note for my subscribers: if you are reading this post in your email program, please click on this link to see the video on YouTube, you will not be able to watch the embedded video in your email program. You can also watch it if you open this blog post online.

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So, as my mother used to say in between thoughts, “So vot I vant to say?” Or have I said what I wanted to say about my experience in the presence of these two paintings which I fell in love with in Berlin?

I have left out much that can be said about these paintings, about their allegorical meanings and political goals. You don’t analyze all the constituent elements of the food you need, you just absorb them with gratitude. I need to see the Cranach again, I mean, I would need to be able to see it all the time, it must be seen in the flesh. It is a bewitching space, which cannot be experienced except by getting as close to it as possible. I also need to see it because I can’t make anything like it, or right now I wouldn’t be inclined to try, so I have to see the original over and over. The Bruegel I couldn’t completely see even when it was in front of me and it gained, for someone not of the original Netherlandish culture, from the linguistic guide, the graph, and the list of proverbs. Thus it is a linguistic experience and as such it is a conceptual painting, it is a conceptual experience which I can take with me. Now that I have seen the painting and know about it in that way of having seen it, the idea of it gives me a space where I can work from it, at the meeting of the figure, the idea, and the word, whether or not I ever see the painting again. Not to paint that, or like that, but to paint something that I’m already painting, but fueled by something new to me and gigantic.

These are not easy paintings to absorb or love or emulate, but they offer me a theory of the human.

New Online: A Lecture and A Roundtable Discussion

I’m happy to be able to share a lecture I gave at the RISD Museum last October, “Mira Schor / Living between Visuality, Materiality, and Language.” This is a lecture on my dual practice of painting and writing. This is one of my favorite lectures, from my point of view one of those happy moments of clarity, where I am able to say what I want to say as gracefully and comprehensively as I am capable of, and it was a pleasure to give it at RISD at the invitation of my dear friend Jennifer Liese, Director of the RISD Writing Center, and with friends including Faith Wilding, Elizabeth Weed, and Denise Davis in the audience. Their presence and a great student audience helped make this lecture a glowing moment for me. I really hope you’ll watch.

Also new online, “Roundtable: A Community of M/E/A/N/I/N/G:” this was a really good, substantive, sometimes heated and I hope generative roundtable discussion at The Feminist Art Project@CAA2015 day of panels this past February 14, 2015, held at the MAD | Museum of Arts and Design, on collectives and collaboration, with the participation of Joyce Kozloff, Sheila Pepe, Alexandria Smith, and Kara Rooney, with M/E/A/N/I/N/G co-editors Mira Schor and Susan Bee.

Note for my subscribers: if you are reading this post in your email program, please click on this link to see the video on Vimeo, you will not be able to watch the embedded video in your email program. You can also watch it if you open this blog post online.