Ingrid Schaffner

Tag: Feminism

  • “Curator’s Statement” Gloria: Another Look at Feminist Art of the 1970s. New York: White Columns, 2002.

    Another Look at Feminist Art of the 1970s

    Curator’s Statement

     

    This exhibition participates in a larger reappraisal now taking place through exhibitions, publications, and scholarship devoted to the feminist decade.[footnote=1] However, rather than attempt a historical survey, Gloria: Another Look at Feminist Art of the 1970s focuses on media-and performance-based works in order to distill a radical operative essence that transmits fully across the decade and to today.

    To young practitioners, looking back thirty years, ostensibly at one’s parents, the issues and icons of feminist art may seem remote-or worse, ridiculous. An ironic state of affairs given the currency of art constructed around images of female identity, female sexuality, femininity, and traditionally feminine pursuits, such as fashion and the decorative arts. Shortly after filling the main floor of the Guggenheim Museum with phalanxes of whippet-thin young women dressed only in high-heels and bikini parts (wardrobe by Tom Ford for Gucci, the brochure announced). Vanessa Beecroft sat on a panel discussion, subtitled “Whatever Happened to the Women Artist’s Movement.” Among the youngest by a generation at a table where also sat feminist luminaries Nancy Spero and Mary Kelly, Beecroft casually denounced her own mother as a communist, feminist, vegetarian, and everything.”[footnote=2]

    Removing her practice from the panel’s purview, Beecroft’s spectacular Guggenheim triumph seemed Feminism’s bitter failure. Likewise, a New York Times article that appeared around the same time. “The Artist is a Glamour Puss” equated the success enjoyed by a bevy of hot young women artists with their stylish beauty and ability to exploit their own sexuality.[footnote=3] “Women today are much smarter. We get pleasure from

    looking sexy,” said Katy Grannan, who pays women to be photographed in self-elected poses, usually nude. Interviewed at the opening of Another Girl, Another Planet, Grannan was one of the dozen artists-all of whom looked “as great as actresses at a premiere”-in this group exhibition of photographs of women by women. Another artist at the opening, was Cindy Sherman, whose mediated self-portrait photographs and commercial success make her a role model. When asked to comment on her protégés’ “Madonna School of Feminism”, Sherman confided, “There’s something uninformed about it that is creepy and scary to me.”

    Cut to Gloria at White Columns. Named for diverse figures within popular culture in the 1970s-Gloria Steinem (the founder of Ms. Magazine and former Playboy Bunny); Gloria Stivik (the outspoken liberal daughter of bigoted Archie Bunker in the television series All in the Family): the role played by Gena Rowlands in Gloria, the 1970 movie by John Cassavettes; and the Van Morrison song as performed by Patti Smith-this exhibition was conceived in direct response to both of Beecroft’s performances (at the Guggenheim and on that panel discussion) and the Glamour Puss phenomenon. Our aim was to reintroduce the efforts of pioneering artists whose influence was apparently being taken for granted, or worse, entirely written off, and to reclaim the sense of empowerment and agency that many young women now seem to enjoy as a direct legacy of feminism. At its most basic, Gloria set out to establish some parity between then and now, by showing that the art of the period was (and remains) significant, vital, sexy.

    Gloria includes works by artists who emerged during the first wave of late 1960s feminism (Carolee Schneemann, VALIE EXPORT, Yoko Ono) as well as those who would catch the tail end of the second wave and ride it into the 1980s mainstream (Jenny Holzer, Cindy Sherman). As demonstrated by the range of work on view-from Mary Kelly’s photo-documentation of her son’s first bath to Nancy Grossman’s sculpture of a sadomasochistic leather mask-feminist art of the 1970s does not neatly coalesce along any singular formal, material, or conceptual lines. Artists were unified by their politics, implicit to which was a commitment to pluralism. The struggle for equality between the sexes meant no one would dominate. Indeed, this exhibition presents the diversity within relatively narrow strains of a movement that, at its fullest, encompassed art which is the very antithesis of the work on view. In electing to limit this survey, Gloria underscores what was common to all feminist artists, including those mining more traditional mediums, representational imagery, craft, symbolism, a female or feminine aesthetic: the activism in which they all participated.

    Seventies feminism grew directly out of sixties activism, as evidenced by the ephemera in this exhibition. The public actions and institutional interventions documented by these small press magazines and newsletters (as well as the very form and distribution of these publications) were based on the tactics prescribed by the New Left to advocate civil rights and protest the Vietnam War. These tactics were co-opted by women, many of whom were directly involved in these movements, and who learned their feminism through the frustration of being relegated to the administrative task forces (ie. doing the shit work) and not being admitted onto the front lines. Paradoxically, this experience seems to have equipped women artists with superpowers of organization to create the alternative exhibition spaces, slide registries, information networks, education initiatives, watch-dog committees, caucuses, coalitions, and general consciousness-raising that revolutionized feminist artists throughout the 1970s.

    It is interesting to contemplate a particular relationship between the activism of 70s feminism and the action-based works in this exhibition, works which also advance major paradigm shifts within contemporary art at large. In 1967. Lucy Lippard, feminist art’s great spokeswoman, coauthored with John Chandler “The Dematerialization of Art” in which they equated radical contemporary art with the political radicalism of the day and advanced emergent trends towards “serialism, analyses of process and procedure, and consciousness of context beyond conventional art spaces.”[footnote=4] Considered one of the launch pads of postmodernism and an opening salvo for the 1970s, the essay called for artists’ liberation from traditional studio practices and for art’s freedom from interpretation based on the object per se. Given that one of the most critical challenges faced by artist members of the Women’s Liberation Movement was to have their work considered equal to art by men, is it any wonder that feminists played such a key role in the conception and creation of action- text- and photo-based works, as well as video art? All were relatively new mediums, not canonized by old masters and with little at stake in the marketplace. They were significantly available to feminist expression.

    Gloria posits that it is through non-traditional mediums and actions that the feminist legacy is most fluidly expressed within contemporary art. An alternative trend that developed alongside the art of critique and social confrontation explored in Gloria, was the attempt to define an essential female iconography outside the boundaries of male culture. Almost by definition, the 70s separatist artist’s goal of developing a purely female voice undermined any effective contribution to cultural dialogue by its requirement of isolation from the mainstream, Witness the decline of women’s galleries, cooperatives, exhibitions, magazines and journals, which were so primary to the work of feminist artists, art historians and critics in the 1970s. This distancing from the dominant culture had the unfortunate repercussions of a lack of broader critical awareness and an often hostile perception of ghettoizing. Thirty years later, a certain disdain exists for exhibitions devoted to women artists, a sense that the reception of the work will suffer from being seen in an exclusively feminist context (though it should be noted that a larger political context is often accepted). While both choices-rejecting or confronting the mainstream-were radical acts, the decision to engage in evolving cultural discourses carried the cultural legacy of feminism beyond the Feminist Decade. As this exhibition demonstrates, the “F-word” applies to work that has had enormous impact and reflects an incredible range of creative and intellectual innovations.

    Despite the differences presented by the objects in this show (discussed individually in the annotated checklist), common themes and images emerge rife with currency. Take the theme of transformation. Starting in the 1970s, women artists turned the lady-like application of makeup and dress into an aggressive form of masquerade, to perform and invent new identities, from the super-feminine to the quasi-masculine. They represented themselves through the definitively male eyes and voice of the media to command its authority and retool its message. They staged objective views of their everyday lives to de-romanticize, demystify, and most importantly, politicize “women’s work. They confronted viewers with birth, menstruation, abortion and rape to show the viscerality of women’s lives. And they put their own sexuality on display for the purpose of enjoying their own pleasure and power at the risk of harassment and abuse.

    Over the course of organizing this show, a transformation in our own thinking took place. It occurred around a letter published in the December 1974 issue of Artforum. Written in response to the copyrighted advertisement of Lynda Benglis photographed by Arthur Gordon in the November 1974 issue, the letter was signed by a group of associate editors; Lawrence Alloway, Max Kozloff, Rosalind Krauss, Joseph Masheck and Annette Michelson. The group came down hard on the magazine for putting them in a compromising position-unless they took the moral high road and documented their disgust, they would be seen as complicit in the publication of the infamous image of the young, beautiful Benglis posing aggressively nude with an enormous double-headed dildo. Given the magazine’s “efforts to support the movement for women’s liberation,” they deemed the picture to be “therefore doubly shocking to encounter in its pages this gesture that reads as shabby mockery of the aims of that movement.” Read today, the prissiness of their response finds critics of contemporary art awkward in the role of moral authoritarians-particularly in light of another lefter on the same page, this one also from an Artforum contributor, Peter Plagens, who suggests “covering the offensive anatomy with a small Donald Judd inset.” As curators of Gloria, whose generation falls somewhere between the 70s and today, the irony of our own reaction to a presumed lack of feminism among artists today was not to be overlooked.

    In researching the seventies, we have been struck by how pervasive the presence of the women’s liberation movement was across culture, the extent of the activism and with what commitment women artists struggled to realize the goals of feminism. And while, compared to theirs, ours is not a moment of great political activism indeed, as Beecroft’s art evinces, ours is a culture of rampant consumption-it is not devoid of feminism. Magazines like Bitch and Bust are expanding on the tradition of Ms. Artsy was recently started in response to the lack of coverage for women artists in Artforum. Flipping through the pages of these magazines, we have been made newly aware of how complex the choices are for young women who are apparently well-versed in feminist theory, watch Sex in the City, subscribe to Martha Stewart Living and Vogue, and are thinking strategically not only about if, but about when, with whom, and how they want to have children. And while, the mainstream press has trivialized these women’s politics as “lipstick feminism,” in the process of working on Gloria, we have learned that the generation we set out to instruct is already highly well-informed.

    Provocation has some worthwhile results, this exhibition, for example. What started out as a reaction against a seemingly self-imposed political amnesia on the part of younger women artists developed into a greater awareness of the ongoing and increasingly complex pursuit of feminist goals in today’s world, thinking globally, feminism is more relevant than ever. As a defining feature of the West, feminism is, opposed by cultures in which women are not considered equal to men. However, even within the limited scope of this exhibition project, it has become abundantly clear that dividing the generations undermines the power that feminism has gathered over the last thirty years. Revisiting the work of some of the most compelling artists of the 1970s-the decade to which all subsequent feminist thought, action, and art inherently refers-we have come to see this exhibition not so much as a reminder, but rather as an affirmation of the feminist continuum.

     

  • “Getting Small with Louise Fishman.” Louise Fishman, ed. Helaine Posner. New York: Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College; Philadelphia: Institute for Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania; Delmonico Books/Prestel, 2016, pp. 184-199.

    GETTING SMALL WITH LOUISE FISHMAN

    This conversation was held at Louise Fishman’s New York studio on June 29, 2015, in advance of the exhibition Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock that will be held at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, April 29 -August 14, 2016.

    INGRID SCHAFFNER: The three essays in this book make meaty narrative of your major work, in part by drawing extensively on past interviews and conversations. That gives us permission to take this conversation off road, to poke around some lesser-known aspects of your painting, your Philadelphia roots, and your feminist and queer politics. Let’s follow the lead of the Institute of Contemporary Art exhibition. Conceived independently from – and running in tandem with – the Neuberger Museum of Art’s fifty-year survey, the ICA’s Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock will be more like a studio visit: a chance to see bodies of work that until now have been a mostly private part of your practice.

    The installation will present a selection of sketchbooks, miniature paintings, and small sculptures. Not much bigger than two by three inches, the miniatures are as completely realized as full-breadth canvases. The sculptures, some cast in bronze from plaster models, the bulk constructed largely from found objects, are so elemental in form and substance they appear almost geologic. And the books, which are filled with mediums and modes of mark making, burst with narrative drive like Amazon comics rendered abstract. There will also be some very early works, including a self-portrait as a blonde boxer.

    Though surprisingly unlike the large-scale, abstract and gestural paintings for which you are known, these small-scale paintings and sculptural objects are deeply telling distillations of the intimacy and intensity, emotion and physicality, you pack into all of your work. So, Louise, let’s get small.

    LOUISE FISHMAN: The gloves are off.

    INGRID: I want to start by focusing on your early feminist circle by way of a small painting: Angry Ti-Grace. From the Angry Paintings, that are as raw as screams on paper, this work is named for the radical feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson, who was also ICA’s unofficial first director. And from what I have researched of the museum’s founding history, Ti-Grace had plenty to be angry about! Working as an administrator in the Fine Arts department, she pretty much single-handedly organized ICA’s inaugural exhibition in 1963, the first museum survey of the work of Clyfford Still, a big boy of Abstract Expressionism and curmudgeon. He wrote threatening to cancel the show if the catalogue included Atkinson’s (very good) essay on his work, because he basically considered her a secretary. Indeed, it was only after she left the job that a full-time director was appointed, a man named Sam Green. Louise, how did you know Ti-Grace Atkinson and her anger?

    LOUISE: I didn’t know her personally, but she was the best spokesperson for the women’s movement and she was 100 percent behind the lesbians. Ti-Grace was the one who was teaching us, even though we presented her with the revolution. When she spoke, we got very quiet and really paid attention. We would go off to weekend meetings, seminars, whatever, and everyone would be screaming and yelling because there were all these factions in the women’s movement – the lesbians, the socialists, the conservative “feminists,” the woman-identified women. Everybody was having trouble. People were taking off their clothes. I remember Rita Mae Brown wandering around taking her shirt off – she was so gorgeous – and everybody was like oh, I wanna do that, but nobody else had that body.

    INGRID: It sounds like a very angry and ecstatic time. You’ve spoken about Jill Johnston – Angry Jill – in similar terms, as an orator for lesbians.

    LOUISE: It was a very powerful moment. We all knew we were revolutionaries in a way that had not happened in Western history. Jill and Ti-Grace were both outside of the fury of the movement, but they were the brains.

    Jill had a column in The Village Voice called “Dance Journal,” which I followed from the very beginning because I was interested in dance. When I first came to New York I accidentally walked into a concert by Yvonne Rainer and immediately fell in love with her, her dance, her ideas; she inspired me in every possible way. Jill originally was a dancer with José Limón’s studio, but she began writing dance criticism for the Voice in 1959. She wrote about Happenings when no one else was. Jill had the ability to touch everything and to say really interesting things. Then the language started shifting: no punctuation, all lowercase, she just started taking tremendous liberties. She became an artist. Everybody was fascinated. Then, of course, she came out in her column, the first person to do so in the media.

    INGRID: Jill’s archive is managed by her widow, Ingrid Nyeboe, to whom you have been married since 2012. Is there an emblematic “Angry Jill” for you?

    LOUISE: I met Jill at several of the little weekend conferences that a group of us who were involved in the movement had at a country house that Hill had bought. She was with Jane O’Wyatt at the time. It was New Year’s Eve and I was in a sleeping bag with Esther Newton. Esther had already written Mother Camp – the first book on drag queens – terrific book; she later wrote an anthropological study of Cherry Grove. We’re still friends. Her partner is Holly Hughes now. Back then, our relationship was on the rocks. Midnight came, everybody was excited. I reached over to kiss Esther and she moved her head away. POW! I hit her in the face with my fist. I don’t usually hit anybody, but it was New Year’s. Everybody kisses everybody. And Jill looked at me and said, “I knew there was more to this relationship than a VW bug,” which is what Esther drove.

    INGRID: It sounds like you shocked yourself, Angry Louise. Another woman from the series is the writer Bertha Harris. You are a character in her novel Lover.

    LOUISE: I was Lover. Bertha took an apartment so she could write her novel about having an affair with me in it. We were separated when the book was published, in 1976. Bertha had run off with Charlotte Bunch to Sagaris, the feminist/lesbian think tank. But later, when we were friends again and the book was republished by New York University Press as an important work of lesbian fiction, Bertha wrote a long dedication to me.

    INGRID: Angry women are passionate women.

    LOUISE: Oh my god, yes. But I was one of the few visual artists in a group of mostly academics and writers. They all kept journals, and I started keeping a journal because I wanted to write, too. The Angry Paintings come out of that desire, using language in a scribbling sort of way.

    INGRID: They also break an abstract painter’s taboo against words on canvas. There’s a strong narrative to the triumphantly feminist title of Victory Garden of the Amazon Queen, one of your abstract paintings on four small pieces of unstretched linen. It looks like a little quilt.

    LOUISE: The title refers to the Victory Gardens my parents’ generation grew during the war; that painting was in the 1973 Whitney Biennial. The first time Marcia Tucker came for a studio visit was in 1971, and I talked with her about being a lesbian and about my politics and feminism. Apparently I reduced her to tears. Marcia, who may have been going through her own political conversion, didn’t include me in the Biennial that year, but for the following Biennial she selected the Amazon Queen Paintings.

    INGRID: So, it was your victory.

    LOUISE: Using words and bringing narrative into the titles were attempts to communicate in a way that I felt abstract painting was not communicating to the women who were my closest allies and friends.

    At a certain point I had to separate from the women’s movement and the feminist artists group for which Lucy Lippard was a spokesperson. It seemed like all that these hundreds of women wanted to talk about was their careers and how they couldn’t get any shows. After I said I was a lesbian, no one responded, I felt invisible. They were apolitical, really. After a summer of consciousness-raising sessions in 1969 with Carol Gooden, Patsy Norvell, Trisha Brown, and me, I helped form another group with Patsy and artists Harmony Hammond and Sarah Draney, and the anthropologist Elizabeth Weatherford. We went to each other’s studios and talked about our work, the problems we were having being women artists, and how to move on, or not. It was very formal consciousness-raising. We accomplished a lot.

    INGRID: Is that when you began to question scale in your work?

    LOUISE: Franz Kline and Willem de Koonig were big for me – Joan Mitchell too. Then Minimalism came along and I was looking at Sol LeWitt and making hard-edge grid paintings. The group encouraged me to see that everything I was doing as a painter – in terms of scale, gesture, and even using stretched canvas and a paintbrush – was male, and this was problematic. I always hated women’s work – growing up first a tomboy, then an athlete, I never sewed. But I wanted to destroy what I had done. So I cut up my paintings and stitched them back together in a woven grid. That was my attempt at making a connection to women’s work and craft [laughs]; I even bought a book on stitching and knotting techniques. The scale was small. Some I stained in the bathroom sink. Then I started putting the cut-up canvas paintings in baggies and tacking them to the wall.

    INGRID: Were you looking at Eva Hesse’s work?

    LOUISE: I met Eva Hesse at the Cooper-Hewitt Decorative Arts Library in the Cooper Union building, where I worked. When Eva was attending the Cooper Union she had had my job, and she was close friends with the librarian, Edith Adams. When Eva told me she was going to cut her hair, I told her I’m going to cut mine, too. She didn’t say she had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. It wasn’t until the memorial show at the School of Visual Arts that I really saw her work. I started using liquid rubber in part as an homage to Eva, but also out of a sense of permission. Her work and my women’s group both made me feel like I could do anything I wanted. I may not get to show it, but I can make it. I can make what I want, even paintings on stretched canvas, if I wanted to.

    INGRID: Before we move ahead, let’s go back to when you were small, Louise. I can see from this childhood drawing you were already interested in the grid.

    LOUISE: That was done in the early forties when I was around six. The format comes from food coupons. The little figures are the brothers and sisters I would have liked to have had. Each kid has a name: “Fishman,” “Fisher,” or “Fisherman,” because I thought that anyone whose name had the word “fish” in it was a relative of mine. (My mother’s maiden name was Fisher.) When my shrink looked at this drawing she pointed to one child called “Jerry,” that had no arms and said, “I think that’s your brother.”

    INGRID: Philadelphia looms large in your life, making for one of many good reasons for doing this show with you are ICA. You were born, raised, and trained as an artist in Philadelphia. Since you moved to New York in 1965 there had been several exhibitions here keeping steady tabs on your new developments. In 1992 three simultaneous shows were held at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (organized by the incomparable curator and art historian Judith Stein) and the two galleries at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, where you received your BFA and BS in Education. More recently, in 2012 there was the exhibition at the Woodmere Art Museum, Generations: Louise Fishman, Gertrude Fisher-Fishman, and Razel Kapustin, honoring a local legacy of women artists. Your aunt, Razel Kapustin, was a professional artist who studied with David Alfaro Siqueiros in New York and was very important role model for you. Your mother, Gertrude Fisher-Fishman, was a dedicated painter who showed frequently in Philadelphia and Florida. She availed herself of the many opportunities Philadelphia offers its artists, from classes at the Barnes Foundation to membership in the Print, Sketch, and Pen and Pencil Clubs. Both Razel and Gertrude were, I might surmise, Angry Women.

    LOUISE: My mother was excited by anything artistic. She loved the Gilded Cage, Philadelphia’s first bohemian coffee-house, where artists and writers – maybe a few queers – drank Earl Grey Tea and espressos. Once, she took me along with her to a drawing class at The Print Club, and I was totally disinterested. I was a serious athlete, playing competitively on the Haverford High School girl’s basketball team. But the instructor said, “Louise, why don’t you do a drawing?” He put a board on an easel and gave me a pencil; they had a nude model, which I’d never been around before. I did a drawing and thought, that looks pretty good. Everybody in the class came over and went WOW. My mother, I thought my mother was going to have a heart attack. She was showing me what she was doing and suddenly I became the center of it. That was the first time that happened: I thought, oh, I can draw.

    INGRID: At ICA last year, a group exhibition of artist’s emotionally charged correspondence, organized by the queer and feminist art initiative Ridykeulous, included your small five-part Letter to My Mother about Painting (1972-73). It sounds like your mother opened up the field of art to you, yet this painting looks murderous.

    LOUISE: I know exactly where that anger came from. When I got that painting into the Whitney Biennial, I thought look how long it took me to get around to doing this. I had struggled for years to make sure my mother didn’t think I was going to be an artist. Even though making art is all I wanted to do and did, I did not want to succeed and I fought every way I could. In a rage, I went to the studio on Mercer Street and put up a piece of paper and wrote “Angry Louise!”

    It was so upsetting, I had to turn the paper to face the wall. Then I thought, I’m going to make one for Esther, with whom I was living. So, I made Angry Esther. Then I made one for my friend the writer Bertha Harris. I made ones for all of the women in my group, then all the people important to me, like Ti-Grace. Every one of them who came to my studio and saw her painting was really upset. It was as if I’d gotten inside and exposed this anger with which we all identified. They were portraits, somehow, the Angry Paintings, and they had so much power.

    INGRID: It’s significant, then, what a relatively small and contained body of work it is. Like a powder keg, the Angry Paintings liberated you to pick up a knife and start painting again. I’m thinking of that series from the mid-seventies, in which the paint is slathered on disks of Masonite with a blade, then incised. There’s even razor blades embedded in the bruise-blue impasto surface of one of them. These works are sculptural as objects, but your painting in general, it gestures, are full of slashing strokes and cutting physicality. Are you a latent sculptor, Louise?

    LOUISE: I would say so. I’ve had crises at various moments, like in the 1908s when I did that portrait of myself as a man. I was in my studio on Eighteenth Street and across the street was a chain factor. And it struck me, what is it I’m doing? This is not meaningful. Chains have a function. Painting doesn’t do anything. It sounds a little bizarre, but I wanted something from m work that was much more concrete.

    INGRID: I was interested to come across a trove of early ceramics. Stoneware slab work, not thrown but folded and paddled into vessel forms.

    LOUISE: I was very fortunate when I was at Tyler to study with Rudy Staffel. Learning to use a kick wheel is really hard, which is maybe why I loved doing it, because it was so athletic – all that kicking. Rudy would put his hand gently over yours to show you what kind of weight to use.

    INGRID: It’s nice you can still feel his hand. Though your ceramics, I must say, are the antithesis of Rudy Staffel’s porcelain “light-catchers.”

    LOUISE: In graduate school at the University of Illinois, there was a good ceramics teacher and I did mostly hand-built pieces. The desire to move into three-dimensional form has always been there. Early on, I did some woodcarving and a lot of modeling from life in plasticine. One time, when I was studying at the Fleisher Art Memorial, a teacher came over and while he was talking to me – he was nervous – he was touching the clay. “Get your hands off my sculpture,” I said. Apparently the faculty had a meeting about me, the woman in the white turtleneck sweater, and how difficult I was. I could be nasty. I remember walking into a jazz bar in Philadelphia to see Nina Simone and saying hello to some people I knew; they later told me how much I scared them. Really I was just so anxious. I wanted to be Giacometti and that wasn’t going to happen. I couldn’t afford the materials or the space. I could afford to paint in my parent’s basement and that’s what I did.

    INGRID: When you started painting on canvas again in the late 1970s, how did you approach scale?

    LOUISE: Like you said, with a knife! I never used a brush or added any medium. It was very gradual working my way back to oil paint and linen, actually.

    INGRID: So the paint itself was slab-like?

    LOUISE: Yes, and the work was modest in scale. Then I went to the MacDowell Colony in July 1980 and returned with all of these really little paintings, based in scale on the predella panels of Duccio’s Maestà altarpieces, which I saw on my first trip to Italy, in 1979. That was the first time I worked on small paintings. It was also my first time using a curved mark since my student years; up to this point, I was using only horizontal and vertical elements. The miniature paintings that I did thirty years later come out of finding these stunningly small stretched canvases at an art supply store in Berlin, where I was having a show in 2008.

    INGRID: What is the relationship between the miniatures and your large paintings?

    LOUISE: No matter the size, I think of my works as experiments in scale. I’m always aware of what’s happening on the canvas relative to my hands, my arms, my fingers, the stretch of my whole body. There’s an athleticism in that, but I also have an interest in diminutive things that are smaller than they’re supposed to be.

    INGRID: Small things do convey a sense of compression – being squeezed down in size – that is certainly physical. But there is the relationship between the miniature and the conceptual, as is so perfectly contained by Marcel Duchamp’s “Museum in a Suitcase.” Likewise, your tiny paintings appear ready-made to exist in the mind’s eye, as objects of contemplation. Speaking of Duchamp, let’s talk about the explosion in a slat factory – as one wag called his Nude Descending a Staircase – that is this stack of painted strips on cardboard and other materials.

    LOUISE: First let me say how important it was growing up in Philadelphia and seeing Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors in the same museum as Rogier van der Weyden’s monumental crucifixion with the mourning virgin, Cézanne’s bathers, and the work of Mondrian, Rouault, Soutine. As students, we used to climb on Rodin’s Burghers of Calais. Even before the women’s movement, art gave me a sense of freedom and permission that anything was possible. I wasn’t imprisoned. And even though I’ve remained a painter – one who adores paint and the tradition of painting – I think there is the potential to do anything.

    The “slats” are from the monoprints I made with Susan Oehme at her print studio in Colorado. They are the plates: scraps of cardboard, mat board, wood, and sandpaper that she had around that I painted and we sent through the press. When the plates turned out to be as interesting as the prints, I kept them.

    INGRID: Some are very tiny, just shards and slivers. Together they read like an index of painting, mark making, drawing, pigments, and materials that is both astonishingly replete and generative.

    LOUISE: It was a terrifically productive moment. I had just begun a relationship with Ingrid Nyeboe. At the end of the two weeks, Susan said, “Louise, you must be in love.” She had never seen anyone make so much work.

    INGRID: Your work strongly conveys a sense of ethics, in the value of labor, in thrift, in being resourceful, scrappy. Nothing appears to go to waste.

    LOUISE: I have paintings on sandpaper that started with scraping down the surface of a canvas and then working back into the sandpaper. I’ve done the same thing with paper towels. I’m always paying attention to process and scouting for new materials. I used to get a lot of interesting stuff to paint on – squares of Bakelite and rubber, those Masonite circles – on Canal Street.

    INGRID: I’m impressed by the carpet samples. They are such unappealing objects to begin with, yet you’ve transformed them into such beautifully tactile little paintings that manage to draw extra power by appearing to be messed-up carpet samples only partially redeemed by art.

    LOUISE: I made those when I was in residence at Dartmouth College for two months and ran out of linen. But it’s true, I would paint on almost anything, including myself if that were viable.

    INGRID: Let’s talk about the leporellos: such an arcane name for a book with accordion-folded pages. Apparently it was a popular Victorian form of binding for tourist souvenir panoramas.

    LOUISE: I still have a leporello guide to Giotto’s frescoes in Padua that I bought the first time I went to Italy, in 1979, when I saw the Duccios and realized that I wanted to paint small.

    What inspired me to use the leporello form to paint in was learning about a Japanese tradition of carrying these books like passports to be marked at Buddhist pilgrimage sites. I made my first one in 1992, after I got back from New Mexico; it has to do with Agnes Martin and scale. I had gone to Galisteo, where she was at the time, because I had the horrible crisis of a fire in my studio. My partner Betsy Crowell and I rented Harmony Hammond’s house, and I was a mess.

    A couple of remarkable days were spent with Agnes in her studio not saying anything. She sat in her rocking chair and looked at me every once in a while. And I thought, what’s going on here? Oh, she’s meditating. I know how to do that. So I went into my breath and did my meditation. I watched Agnes and listened to her, later, when she showed me drawings and pulled out paintings and talked about her dealer and whatever else artists talk about. It was clear that the work was a meditation for Agnes, a path, and that I could quiet myself down.

    Having a fire in your studio is one of the most unhinging experiences an artist can have; everything falls apart. When we got back to upstate New York I started making these books that suddenly made perfect sense. There were little grids and bigger grids, rubbings and blottings. I got interested in transferring the image from one side of the page to the other, because these books can be used in different directions and don’t really have a front or back, beginning or end.

    INGRID: I’m thinking about your feminist journaling and how these books relate to your early interest in writing. They read in such an interesting way, because they’re so episodic. Serene passages of watercolor drawing are interrupted by seismic eruptions of oil paint, metal stapes, and built-up accretions of paper and various media. They’re contained, yet volatile; they don’t want to be closed—or opened! This one is a crucible of painting so gooey that the pages are protesting as we pull them apart.

    LOUISE: I never make drawings for paintings. So I’ve been surprised at hoe many ideas that seem to appear on canvas as if from nowhere can actually be found in these little books from years earlier.

    INGRID: So we’re sitting in your studio with these very sculptural books in front of us, surrounded by objects. Louise, you’re a collector.

    LOUISE: It started with Chinese scholar’s rocks. In 1985 I saw an exhibition at the China Institute, curated by John Hay – I still have the catalogue, Kennels of Energy, Bones of Earth: The Rock in Chinese Art – and my mind was blown. Because not only were these rock formations extraordinary, but their bases had been carved to correspond to their contours. It was the most beautiful melding of one object into another – in total respect of the rock.

    So I started learning about scholar’s rocks. It never occurred to me that I could own one. But Bernard Lennon, my dealer at the time, knew the sculptor Richard Rosenblum, who was based in Boston and had an incredible rock collection. He told me about a couple of guys who had stands at the flea markets and little antique centers that used to be all over New York. And I started buying, spending $25 or $90 for these beautiful rocks.

    INGRID: Aptly, I see a discipline, a form of study. It’s very specific what you collect. Besides the scholar’s rocks here in the studio, you are a collector of African sculptures, American milking stools, and Venetian glass.

    LOUISE: I don’t know how disciplined you would consider my collecting if you knew how much stuff I have at home! But they’re objects to draw, subjects to study and just have around for their impact. With the African art, which I first started looking at in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, what I became interested in were these small-scale pieces, mostly bronzes, some so small I couldn’t believe it. There was one African dealer, also at the flea market, who was educating me. Some of what I bought may not have been authentic. It didn’t’ matter. This one piece looks like it has a certain amount of weight, and when you hold it, it’s like a feather. That idea amazes me.

    INGRID: What special appeal do the other collections have?

    LOUISE: The three-legged stools are for milking, but the rest are all work stools. They have all taken on the shape and wear of individual use and work over time. I used to get them at auctions in upstate New York for $5 or $10, but now the antique pickers bid up the prices too high for me to be interested in continuing to collect them. I began collecting the glass after Ingrid and I started spending time in Venice. We may have gone to Murano, but I wasn’t that interested until I saw this beautiful piece at a flea market. It was 100 euros, which seemed like a hell of a lot of money, but I bought it. Then I started reading catalogues and found out the period I was interested in was the 1930s to the 1950s. I’ve gotten a lot of exquisite glass on eBay.

    INGRID: Again, there’s something about weight: this tiny Carlo Scarpa glass bowl is incredibly heavy.

    LOUISE: There are iron filings in the glass, which can contain all kinds of odd materials, like glitter. I’ve recently made paintings and watercolors inspired by Spuma de Mare, a technique that Ercole Barovier invented for getting something decorative to happen inside the glass that makes it look like foam churning up from the sea.

    INGRID: That’s another correspondence with your work, the elemental nature of these objects. I always feel close to the substance of your materials: the minerality of oil paint, for instance, the malachite of malachite green. On another studio visit you showed me the mortar and pestle you used in 1988 to pulverize the soil you collected at the Pond of Living Ashes at Birkenau for your Remembrance and Renewal paintings.

    LOUISE: I think all of that has everything to be with being a Jew. My family were Ashkenazim and they were Talmudic scholars. When I was studying Yiddish I went to a lot of old movies. I remember identifying so intensely with this silent film about the golem – the creature made from clay – brought to life to protect the Jews of Prague. Being an American didn’t make any difference. I still had that desire for something supernatural that could protect us, protect me.

    INGRID: Is that, in part, what painting does: protect you? I’m thinking less about the golem and more about your anger as a material, one that has never been fully transformed by alchemy or anything supernatural, but rather, has been annealed by your art. To anneal is to burn, to make a substance stronger by making it softer, less brittle. To be in your studio now: it’s the work that’s on fire, not you!

    LOUISE: Yes, I am happy being benign Louise. I’m allowing myself much more freedom in the studio. I would have never been allowed all that white space of the canvas to be there before. I wanted to give everything a lot of richness, but this is a different story. Now it’s about giving reign to what paint does on its own. And I do think there’s something magical about painting. Something is made out of paint, aside from the purpose it gives my life. You know, I stopped painting to have this knew replacement and I have no idea what’s going to happen when I get back to work. I mean, it’s a complete mystery.

     

  • “Conversation with Joan Jonas.” Joan Jonas: They Come to Us without a Word. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT List Visual Arts Center, New York, New York : Gregory R. Miller & Co., Ostfildern, Germany : Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2015, pp. 114-131.

    Conversation with Joan Jonas

    BELLS
    MASKS
    STONES
    STICKS
    DOGS
    TOYS
    HOOPS
    CONES
    COSTUMES
    MIRRORS
    WATER
    WIND

    I propose the list above, of elements Joan Jonas often uses in her work, as a place to begin.

    In 2001, Jonas was one of twelve artists to accept my invitation to make a new work in response to an old American Impressionist painting in the collection of the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York. When I tried to find out what she was doing, she rebuffed my attempts so cordially and firmly that I resigned myself to the possibility that she might not be doing anything at all. But of course, Jonas delivered. An assortment of objects and video equipment arrived at the museum. Next came Jonas and an assistant, who, absorbed in composition, spent all morning in the gallery, as if it were the studio.

    The finished installation was a small set up: a giant metal hoop, a child’s desk, an easel holding a chalkboard on which rough shapes had been dryly drawn, and a video monitor. In the video, a white dog jumped through a hoop that was held by the assistant. The timing had been jiggered to make the dog appear to fly, to float, to leap forward then soar backward before touching the ground: to stick in space. It was dreamy, looping endlessly, accompanied by the sound of a musical saw that seemed to drift from some otherworldly dimension or, perhaps, from the circus.

    Some stage magic had definitely taken place, because the project’s august premise – William Merritt Chase’s painting of scrubby dunes on a sunny day, three girls in white frocks industriously picking bayberries, and, looming small in the distance, the giant Victorian cottage whence the girls presumably came – seemed to have completely disappeared. And yet, an even stronger sense of the picture remained. In the scale of the desk, the old-fashioned props, the charming film, and in all the mysterious emptiness in between, the painting flickered like a memory briefly entertained, then abandoned, in favor of this wonderfully perplexing new image.

    Since the 1960s, Jonas’s essentially improvisational art has been a discipline of assembling not only the provisions – the ideas, the images, the props, the performers – she needs but also the requisite pressure. Jonas pushes herself and her collaborators, curators and institutions alike, to keep a situation open for as long as possible in order to make the urgency and exhilaration of realizing the work fully a part of her art’s potential and experience. Building suspense is a critical part of the process. Although the United States Pavilion in Venice will be one of her most important commissions, with an anticipated 440,000 viewers, Jonas is no less committed to her art’s brinksmanship. Hence, the list on the opposite page of things one might expect to find in the work of Joan Jonas primes a discussion of the still-fluid ideas and images she is now preparing to use in Venice to stage her art.

    JOAN JONAS: I looked at your list and I made word associations because there are relationships. BELLS, STONES, STICKS, TOYS, CONES, WATER, and WIND all make different kinds of sounds. But that’s not why I chose each one. Bells ring. Stones, I used them to click together and to define space by the way they echoed. And I collect stones. I collect bells. Sticks, the same.

    INGRID SCHAFFNER: Lists have a rhythm.

    JJ: Yes, I like lists. There is also the visual aspect. Each toy suggests a little world of its own that adds something to my content. There is also something grotesque about toys for adults – I mean children’s toys – and I like that double aspect.

    The HOOP I chose for different reasons. One was that when I first began to do performances with drawings, I drew circles and lines because they’re the basic elements of depiction. And then I was inspired by Houdini to have a hoop made. It was six feet in diameter and, for a performance in 1970, I had myself rolled around the block. That particular hoop has been a major element in my work over the years.

    Later I collected wooden hoops, sports hoops, in Italy, actually. The cone is another object I use because of its relation to form.

    IS: Right, the magician waves a hoop around the levitated woman to prove his trick is real. What about metaphors and models of perception? There is the cone of vision, of hearing. The cone of silence?

    JJ: I’ve used the cone for all of those things. In Mirage, there are tin cones that I look through, listen through, then use to direct sound around the room. It’s a beautiful form, and it’s also functional.

    WATER is everywhere and it’s a medium. WIND is a character – mysterious and frightening – and a very strong element in my work. My very first film is called Wind [1968].

    IS: In the film, a line of performers is trying to put on and take off their coats while being battered by the wind; it’s like a silent comedy.

    JJ: Well, I like comedy.

    IS: It’s good to get that straight.

    JJ: MIRRORS creates a space. They also change the space. And they can break. It always makes people a little bit uncomfortable to see a mirror, to perceive themselves. The first prop I used was a mirror.

    IS: In Mirror Check [1970], one of your most iconic works, you are inspecting your naked body with a small hand mirror in front of an audience who cannot see your mirror image, but only know how you respond to it. So what about dogs and masks?

    JJ: DOGS and MASKS are two of the most important. When I started working on Organic Honey [1972], my first video piece, I worked with what was around me – what was nearby. My dog Sappho was there. I excuse my use of the dog by saying it’s an animal helper, like in a myth or fairytale. They call it a “familiar.”

    IS: Usually the helper is a black cat, but you always had a white dog.

    JJ: Not always. My dog is beige now. There were two dogs in a row that were white: Sappho, then Zina. In the mid-eighties, Sappho chewed up a lot of my costumes and props. It was quite liberating, actually, to be freed to think about new images.

    IS: That was helpful of Sappho. Your current familiar is named?

    JJ: Ozu, after the Japanese film director [Yasujirō Ozu, 1903-1963]; I love his use of everyday objects and moments. When I traveled to Japan for the first time in 1970 with Richard Serra, we went to the Noh theater. I was deeply affected and started working with masks immediately after that. Masks were, for me, perfect, because they hid my face. I was not a performer when I began in 1968; I didn’t want to be Joan Jonas. The mask gave me another identity. COSTUMES also transform.

    IS: You are widely regarded for bringing together performance, video, and installation in ways that we now take for granted in contemporary art. Let’s expand the list with the various modes and mediums of your work, starting with MOVEMENT and DANCE.

    JJ: I trained as a sculptor. My work, which I mostly destroyed a long time ago, was influenced by Giacometti. It was the early sixties; I was living uptown, married to a writer, Gerry Jonas, when I started going downtown, where I experienced the work of La Monte Young, Claes Oldenburg, Simone Forti, among others, for the first time.

    IS: Just by crossing Fifty-Seventh Street, then, you went from museums and modernism into an emerging art world of Minimalism, performance, happenings, music, and dance.

    JJ: I saw Lucinda Childs perform a piece that was, for me, very strange. And immediately I thought, “Oh my god, this is very attractive. I have to do this.” That’s when I really decided to go into performance, but it took me several years.

    In order to perform you have to move. I took all of the workshops I could, and each was different. Deborah Hay’s would be about doing a movement that she might do; Yvonne Rainer, the same thing. Trisha Brown used theatrical exercises developed by Viola Spolin to teach improvisation. Steven Paxton was working with everyday movement. Lucinda Childs was very controlled. I would also go to their performances. You learn by looking, and I wanted to see what was already being done.

    IS: Your project to become a performance artist began with a period of intense research. Was it inhibiting not being a trained dancer?

    JJ: No, it wasn’t, actually. I even went to Merce Cunningham’s classes once or twice, where I saw for myself in the mirror how totally different a dancer’s body is. But to become a performer, I really had to learn how to move, which I did, in part by doing my own thing.

    IS: Your first performances with mirrors were, uncomfortably, silent, but SOUND soon became a shaping element.

    JJ: My first thought when I stepped from sculpture into performance was that now I can make something with sound. Initially, I made sound in abstract ways – clapping blocks of wood, for instance, like in Noh theater – to sound out space, or silence. I was also interested in sound delay and in creating situations where you saw a sound being made before you heard it.

    IS: The art historian Douglas Crimp used the term “de-synchronization” to describe your strategy of taking us out of the flow of real time. How did VIDEO, which you’ve greatly used to abet this aim, enter the picture?

    JJ: I love film and have always gone to the movies. The minute I found out about the Portapak camera, I wanted to get one. So, I did. In 1970, when we went to Japan, I bought one there and started working with video. I imagined that I was making film. I had experimented with Super 8, but actual film is very complicated. Video is instantaneous, and it was a new form. I was very interested in that. I began by exploring the qualities of the medium that were different from film. However, throughout my work, the way I use time and think about time remains very influenced by what I know about film – and music.

    IS: Film is called the mirror of its age. You’ve used video like a mirror in your PERFORMANCES and INSTALLATIONS.

    JJ: To make work, I must have something concrete in my mind. When I started doing performance, I needed a place to enter, and that’s when I thought of the stage. The stage could be an empty city lot, Jones Beach, a school gymnasium, or my loft, which is where the pieces began to be more theatrical, in terms of sets and costumes. But I didn’t start concentrating on installation as an independent form until 1994, with my retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Nor did I really show my work in galleries until the 1990s. But I did show my videos and performances at Castelli-Sonnabend in the seventies.

    IS: DRAWING in your work is more than a medium, it’s a way of thinking and performing.

    JJ: In the early outdoor works, I purposefully set the audience at a distance, because I saw the gestures and configurations as drawings in space. After I got the Portapak, I started drawing for the camera. I would make small drawings on stage that audiences experienced on screen, as large projections. I had all these different ways of drawing that were influenced by the setup of the camera and the monitor. Don’t look at the paper. You can’t totally control drawing in a performance. It gives you a different way to arrive at an image. The result is always surprising.

    IS: Wearing a billowing paper coat and hat, you appear to have become a drawing element in recent work.

    JJ: I’m a character making drawing. With each new piece, I think, what image do I want to draw? How shall I draw? And how can I make the drawing relate to the situation, because that’s always a question.

    IS: Which brings us to the question: what will you draw for VENICE?

    JJ: The subject is animals. There will be a lot of drawings in three of the four main rooms. They are based on installations I did at the Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Kitakyushu, Japan, where I’ve been an artist in residence four times.

    On my third visit, I brought along an old book I found in San Diego of Japanese FISH. Often what happens in my work is that I get inspired by something beautiful, hand-drawn illustrations, exquisitely colored. In Japan, you eat a lot of fish, and we’re all thinking about overfishing. This is really what attracted me to the idea of using the book to make drawings of fish and hang them in a certain way, not on the walls but throughout the space, from poles.

    I wanted to work with a craft particular to Japan, and a kite maker agreed to make me about eighty KITES out of Japanese paper and bamboo. Traditionally, the kites, which come in all of these beautiful shapes, are decorated, but mine were like blank sheets of paper. In Kitakyushu, I painted them different colors, then pasted shapes cut from hand-tinted paper, using stencils based on the drawings I was doing.

    IS: The kites will bring wind, and the fish water, to Venice. What about Matisse? The kites make me think of his cutouts.

    JJ: Matisse is one of my favorite artists

    IS: To get that sweep and scale of line, Matisse famously drew with a piece of charcoal attached to a long pole – a fishing pole, perhaps. Joan, you draw with a crooked stick! You’ve also been known to use ink and chunks of ice, as well as to dribble ink into snow. Like a witch, a crone, a shaman, with a wand, a cane, a dowser’s rod, you make drawings appear as if by divination or magic.

    JJ: I like to work very fast. I draw the fish by looking at the book and not at the paper, which is on the floor. I’m standing, using a long brush. One minute, two at most. I’m always looking to bring in new techniques.

    I’m also doing BEE drawings, using a Rorschach-style inkblot technique. Given how much drawing there will be, I’m already talking to a conservator about archivally printing these works on paper and showing copies, so they don’t fade away in the Venetian light. I’m also working with the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia on a curtain that will be both theatrical and functional in the space.

    IS: Schools of fishes, swarms of bees. What brings the bees to Venice?

    JJ: I’m trying to unite different elements on various levels. The bees partly come from reading Jakob von Uexküll [1864-1944], a German biologist, who wrote about animal perception. I’ve always loved his description of how bees fine nectar, transport pollen, and make honey, it’s so miraculous. He was also the first to study the “information dance” that bees use to communicate; they do four different dances.

    IS: Apparently, it’s relational: the mood of the hive affects how well the dance and its encoded message are received. I imagine signals in the hive are increasingly down, given the global effects of climate change, pesticides, and destruction of habitat on bee populations.

    JJ: Certainly, it’s an issue that connects the imagery of fish and bees. But I didn’t want to make a gloomy piece about the world situation, even though it is a sad situation. That’s why I have the CHILDREN. I wanted to have their innocent voices. This is their future we are talking about, after all.

    IS: Where are you finding the children, and how will their voices be incorporated into Venice?

    JJ: Through workshops. We’ll meet every Saturday until March, when I leave for Venice. They’re mostly children of artist friends, ranging from the five-year-old girl next door to Lorna Simpson’s and Carol Shymanski’s teenage daughters. We will talk about animals, about things that are threatened, creatures that might be disappearing, or not Children think, “Oh bees, they sting.” But I found a very nice beekeeper in Manhattan, who is also a biology teacher, to show us bees and all that they do. Another thing I want to do with the children is try and make little bee dances.

    IS: What a sweet echo of all those lovely early downtown dance workshops!

    JJ: We’ll see what happens, starting next week. The workshops are being held in a big space MIT has rented for me to use as a STUDIO in the West Village. We set up a back-projection screen with two stages; each stage has a screen with front and back projection. We’ll have a computer and a video mixer, like I use in all of my performances, so you can go from live camera to prerecorded video. During the workshops, we’re going to be projecting from both directions, sometimes mixing, sometimes blocking, with the children in front and around the screens. It will be a big visual experiment. In Venice, the stages and screens will be part of the installation; you can see them in the model.

    IS: [looking at the model] That’s amusing, the scale model of a viewer looks like a Giacometti. I also see you have blocked off the central doorway so that visitors enter through the left wing of the pavilion.

    JJ: I got the idea from Sarah Sze’s approach to the pavilion during the last Biennale [2013]. It makes for a more linear progression through the four rooms and the rotunda. In a way, the whole piece is like a performance that you go through one room at a time.

    IS: I’m thinking of Reanimation (In a Meadow), your work for dOCUMENTA (13), which also took the form of a very inviting little house in a public garden, but there, viewers could only look through the windows. I especially remember the video of glaciers appearing like sad and monstrous figments of global warming in a room.

    JJ: I’m always looping elements of the last project into the next. Reanimation started with Halldór Laxness’s 1968 novel Under the Glacier and continued my interest in Iceland. It also introduced the imagery of bees and marked a shift toward more environmental thinking. And yes, in Venice you get to go inside the house.

    IS: The fourth, and last, room we haven’t talked about yet. The setup in the model looks like one of your stage sets, with relatively domestic seating elements and screens.

    JJ: And like the last part of one of my performances, the fourth room may not get resolved until the very end. I recently saw a drawing of the eye of a whale and it looked just like a human eye. All mammals have “semicircular canals” in their ears. There is the eye of the storm. And then, we come from fish. I’m trying to unite these things in the last room, the “human room.” I’m not worried right now if it’s going to make sense in that way. This is how I work.

    I shot video in Canada last summer, in relation to Venice (some of it Ozu did with a GoPro camera around his neck). I’m also working with ghost stories from Cape Breton.

    IS: Cape Breton, like Iceland, is another embedded landscape in your work.

    JJ: I’ve been going there since 1970. Rudy Wurlitzer and Philip Glass, with JoAnne Akalaitis, bought an old summer camp with all these A-frames, and they invited Richard Serra and me along with a number of other artists. We eventually bought land. I now have my own house and studio and spend part of every summer there. I’m inspired by the place.

    There used to be a magazine called Cape Breton’s Magazine, full of stories and interviews, chronicling aspects of the culture that were dying out. The ghost stories are from the magazine’s collection. I didn’t want a literary ghost story; these are just very everyday people talking about their experiences.

    IS [reading]: “The wind … opened the front door. It was a beautiful afternoon…. Just like a choir, the voices came in.”[footnote=1]

    JJ: I will use fragments like that.

    IS: Research is an important part of the process. Are there other sources for Venice?

    JJ: The work always begins with finding a subject of interest and then exploring where that interest leads. For Venice, I’ve been reading John Berger’s Why Look at Animals? [1980], which talks about ancient bonds between humans and animals that are broken, and Giorgio Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal [2004]. It was Agamben’s philosophical writing on the tick that led me to Uexküll. I’m looking at these great illustrations he used to show how different creatures – a fly, a dog, a human – see the same room.

    IS: The human room: the dog only sees snacks and things to jump up on. Coincidentally, I just saw a work by Pierre Huyghe titled Umwelt after Uexküll’s concept of worlds of animal perception. Will there be a PERFORMANCE in Venice?

    JJ: Yes. Right after the opening I will come back to New York to start working on a performance that will take place somewhere in Venice. I never perform in my installations. It really takes all of my concentration to develop and installation, and the performance is more or less another endeavor working with the same material. I will reedit the video and work with the composer Jason Moran on the sound.

    IS: This will be the third time you’ve collaborated with Jason. How do you two work together?

    JJ: To start, I talk about the themes, show him some video backdrops, and he responds by playing a sequence or a tune. I choose what I like best. We respond to each other rhythmically. It’s his music and we add sounds. It’s important to say that we don’t collaborate on the performance, but working with Jason has had a great effect on my work. Also, once the piece is set, the improvisation is over. I always perform it exactly the same way.

    IS: Like a ritual. Who are some of the other COLLABORATORS and CONTRIBUTORS to Venice?

    JJ: I like working with artists; they bring their own way of doing things. David Dempewolf is my veejay. Although I oversee all aspects of the editing process, he is technically my support. He knows my work really well and helps me to bring in material from past works. He’s also a really good audience. We’ve worked together for eight years.

    I’m also working with several others: David Sherman on video, and Meredith Walker and Jin Jung on other aspects, such as props, models, and SketchUp files.

    Jan Kroeze is a professional lighting designer and friend since the seventies. When he heard I was doing Venice, he said, “I want to do the lighting.” Which is great, because lighting is not my thing.

    IS: It’s a very intergenerational team, Joan, from age five and up. Does your experience as a teacher play a role in your work?

    JJ: I’m not sure what direct effect, if any, teaching has had on my work. But I’ve been inspired by individual students, and by the activity of teaching. It certainly kept me from the isolation of the studio. It started with some part-time teaching at UCLA in the early nineties; then, I was hired at the Academy in Stuttgart [Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künst Stuttgart], where I worked closely with students. I was going through a transition; it was a good period. At MIT, where I taught from 1998 and am now professor emerita, the exchanges with students and colleagues and access to new technology have been great.

    IS: As invitingly rich and layered as your installations and performances are, there is also something forbidding about your work. We want to enter the image, but we’re held back by a sense of trespass or danger. There are jarring visual leaps, abrupt and dissonant sounds, manic movements, gaps. There’s screaming.

    JJ: From the very beginning, I wanted a slight disturbance – I wouldn’t use the word “shock,” just an uneasiness. I’ve often been asked about fragmentation in my work. What I recognize is a conscious desire to change the mood, to create a kind of strong rhythm, through a soundscape or a landscape that is always shifting. Because I was looking at the structure of film, I was interested in the potential of the cut, in cutting, which is never seamless in my work. I think it also reflects my way of thinking and speaking: I want to make beautiful images, but I’m not really interested in pleasing people.

    IS: You have such a unique voice. In tone and timbre, your speaking voice is nothing short of a material presence. As an artist, you are a strong feminist voice. Your work critically addresses the ways in which women are perceived and represented in culture; at the same time, it embodies and constructs a profoundly female world. So my question is: were you born with that voice?

    JJ: The way I speak, I was born that way. I have a very low voice – it’s gotten gruffer and less soft; I do speak fast and in monotone. What I’ve worked on is opening up my throat and my body, and having a certain clarity of rhythm. It was useful to perform with the Wooster Group and work with my voice in relation to text. I’ve acted in two of their productions; in Nayatt School [1978], I played a character named Celia Coplestone.

    Finding my own voice as an artist was very important. I was involved with the feminist movement, as were all of my artist friends. Improvising with my own sensibility and body was partially research into the question of whether or not there is such a thing as female imagery. Seeing Jack Smith, who performed, like in Noh theater, both the male and female parts and with such femininity, had a profound effect. When I began working more directly with narrative – with fairytales, myth, the writings of H.D. [Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961] – I was exploring the place of women in history, as outsiders, witches, storytellers. I have always been interested in the poetics of how women are depicted, which is political, of course.

    IS: From voice to Vorstellung: Joan, we are mutual fans of the German art historian Aby Warburg and his passion for the driving force of images, which he linked across time and space in his Atlas of Memory [1972-29]. Vorsellung was his term for the mental picture behind an image. He ascribed to it an almost supernatural power to transmit and animate cultural memory. I experience a similar intensity, ambition, emotion, through your work.

    JJ: My work is, in a fundamental way, about making and connecting images. I’ve always been interested in how ritual and myth can be used to describe a present-day situation or suggest a character. I didn’t know that term, but I was deeply moved by Warburg when I explored his character and writings for Line in the Sand [2002]; I had the feeling he could have been a dancer, he was so attuned to movement. Warburg’s openness to world cultures was also exciting to discover.

    IS: Let’s bring the conversation back to Venice by way of a picture behind the image of your work in my mind: Velázquez’s Las Meninas [1656]. There is the easel, the dog, the mythic cast of characters, and the mirror, a magic mirror that brings viewers onto the very stage of picture making. Are there pictures you are looking forward to seeing in Venice – a city of water, glass, reflections – and will mirrors be a part of your new work?

    JJ: I love Tintoretto. I studied Renaissance art history in college; the intellectual aspects of Mannerism attracted me.

    I am working with glassmakers in Murano on several things right now. The rotunda space joins the two wings of the pavilion, and I was thinking of making a kind of chandelier, naturally. I am designing a metal shape on which to hang crystals. A light will shine through them, like ice. It’s an experiment at this point. But I made a similar piece for Reanimation.

    I’m also experimenting with having mirrors made in Murano. Because I want distortion, they are working with an old-fashioned technique that Alex Rosenberg, a former student, reminded us of. You make a big glass cylinder – it looks like a bottle – and cut it. The glass actually flops open. These mirrors are thick and they’re beautiful. We’re making several. I don’t know what I’m going to do with them yet.

    Ingrid Schaffner interviewed Joan Jonas at her New York studio on January 6, 2015. Thanks to Erik Moskowitz, Amanda Trager, Rachel Pastan, and Chris Taylor for their excellent input in the process of preparing this interview

     

  • “Slim Volume,” Moyra Davey: Burn the Diaries [a supplement]. Philadelphia: Institute for Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania; Vienna, Austria: the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, 2014, pp. 7-20.

    Slim Volume

    The most remarkable element of this exhibition is a slim volume that could escape notice – not that books are in any way extraordinary in the work of Moyra Davey, an artist and essayist whose photographs, videos, and writings are full of images of them. This, however, is the first time she has ever made a book as an integral part of a new installation. Think of it as a commission, like that of a sculpture. That’s what I told Robert, my Institute of Contemporary Art colleague, and so we portioned the budget accordingly, dedicating the lion’s share – an amount the museum typically spends to pack and ship existing works of art – to the fabrication of Davey’s new publication.

    When you come across this enticing little 104-page paperback in the museum, it may very well look like someone mislaid it in the gallery. Like a pocket edition, Burn the Diaries is designed to be affordable and accessible. It contains two essays and many color photographs, one of the first of which shows a gamine young woman with bangs, reading a book in a subway car. Many of the photographs show details of books (pages, print, spines) and bookscapes (shelved, piled, scattered).

    Davey started out as a photographer in the early 1980s, but reading has become her medium. She has developed a singular body of work in which photography, film, and writing intertwine with her life in what is both a process and practice of reading. Deeply personal and acutely intellectual, the texts she reads range from the writings of Walter Benjamin and Virginia Woolf to the photographs of Peter Hujar; from the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder to the taped interviews Davey conducts with family and friends; from bottles of prescription medicine to a clump of psychoanalyst’s bills; from shelves loaded with records and stereo equipment to a dust bunny trapped beneath a dog’s paw. All satisfy Davey’s constant and voracious need for reading.

    In a way that is truly discursive, Davey has engaged fellow readers who respond with pleasure, insight, and often surprising candor. The body of writing created in relation to her art stands as one of that art’s achievements. Art historian George Baker, writer Chris Kraus, and curator Helen Molesworth are among the cultural luminaries who have written, by way of Davey’s work, brilliant essays on photography, collecting, archives, illness, abjection, feminism, queer culture, psychoanalysis, motherhood, memory, and, of course, dust. That these are some of the most potent themes of postmodernism – a movement that began in literature, reading everything in culture critically as text – only makes the reading, and the pressure Davey’s art exerts on the writing that mirrors it, more intense.

    In compiling her selected texts, Davey deploys photography and writing to frame, cut, quote, document, and reference – and to print. Print. She uses text – whether delivered as photograph, film, or actual book – to narrate, illuminate, analyze, interrogate, interpret, and even compose her life as an artist. So where does the reading stop and her life begin? This question gets raised early in Burn the Diaries when Davey quotes Pradeep Dalal, an artist friend who once observed critically of Davey’s work: “A part of me… wants to see… writing or reading, as personal and private and pleasurable…. Not everything we do it for art-making.” Dalal goes on to paraphrase Jean Genet’s advice to artists: “that to deepen your practice, it’s not just by studying writing, that it’s actually the other bits – the music, the theater, the film, and other things that all interlock and move you up a notch or two.” Davey’s response is to pick up the work of the French writer, criminal, and political activist and start reading.

    In Burn the Diaries, Davey details dreams had, music listened to, friends interrogated, films watched, memories unleashed, and other episodes of daily life during her reading of Genet. Her writing is structured, as it often is, through short entries, interspersed with quotations and separated by indexical headings, such as SNOW, SLEEP, DISCIPLINE, LIBIDO, GIACOMETTI, MONEY, ALISON.

    The second essay in the book is by Alison Strayer, a translator and writer living in Paris, who corresponds with Davey about her reading. Resistant from the start – “I scribble like a crank, ‘Why Genet?’” – Strayer responds by reaching reflexively for the work of Violette Leduc, another “blazing” outlaw figure of French literature (her writing was censored for its lesbianism). Leduc’s work cries out to be read: “Reader, my reader… stay with me’ is her clarion call [and] I am defeated in advance by her vigor,” Strayer writes of Leduc.

    Strayer oscillated between Davey’s project and a parallel investigation of her own life and reading. It turns out the two women have known each other since childhood, both having grown up in Ottawa. Meanwhile, the copy of Genet’s complete works that Davey is reading – an old Gallimard edition in French – bears an inscription from Strayer to artist Susan Kealey, a mutual friend who was dying when she gave the book to Davey. By the end of her essay, Strayer has accepted Davey’s Genet-reading project, not least because his language shed a blaze of light onto Susan’s diaristic writings (“her style was precise and vibrant”) and on writings as a vital way of life. “At the end of the day,” Strayer writes to Davey, “the diarist, dreamer, writer… seized the words that gallop ahead, or, as you, [Moyra] write, moves a soft lead pencil across a page.”

    Structurally speaking, Burn the Diaries is in many ways simply a plusher version of Davey’s very first book, a small, spiral-bound volume with a short text followed by pages of photographs. Grainy vintage portraits are paired with cold studies of toes (Davey made the feet of her husband, the artist Jason Simon, appear beastly). The text begins with an intimate fantasy about “the serene and the scatological,” then zeroes in on Surrealist philosopher Georges Batailles’s famous writings on the big toe and the nature of eroticism. A dead ringer for a Surrealist document, Davey’s [ages look like they could have come straight out of a book she was reading at the time: L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (1985) by Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston, revelatory for artists and academics alike, opened up a new way of seeing what radical use the Surrealists made of photography as a form of research – that is, of exploring, indexing, and documenting the uncanny, unseen, and theoretical.

    The written component of her thesis exhibition, Object Choices at the University of San Diego in 1986, Davey’s first book was handed in but never shown. It remains in the artist’s possession, lasting proof that exhibitions are even more ephemeral than the documents they produce. Another lesson to abstract from Davey’s written thesis is one she learned as a teacher herself: “In one of the grad programs where I teach, students are required to write a thesis about their work and process. I notice that their photographs become vastly more interesting to me after I read what they’ve written about them: I like seeing their images shrunken and recontextualized, embedded in paragraphs of descriptive text.” Burn the Diaries, the book, makes discerning editorial use of photography, especially because the relationship between words and pictures here is far more associative than descriptive.

    What should not get lost in all of this reading is a sense of the heft and loft of the work itself. Text-based though her practice may be, Davey is an artist who makes objects and exhibitions. Burn the Diaries is not only the title of a book but also the name of the installation in which the book appears on a table, surrounded by a series of photographs printed on the scale of small posters and pinned directly to the walls of the gallery in which Davey’s new film, My Saints, is also shown. When asked how she would like to present the film – a question that has many ramifications, for a digitized medium can be shown on a monitor (what size? on a pedestal? wall mounted?) or as a projection (what’s the throw? how many lumens?) – Davey, ever pragmatic, specified only that there be a comfortable place for viewers to sit.

    These objects and their arrangement distill an entire household full of tables, chairs, books, screens, and couches. Like most pared-down gestures, Davey’s Spartan art has been years in the building. And since she is an artist who works at home, her rendition of gallery space into domestic space is a double occupation that operates on a surprising number of levels. On one, it is a feminist breach of authority to set up a modest life-work situation within the museum’s high cultural precinct. On another, Davey’s installation, though not exactly cozy, encourages us, as viewers, to make ourselves comfortable in the white cube; at the same time, it enforces a certain discipline. Reading requires concentration; to be lost in a book is to forget where you are and to forget even the object in hand (whether hardbound, paperback, or tablet). Similarly, Davey’s photos, film, and book all stand to disappear once viewers become readers within the volume of the gallery. So, quick, snap a picture. Davey’s show seems made, with provisionality in mind, to disappear – leaving in its wake a collection of documents: a book, a film, a stack of photos.

    The exhibition, Burn the Diaries, like the book, is editorial in construction, though perhaps less obviously. All similarly small in format, the photographs are arranged in a sequence of groupings that float – in a grid, a stack, or a line – with plenty of white space in between. The walls of the gallery stand like the pages of a giant picture essay, from which columns of text have been removed.

    The pictures are those Davey made for Burn the Diaries – including some that never actually made it into the book – plus images from past projects that expand on the book’s thematic lines and perennial preoccupations. Here are the dilapidated walls and dusty corners of Davey’s apartment building; here are cemeteries; here are dogs. The latter – portraits, really – Davey considers something of an indulgence (“I think my dogs have a human face,” she says of Rose and Bella’s sensitive gargoyle mugs). And yet, Davey notes, one often stumbles upon graves in the work of Genet, whose shuddering description of a scrawny dog taking a shit she quotes. Indeed, all the pictures hook back to the larger project of reading Genet, which in turn expands on the chapters of Davey’s own past work.

    The photos themselves are examples of her signature “mailers”: C-prints, folded and sent through the post. Each bears the marks of its journey – creases, stamps, spots of brightly colored tape, the name and address of recipient and sender written in ink – across the face of the image. Clearly identified as pieces of correspondence on view in the gallery to be read, mailers as a form entered Davey’s oeuvre almost by chance. She credits her Toronto dealer John Goodwin, long a creative catalyst when it comes to exhibiting her work. In 2007, Goodwin was so smitten with the look of some picture proofs he had asked Davey to fold up and mail to the gallery that he reproduced a facsimile of one as the announcement for her show. As works of art, the mailers were codified two years later when Davey, living in Paris on a residency, was invited by the New York gallery Murray Guy to participate in a group show. Daunted by the logistics and expense of shipping and framing, Davey had a liberating notion: Why not just mail the photographs and exhibit them as the pieces of paper they are?

    Davey hasn’t cut frames out of the picture entirely. One need only look at her early installations to see the strong and indelible presence of frames and framing. Regimented rows of gunmetal-blue steel frames turned her 1994 first gallery show at American Fine Arts in New York into a succinct study in museum display. At her final show at the gallery, a group of unframed photographs under glass was clustered on one wall like the elements of a collage that had drifted outside its frame and burst into a cloud of pictures. That was in 2003, the year dealer Colin de Land died and his gallery closed, in the wake of which Davey became a partner in Orchard, the pioneering space on the Lower East Side.

    Cooperatively run, Orchard brought the many activities of its members – art, music, film, performance, and writing – together in a discursive program of exhibitions and events. In 2006, Davey organized Reality/Play, a group show into which she inserted a screening of a new work of her own that marked her return to film. This curatorial experience, along with her experience of the basic dynamism of Orchard’s program – how others thought about space and used it – heightened Davey’s awareness of her work’s almost obverse relationship to space. Her training as a photographer had inculcated her to see everything within the context of the frame; everything outside it, she says, she simply edits out. Likewise, Davey’s approach to installation seems like that of a picture editor – whom we imagine works on a horizontal surface, say, a bog tabletop – sifting, sorting, cutting, pairing, and grouping images not according to their physical format but in terms of their relationship as images to one another.

    Film is all about editing. At ICA, Davey’s My Saints is shown as she prefers: projected in a dark space with a comfy couch – all the better to envelop us for the thirty-minute duration. In My Saints, artists, friends, and family members (many seated on couches) analyze a passage from Genet’s A Thief’s Journal. With each reading, the text – a scene in which Genet, the thief, watches with increasing detachment the mounting hysteria of a soldier searching for his stolen money – appears newly embodied. Each reader has her or his own individual take, and difference itself is manifested on-screen by the reader’s diverse ages, ethnicities, genders, and cultural backgrounds. Throughout the film, reading, subjectivity, and identity are powerfully linked and nuanced.

    In a sketchy reenactment of Genet’s text, scenes show cash being hidden and moved around Davey’s apartment, where her films are mostly shot. The first perp is her son, Barney. Now a teenager, he has been part of his mother’s work since he was born. (Davey’s first published book was the anthology Mother Reader, which she started to edit shortly after giving birth.) In My Saints, Barney stashes the cash in a book, which his mother later rifles through, only to find the money gone. In another scene, a violent game of tug-of-war between Barney’s father and the family dog is witnessed through a shadow play of silhouettes, cast across a bookcase in a sunny rom. The churning light and wild joy are as disruptive as a dream, as love.

    The film is an essay, structured in short episodes separated by titles, like the book with which the film shares narrative passages (Davey reading them in voice-over) and quotes (colorful typography on-screen). All three components – books, film, and photographs – contain overlapping material, though each has its own special scope and thrust. Unique to the film, for instance, are the interviews, which lightly play off a cinematic reference to Roam 666, Wim Wender’s 1982 documentary comprising a series of interviews with various people who respond to the same question about the future of film.

    We could keep going deeper into the processes of looking, cross-referencing analyzing, and interpreting that every frame, picture, and page invites. Certainly Davey’s arrangement – the couch, the table, the chair – has made us comfortable enough as viewers to settle down into the work of reading that she as an artist does every day. But we are almost out of time. We will have to limit our reading to just two passages, both from the film.

    “That was the hook,” Davey says near the beginning of My Saints, shortly after Dalal refers to Genet. Cut to a rickety ceiling fan, blades rotating, a little chain hanging down; enter, from below, Davey’s pale feet, followed by her long thin legs, reaching toward the ceiling then sticking up, midair. It’s just a little yoga, but so much else is there too, not least the artist’s own body. Davey has disclosed that she has been diagnosed with a degenerative disease, making both her frailty and her strength relative signs of the illness she lives with. Then there is the word “hooked,” offering a flash of legs hauled up and a body hanging like meat. To be hooked, of course, speaks of addiction (hooked on sex, drugs, booze, jazz, or Genet), the specific substance largely determining whether we’re talking attachment or abuse. Once you’re attuned, “hooked” is everywhere in Davey’s work, the word itself hooking together references, images, details, and texts into a powerful network, or safety net, holding art and life together by the delicate threads of strenuous reading.

    The second passage comes nearly at the end of the film. Davey and Strayer are on the phone, winding up their Genet reading project. “I kind of thought it was a money and shit thing,” Strayer says. “Can you comment?” The camera pans over black-and-white photographs Davey took in 1984 during a trip the pair made to Budapest, then stops on a portrait of Strayer gazing straight at the lens. Yes, Davey responds, at first she thought her reading of Genet was fairly typical, until she began hearing how much it differed from others’: only then did it “allow me to tap into memories… of my own sadism and my own tightfistedness.” Davey lets go a disarming chuckle, then declares, “You’re the first, Alison, to turn the table on me.”

    But the jig was up long ago. From the start, Davey’s work has depicted a complex imagery of that classic combination of money and shit, imagery that psychoanalysts read (and Bataille wrote about) in terms of excess and expenditure, abandon and control. Copperheads (1990), her uncannily enlarged portraits of old pennies, for instance, could not show lucre to be filthier. Her first film, Hell Notes (1990), starred Simon and Davey in the story of a wife whose money madness turns a couple’s life to shit – a Super 8 mm rendition of Erich von Stroheim’s silent classic Greed. Elsewhere she relates what a shrink once told her about paper and ink (smearing, pulpy, both inherently anal), offers tidbits from a cocktail-party conversation about laxatives, and gives a narrative of the family refrigerator, stocked weekly with nourishment and garbage, that is, frankly, twisted. In short, Strayer’s suspicion/insight seems consistent with Davey’s work as a whole.

    To be fair, it was Davey who first turned the table on Strayer. It may be mock horror, but when Strayer receives Davey’s photograph of a thin slice of a fat biography of Genet on a dinner plate, “with a troubling wash of pink on a napkin,” Strayer exclaims, “Scandale!” It’s Davey’s habit to cut books into portion that will make them more manageable to read, say, on the subway. Strayer may be more reverent, but she’s no less morbid; to illustrate her essay, Strayer sends a snapshot of her unfinished novel lying in state, under a body. Burn, eat, flesh, fuel. Like all writing, diaries consume time, energy, calories, turning life into nourishment for others. Close the book, set it back down on the table, where it turns into a small Surrealist object, a trompe l’oeil stack of books and papers with a plate stashed between the pages. A slim volume, for sure, but make a meal of it.

  • “FRP: An Induction.” Beverly Semmes: The Feminist Responsibility Project. Glassboro, New Jersey: Rowan University Art Gallery, 2011, pp. 5-6.

    FRP: An Induction

    What is the Feminist Responsibility Project? And why is Beverly Semmes in charge of it? By the time Semmes emerged as an artist, the first wave of Feminism had already subsided, transformed from a political form of activism to a cultural form of reference. Semmes is part of a generation who made their mark during the early 1990s with a Feminist take on Minimalist art of the 1960s. Think of the monumental, monochromatic, mostly metal, always hard monoliths of such artists as Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Richard Serra. Now apply fabric, fashion, the body, craft, appetite, desire, excess, because that’s exactly what Semmes—along with such peers as Janine Antoni, Polly Apfelbaum, Kiki Smith, Jessica Stockholder—seemed to be making sculpture with, for, and about.

    For instance Semmes’s Red Dress, 1992, now in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. As big as the wall, and attached to it by a hanger, this gargantuan velvet gown cascades to the floor, where it pools and pushes us out of the way like a coming tide, a red tide. Get it? The metaphors and imagery of Beverly Semmes’s art typically flow in this direction: from the female body and out into the landscape. Dresses are to be seen as vessels, as Semmes’s pots made of out glass and clay demonstrate. Like cartoon images of “making a pot,” these sculptural objects are gruntingly physical embodiments of the touch, the craft, the pleasure, and work that goes into building even the most elemental of forms. Whether it’s pots or dresses, Semmes’s works are environmental in sensibility and scale, billowing, icy, earthy, aqueous, or luminous, depending on material and color, which are always superabundant and sensational.

    There is also a performance aspect to Semmes’s work. The dress sculptures can appear as costumes, worn by gallery attendants as part of an exhibition, or by models in Semmes’s photographs and videos. The latter are usually family members and friends. (Getting people you care about involved with your work is always important.) Semmes too performs on occasion. She sometimes dons wig and sunglasses to deliver a talk, or, even, while working. As an artist-in-residence at Pilchuk Glass School, Semmes must have struck a glamorous note, hanging around the glory hole (as the firey center of the foundry is called) in a patently 70s get up.

    The seventies was, of course, also the heyday of Feminism, which brings us back around to the original question. The Feminist Responsibility Project—or, to use the artist’s acronym, FRP—makes its debut here at Rowan College in the form of a gallery installation with video, sculpture, photography, and two performers. The immediate impression is of a set-up so highly stylized and strange that is must stand for something. But what? The floor is covered in a foamy sea of white chiffon fabric, in the midst of which two women in voluminous gowns sit on chairs, facing one another. One woman’s gown is striped, the other’s a kind of canine camouflage, all-over-dog print. As identified by their attire and other insignia, the women are characters, the “Puritan” and “Super Bitch.” They are doing a picture puzzle, spread out on a table between them. Beside each woman a plastic dog sits like a sentry. Overhead hangs a beautiful chandelier, handcrafted of clear molten clay; it is lusciously globular.

    There are pictures on the walls. A projection covers one (like Warholian wallpaper, a picture that moves) with a video of a woman’s feet, kicking a potato over a frozen lake. The potato, painted pink, messes the ice and makes a dull thudding noise that fills the gallery space. On the other walls hang a series of pictures that come straight from the core of Beverly Semmes’s Feminist Responsibility Project.

    Over the past eight years and shown for the first time in this exhibition, Semmes has been diligently collecting and correcting images from what she refers to as “gentlemen’s magazines.” This is a ladylike (Semmes hails from the South with roots in Arkansas and Alabama) reference to her sources: vintage Hustler and Penthouse magazines, the pornography of which she has masked with strategic coats of paint. And if the five FRP works included at Rowan are anything to judge by, this project is much less straightforward than it may sound. For one thing, despite Semmes’s “corrections” it’s completely obvious that we are being confronted with shots of classic American porn. Splayed, spread, sucking on things, the women are more masked than concealed by paint-jobs that only amplify their objectification. Now things get tricky and funny, too, since the female objects on view are now simultaneously crude consumer objects of male desire and highly crafted feminist works of art. Focus on the painted parts and you see these silhouettes, the scale and shapes of which look a lot like Semmes’s sculptures: tactile, over-sized, sensual, scatological, enveloping, grotesque, humorous, basic. If you grabbed any one of these painted forms and set it on the floor, you would see one of Semmes’s pots or dresses. Masked in color, all of Semmes’s forms specify the body as something elemental with a hole in the center.

    The provocation of the hole lies at the center of the FRP installation. Note that the female attendants sit inside an erogenous “O” of fabric on the floor. (And of course, in porno-parlance, women are just holes.) So what is the puzzle that the Bitch and the Super Puritan are piecing together? It’s an FRP image that Semmes sent to a company in Germany that will turn any picture into a jigsaw puzzle. Speaking of puzzles, now seems like a good moment to introduce some of Beverly Semmes’s own notes about her installation. The use of fabric and craft, she writes, are intended to reference first wave Feminist art practices with their infusion into the mainstream of women’s work and decoration. The potato-kicking feet are flat-footed Freudian phallic symbols. Doing puzzles together is a favorite way of passing time with her mother.

    Like any sacred ceremony or mystery play, Semmes’s installation—with its fetish objects, icons, and acolytes—looks just sanctimonious and serious enough as to appear a little ridiculous to those of us who stand outside of it. Is this how Feminism looks today? Would only a bitch or a prig challenge the common wisdom that women have achieved equal opportunity as well as control over their own bodies? Has anyone been paying attention to Congress’s gambit to slash support of Planned Parenthood? Or, on a lighter note, has anyone read Tina Fey? The most successful woman in comedy has been writing about her experiences coming up with the guys who dominate her profession. From an essay in The New Yorker, here is one of Fey’s more pithy observations: “I have a suspicion—and hear me out, because this is a rough one—that the definition of ‘crazy’ in show business is a woman who keeps talking after no one wants to fuck her anymore.” Caustic, funny, fearless, I love this quote: it’s the Feminist Responsibility Project at work.

    Taken as a whole, Beverly Semmes’s FRP is a kind of camp. It disrupts the normal flow of pornography by strategically amplifying the awkward and obvious construction of the pose, the gaze, the exploitation, and the bodies that make it work. And it calls to order Feminism, along with social issues and political responsibilities that, in so-called Post-feminist culture, we may not care to embrace. Beverly Semmes’ FRP shows us that Feminism retains the super bitchy, pure crazy power to prove that we are no way near finished with the project.

  • “On Dirt.” Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay. Philadelphia: Institute for Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 2009, pp. 25-31.

    On Dirt

    These days the annals on dirt flop right open to writings on the informe or “formless.” That principle, as theorized by the French philosopher Georges Bataille, itself frequently recourses to mentions of mud. Mud oozes up around the big toe in Bataille’s rumination on that appendage, which enabled us as humans to stand erect in the first place. Head up to sky perhaps, but feet *and mind) forever mired. Mud is viscous and lugubrious. Smacking of excrement – of excess and expenditure – it is a base material, one of life’s raw essences. And it is home to those poor little earthworms Bataille calls upon to help his readers conceptualize the power of the informe to confer status so low as to be crushable on the spot and made formless as spit. This peculiar power is what makes the informe such a critical operative in recent art history: it undoes a narrative that privileges form, while offering nothing as an alternative. Nothing being everything in the universe rendered formless. In other words, the informe is a noun that performs as a verb. Bataille called it a mode d’emploi. And given what good use he made of mud, the informe seems an excellent rhetoric to employ in a discussion of clay as both material and impulse in contemporary art.

    There is even a guide for the discussion to follow: Yves-Alain Bois’s and Rosalin E. Krauss’s Formless: A User’s Guide. Published in conjunction with their 1996 exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, this book puts Bataille’s thinking to use by identifying those moments of slippage and rupture that signify the informe at work. Take, for instance, Jackson Pollock’s “allover painting,” a term that comes to sound like a quaint euphemism once you have seen his expulsive squirts and cloudy skeins obliterate the so-called language of abstraction. Likewise desecrating the field of postwar abstraction are Lucio Fontana’s ceramic sculptures with their scatological concreteness and fetishistically fingered surfaces. Dirt on Delight includes a work by Fontana – albeit a relatively more figurative one than the Formless example, which is impressively compared to a “massive turd.” And though it’s not mentioned in the Guide, Pollock also worked briefly in clay. There is a photograph of him in the 1967 Museum of Modern Art catalogue standing over a potter’s wheel. With an apron over his shirt and tie, he looks like a butcher, his hands covered in muck. The wheel belonged to an East Hampton neighbor, one Mrs. Lawrence Larkin, who evidently helped Pollock during the summer of 1949 make several abstract ceramic sculptures. The picture of one squished and spattered examples looks pretty much how one would imagine a rough sketch of the formless in clay would look.

    Since clay was only an incidental medium for Pollock, his work is not part of Dirt on Delight. However, the exhibition is teaming with objects, images, and gestures that resonate with an appreciation of the informe. Pats and piles, drips and smears, pinches and slashes, cuts and holes, squeezes and stretches. The notion of leveling also seems relevant to the exhibition’s general lack of formal distinctions. Whether at thing is kitsch, craft, amateur, folk or art does not signify. It’s all just so much earthworm castings: material to use. In terms of this show, it’s as if clay itself were a leveling medium, a disruptive fieldn of operations in which advancing and refressing are indistinguishable objectives. By the time we have entered the installation and are surrounded, it’s time to drop the Guide. (That is, it if hasn’t already been requisitioned by the authorities.) As useful as it is for making a theoretical approach to this material, it will only carry us so far in actually engaging with the works on view. The informe stops at nothing, remember. Yet, there remains so much dirt to dish. Or wedge.

    The first step in working with wet clay is to wedge it. This involves kneading, slapping and squeezing out any air bubbles that might lead to explosions in the kiln later down the line. Physical and direct, wedging offers a useful demonstration for getting to the material at hand: let’s just pummel the dirt out of clay. Slapped from all sides, as opposed to squeezed through one reading or text, dirt yields up many possible meanings, associations and histories for those who would engage in working with, looking at and thinking about clay. Ever resilient, it punches back with constant hits of delight. Like sex, the physicality and sensuality of which thrum throughout this exhibition, discerning the dirty from the delightful is inextricably intertwined when it comes to a material as elemental as clay.

    “First of all,” observed Rudolf Staffel, “working with clay (as anyone who’s ever touched clay knows), is a primordial experience that is very, very comfortable. I think every infant has manipulated something that was soft and gushy and pleasant to touch.” Staffel’s medium of choice was porcelain, the whiteness of which does not mask the small of the substance of his words. The infantile pleasure of playing with poop is one of life’s many early delights, and one sure to mature into neurosis and perversions if not checked by, say, a healthy interest in working with clay. Psychoanalysts may find much to read into all of the sculptural pieces of shit and fecal matter that dot this exhibition. Freud himself would have stopped for a beard-stroking pause over Robert Arneson’s John Figure: a sculptural toilet all embedded with bodily fragments. Made of stoneware and glazed filthy white, the work, in which a coiling turd figures, completely de-sublimates Freud’s contention that the whish to be clean is inseparable from the desire to be dirty.

    Sex may not be the first thing that comes to mind when one things of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, first shown in 1917. A porcelain urinal now enthroned in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia and other museums of art, modernism’s most infamous work of clay sculpture seems the very antithesis of the early, handmade ethos of Dirt on Delight. Except that Duchamp’s cool readymade is never the pure conceptual object it’s generally portended to be. Just look at the artist’s pseudonymous signature “R. Mutt,” scrawled like bathroom graffiti over the face of the shapely vessel, with its feisty little protrusion, to see how dirty-minded a thing it is. To say nothing of the artist’s sense of humor; don’t be hasty to dismiss Duchamp’s role in shaping the work on view. The Dirt on Delight checklist is riddled with titles that pay tribute, however inadvertently, to the master of visual puns, whose great legacy includes plenty of yuks for art. The erotic small sculpture of Kathy Butterly and Ron Nagle, respectively titled Like Butter and Hunter’s Tab, for instance. Clay may even be conducive to piling on the laughs (or smirks) that can kill less resilient works but which are one of the vital signs of the grotesque in art.

    When it comes to clay, surprisingly dirtier than shit are figurines. This class of small-scale sculpture has suffered insult ever since one of the founding figures of art history, Joachim Winckelmann, wondered why on earth Europeans had gone to such trouble to discover for themselves China’s secret for making porcelain when it was for the most part used only to produce “idiotic puppets.” Writing during the heyday of royal porcelain production, he considered the taste for figurines by Secres, Meissen, Nymphenberg – the very patronage of which carried the taint of Porzellankrankeit or “porcelain-disease,” a mania that ruined many an aristocrat’s coffer – to be plebian nevertheless. Winckelmann’s own Neoclassical ideals, popularized by the worthy pottery of Wedgewood, were based on Greek sculpture, which he falsely believed to have been pure white. He thus failed to see the artistry (or delight) in polychrome sculptures of peewee courtiers, miniature monkey musicians and tiny troupes of commedia dell’arte actors. Nor would he probably have been amused by Ann Agee’s contemporary twist on this tradition. Elegant figurines, handmade in multiple, are displayed on a table, like the products of some Rococo cottage industry. Forming a random tableau, they present us with an Arcadia in which butchering a pig is as wholesome and essential as burning a bra.

    Prejudices that persist against the figurine grant paradoxical power to those who dare its terms. Aspects of which are expressed by virtually every one of the artists in this exhibition. In turn, their works suggest some similarly dirty works for sculpture: curio, souvenir, tchotchkes and “little Gramma wares.” The last is how Ron Nagle once referred to the work of Ken Price. Said with all due respect and humor, of course, given that Price’s sculptures – their fetishistic finishes and forms – have granted generations of artists since permission to develop their own work along such lines. The dazzling colors and illustrative technique of Nagle’s sculptures comes directly from the hobbyist’s kit and craft of china-painting on prefab porcelain dishes and little statues. Is there anything more proverbially grandmotherly than that? To tally up the score: diminutive scale, decorative surface, exquisite detail, unabashed sentiment and artisanal craft, these are the terms of the figurine. And if they sound familiar, it’s because feminism has made them a generative means for addressing issues of contemporary life through art for decades. Issues of identity and craft, consumption and class, domesticity and labor, sex and beauty lie at the core of Dirt on Delight, and exhibition as feminist in its political tendencies as figurines are feminine in culture – pretty dirty stuff.

    Feminism takes dirt in stride. Think of some of the movement’s iconic works: Mierle Laderman Ukeles washing the steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum; Mary Kelly pressing her son’s soiled diaper into a Post-Partum Document; Anna Mendieta laying down naked in the earth to create an ephemeral Silhueta in the landscape. Plus what a field day artists had with the cliché of the female body as vessel, pulling things out and sticking things into holes that were theirs only to mess with. That said, Joyce Kozloff is one of the few leading figures to have made clay a primary material for her work: patterned tiles installed as carpets of color map myriad decorative arts traditions. And there are plenty of dishes in The Dinner Party that Judy Chicago threw for women throughout history. In both cases, however, clay is more a surface for painting than a material for sculpting.

    Perhaps it was the machismo of clay that used to keep women at bay. One artist in the show recalls encouraging words, heard as a student during the 1970s, from a professor teaching her class how to throw: he said it was good for the bustline! As a student during the 1980s. Kathy Butterly did not see herself working with clay until she saw Viola Frey demonstrate that a woman could. And though Frey’s über figurine sculptures engage with issues of feminism, she did not actively identify herself with the movement. Nor, generally speaking, have more recent generations wanted to ally themselves with a movement that would seem to situate them in the past or a politics that could limit (or put a stain on) a reading of their work.

    And yet, feminism is the context that came up again and again in conversation with artists during studio visits for Dirt on Delight. Or simply through the objects themselves, for instance, Jessica Jackson Hutchin’s kitchen table bedecked and festooned with papier-mâché and ceramic dishes puts family life and art playfully out there (it was originally shown alongside a video of her baby daughter, grooving in her car seat on a road trip). Or consider Jeffry Mitchell’s ersatz versions of traditional porcelain pieces all pumped up with emblems of gay identity. Chalk it up to a postfeminist era, when male and female artists alike deploy strategies first pioneered by women during the radical 1970s. It’s high time feminists called in their debts.

    Not all that glitters is gold, as any prospector will tell. You have to sift a lot of mud to hit pay dirt. Even then it might just be fool’s gold, or pyrite, as is the case with Sterling Ruby’s sinisterly sexual Pyrite Fourchette. Similarly, Nicole Cherubini’s G-Pot with Rocks is a spectacularly raw-looking vessel festooned in fake jewelry and chains. Indeed, there is a lot of mixing of it up between the crudeness of clay and the exquisiteness of jewels in Dirt on Delight. Readers of the informe might find in this imagery a near literal expression of Bataille’s principle of “sumptuary expenditure.” Mud being excrement, jewels being money, both are pure waste; and depending on what one is into, ecstatic transactions in loss. However if extreme transgression is not your bag, there are other, no less sumptuary takes on sparkles in and on the mud. One that Eartha Kitt, the chanteuse singer of “Santa Baby” (and who just died last Christmas) took as her creed. “I’m a dirt person,” she said, “I trust the dirt. I don’t trust diamonds and gold.”

    Since medieval times, sumptuary laws have been used to regulate consumption and keep folks in their place. In Renaissance Venice, sporting gold or silver threads was forbidden to those outside the aristocracy whose social status was signified as much by their freedom to wear what even those who could afford it could not. In terms of dirt, it’s not so much a question of what is forbidden as what is allowed. Working in clay, artists can build for themselves the treasures, relics, and triumphs that signify power, privilege and wealth. Look at all the iridescent and golden effects, the dazzling colors and rich tones on display in Dirt on Delight. See the royal retinue of chalices, vases and other ornamental plate. And look closely. Jane Irish’s vases, for instance may at first appear to be homespun versions of Secres porcelain-robber baron booty for the bohemian set. Until the decorative painting discloses a homeless person’s cart, a hotel maid scrubbing a toilet, and other less than charming scenes of contemporary life.

    Not always so politically overt, dirt is packed with demonstrations of clay’s incipient power to usurp, or at least mess with establishments. The exhibition itself might be seen to represent a major triumph for contemporary artists, who work irrespectively of the old ruling classifications between find and decorative arts, high and low, artist and folk artist. The work of Eugene Von Bruenchenhein seems relatively obscure; yet this visionary artist is one of the great progenerative figures in Paul Swenbeck’s personal pantheon. It was with their actual proximity in mind that Swenbeck created a whole new series of his figurative mandrake-root sculptures for this installation. Meanwhile, at the bitter root of Von Bruenchenhein’s art was the contention that he and his wife were descended from royalty, so he turned their house into a grotto, stuffed with crowns and other trappings of a lost civilization including the requisite jungle growth, all made of clay.

    Dirt is ground and artists have always covered a vast amount of terrain using clay. Indeed, today’s challenge to think globally is one that artists working in clay have acquiesced to for centuries. The authority of East Asian ceramics – its techniques, traditions and aesthetics – is practically a subtext for Dirt on Delight. This narrative could be dished in detail through individual artists and their learned predilections for Ming, Tang, Momoyama, mingei, celadon, blue and white, crazing, blanc des chines and countless other wares and desired effects that originate outside of the European tradition. It could also be summed up in the many references made by various artists to Chinese scholars’ rocks throughout the exhibition. Adrian Saxe’s raku renditions resemble highly aestheticized piles of shit and push the Japanese principles of wabi-sabi and shibui – of beauty in humble, natural forms and slightly bitter taste – to an extreme. But Asia is just one hemisphere of the clay globe, which lets artists travel virtually every place on earth, and throughout time. Unlike oil paint, for instance, clay’s ubiquity seems to make it the stuff of cultural transcendence. So Betty Woodman’s Winged Figure (Kimonio) draws a fluid line from the drapery of Japanese textiles to Brancusi. A line Arlene Shechet makes a thread of her in her sculptures, win which many spouted vessels sitting atop Constructivist bases, merge afterimages of the modernist studio with the many-armed gestures of Hindu deities. Why choose one’s gods at the exclusion of other when clay admits all?

    The question of taste leads to food. Tell someone “Eat dirt” and best stand back. Unless you are in some “geophagic” part of the world, like certain regions of China, Zimbabwe, and North Carolina, where there’s no insult in eating the local clay, just good nutrition. (A recent dirt-themed dinner held at San Francisco’s New Langton Arts featured a terroir tasting.) Building strong bodies is one of dirt’s mythic properties – Adam and the Golem were both men made of mud. Though the classic metaphor of the “human vessel,” turns stale in contrast to all the “flesh pots” on view. From Beverly Semme’s lumpen pinch pots, cloaked-to-choked in robes of color, to Arlene Shechet’s ashen-toned abstract ceramic lungs, Dirt on Delight is teaming with animate form and visceral clay bodies. Like flesh, clay is largely water. Until it’s cooked in the kiln, the ceramicist’s oven. It’s there that the alchemy of turning dirt into such delights as this exhibition holds ultimately transpires.

    And so does this essay, which took off from the notion of wedging, draw to its conclusion with firing. Imagine the smoke curling up from the incense burning in Von Breunchenhein’s “sensors.” The oil in Saxe’s Aladdinesque lamp is lit. Beatrice Wood’s goblets glow with the radiance of their own iridescent magnificence. And the nostalgie de la boue hangs heavy in the air: it’s complicated funk, this “nostalgia for the mud.” And like the informe, it’s another term from the French useful fro thinking about dirt. To speak of nostalgia of any kind invokes a sentimental longing for something that probably never really existed in the first place. Van Gogh went peasant, Gauguin native, in search of romantically simple lives and imagined communion with the earth. To be wistful for mud, however, seems ill advised, even silly. And yet, nostalgie de la boue is not so easily dismissed, given all that it connotes. “That which is crude, unworthy, degrading”: the dictionary definition leaves it at that. But let’s not leave out the lingering allure of the primitive, the authentic, the native, the natural, the simple, the handmade: the very non-civilized conditions that Freud himself said every civilization longs for in its discontent. (Bohemia was built from this boue). However incorrectly they have been deconstructed and disabused within postmodern culture, the critical power of these conditions remains intact.

    At least where clay is concerned, as the artists in this exhibition show, not through any sentimental longing, but by smartly crafting their work to represent those conditions – both dirty and delightful – that seem increasingly absent or remote from contemporary life. Especially in this moment, as we all face an economy that has been thrown down the crapper buy corporate interests that seem to have run the world into a state of ruin. Dirt has long been the bane and boon of a consumer culture built on entire industries devoted to personal hygiene and cleanliness, industries that simultaneously turn a blind eye to the environment, polluting it to the point of climatic meltdown. Dirt is the antithesis of the virtual and synthetic. It takes but a speck to destroy a disk, a chip, a hard drive – to damage beyond repair the highly polished surface of a Jeff Koons bunny or a Donald Judd Stack. And yet, it is in light of the overproduction of things we don’t need, coupled with the avoidance and denial of the stuff that’s just there, that artists‘ use of clay comes to seem not only prescient but also instructive. Dirt is always an option.

     

  • “Snow White in the Wrong Story: Paintings and Drawings by Marlene Dumas.” Arts Magazine, March 1991, pp. 59-63.

    Snow White in the Wrong Story: Paintings and Drawings by Marlene Dumas

     

    I am the place in which something has occurred.  —Claude Lévi-Strauss

    Like fairy tales before they’ve been bowdlerized, Marlene Dumas’s paintings and drawings are not pretty pictures. As the Brothers Grimm wrote it, the wicked queen’s demise was far from Disneyesque; she was forced to wear red-hot iron shoes at Snow White’s wedding and dance until she dropped down dead. For Dumas Snow White is no innocent girl: she’s a naked woman strapped to a table in a clinic. And where are her loyal dwarfs? Replaced by a juvenile tribunal of not-very-nice-looking private school boys, scrowling and staring at this vulnerable female spectacle.

    The camera she’s clutching and the flurry of Polaroids beneath her cold bier incriminated Dumas’s Snow White and the Broken Arm (1988) for snapping one too many: a paparazzi crime of which the artist herself might be guilty, since her figurative paintings all originate in the myriads of pictures she takes. And though this isn’t a portrait likeness, Dumas can be further identified with the princess in the tale and its tellers.

    Marlene Dumas was born in Capetown in 1953; she received her bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the local university in 1975. Seeking a less provincial environment for her art, she left her homeland for Holland to participate in Ateliers ’63 at Haarlem in 1976. Though her years in South Africa may not have been the most culturally stimulated, the country’s political realities gave rise to a dilemma that remains central to her art:

    The fact that I realized that because I was white in South Africa I was one of teh oppressors greatly confused me. I personally don’t see myself as a real oppressor, but I am a part of the oppression nevertheless…It can never really be resolved. You have an individual feeling about yourself, but if you then see yourself as a part of something else you can reach an entirely different conclusion about yourself. The one is no more, or less, truthful than the other.[footnote=1]

    For Dumas, discovering the dubiousness of being “fairest in the land” of South Africa entailed a loss of innocence. Her complicated self-image is reflected in a 1984 portrait where she appears looking altogether like the sweet young girl she once was, framed in radiant fall of glowing blonde hair.[footnote=2] The title of the painting, Evil Is Banal, sheds a different light on her identity; in the cracked mirror, Snow White saw that she herself was the wicked queen. Or, to quote another of the artist’s works, Dumas discovered herself to be Snow White in the Wrong Story.

    Dumas currently lives and works in Amsterdam. Her earliest Dutch art is an explorative mixture of drawing and collage, probing problems of artistic representation by adopting different approaches, one “no more, or less truthful, than the other.” In a note scribbled in the wings of one such untitled work, dated 1977, Dumas prescribes for herself: “The problems of interpreting circular forms” with their challenging circumferences traveling “Between the Zen circle + the traffic circel [sic].” A newspaper picture of an infant inching towards a rolling ring-toy crowns the top of a stack of pictorial solutions, which read vertically, like Chinese characters, in standing script. Below, circled and printed in red, is another photo showing an “unknown political prisoner,” bound and blindfolded. The shape of his bellowing mouth is echoed by the first letter ONBEKENDE POLITIEKE GEVANGENEN. Dumas punctuates the list with the final image, in her own hand: a lushly brushed circle of black ink.

    Dumas’s solutions to the problem of circular forms also take up the three predominant modes of address in contemporary art of the eighties. Reviewing the collage, again from the top, we see appropriation’s decontextualized imagery, current political art’s graphic explications, and Neo-Expressionism’s egocentric hand. Another line of text in the drawing, ALLES WAT ROOD IS, IS NEIT BLOED (All that’s red, in not blood) adds a note of ironic uncertainty to the act of interpretation, which is certainly in keeping with the times. But from this point, Dumas hones her fluency in these strategies, so does she subordinate them, sometimes even in the same brushstroke.

    In 1983 Dumas started painting assiduously in oil, beginning with a series of large portraits, followed by paintings of nudes, school children, pregnant women. The subjects were all close at hand, part of Dumas’s environment or condition. The birth of her daughter in 1987 inspired her ongoing work about infants, including The First People of 1990. But no matter how familiar, Dumas never paints from life, she states as if confessing to a crime:

    My people were all shot by a camera, framed before I painted them. They didn’t know that I’d do this to them.[footnote=3]

    Owning up to the act of violation implicit in taking pictures, Dumas is equally candid about preserving the perversities of her source, using an episcope projector to translate her images onto canvas. Her painting compositions often emulate Polaroids with their closely framed subjects pressed forward against unnaturally glowing grounds, while the paint itself follows the photo from areas of high resolution into slippery pools of unfocussed light. But as Dumas intimates, her truth to photography has a dark purpose. The Polaroid’s grease and glare act as a scrim, behind which Dumas strips her subjects, throwing away their unique identities; she has use only for their hides. Via the episcope, the artist’s own child ends up robbed of any claim to her mother’s sympathy and is transformed into a powerfully writhing cipher: one of The First People, full of unknown potential.

    In a text to accompany her exhibition The Private versus the Public, Dumas railed against the current “cynicism towards representation.”[footnote=4] Particularly in a postmodern period, when all kinds of representation are possible, art in which “everything is used and nothing is related,” “where (for example) nudes become signs and not ‘erotic presences,’ strikes her as disaffected and irresponsible. In a group of works whose subjects are nudes, Dumas challenges structuralism’s inability to make meaning, while demonstrating her power to create significant images.

    The pair of paintings Waiting (for Meaning) and Losing (Her Meaning) (1988) each depict a nude woman bent over in a pose that obscures her face and makes her body prone to penetration. The waiting woman is bent backwards, with her legs dangling over the side of what appears to be a coffin (Snow White’s perhaps?), while her sister lies, Ophelia-like, facing downward in oily dark water. Contrary to appearance, these images are not open-ended. They are “erotic presences” offering no reprieve in the form of popular theory to regard them as “empty signs.” The paintings’ titles fully incriminate the viewer as a voyeur, whose lascivious gaze makes the recumbent nude into a signifier of very particular meaning.

    In an inscription on one of her drawings, Dumas can be heard muttering ALWAYS THE FEMALE BODY, ALWAYS. This note of disappointment is amplified and clarified in a statement, “I am against…the nude.”[footnote=5] But her intolerance doesn’t prevent her from taking pleasure in depicting flesh and eroitc rapture. Indeed, she even considered it an especially delectable challenge to depict “without hatred, distrust, disgust or blame” a nude man.[footnote=6] The corresponding painting, The Particularity of Nakedness (1987), shows him stretched, supine, with his head resting on one extended arm, his face turned full to the viewer. The title announces what’s essential to the painting’s success in meeting the artist’s criteria. His body is not idealized brawn (in fact he’s rather skinny), nor is it formalized porn. He is, as naked people often are, vulnerable and sexual, with a gaze turned steadily on the viewer, acknowledging that his is an arousing presence. Dumas responds to these particulars with her explicitly sensual representation of his face, his flesh, his languorous pose. And though his forthright sexuality could inhabit the boudoir next door to Manet’s undressed Olympia, it actually comes from the tomb.

    In a sheet of notes with the heading, “Thinking about PAINTINGS of the human Figure,” Dumas identifies the source of the painting’s composition and the figure’s sexuality in The Particularity of Nakedness as Holbein’s Dead Christ.[footnote=7] These notes read, in part, like someone’s little black book, providing a list of names and what the book’s owner figures she stands to get by them: from Nolde, the glow—from Lucien Freud, the ordinary—from Alex Katz, the flatness of modernism. Other contacts are Diane Arbus, Eric Fischl, whose portrayals of “sexual guilt” are “better to read about than to see,” Philip Guston, Frida Kahlo, Stephen McKenna, Jackson Pollock, and Vermeer. There’s also a bit of the secret diary, confessing to cast-off affairs with de Kooning, whose Women she eventually found “too elegant,” and Clemente; “too sweet.” Notes of admiration are made for Alice Neel’s “beautiful portrait of Andy Warhol”; Baselitz, “My favorite painting of a foot,” and Beuys, “A Big Man” who made “tender + frail drawings.”

    These remarks, which turn Dumas’s private-sounding opinions and liaisons into public knowledge, are not an isolated peep through a pinhole. Dumas repeatedly comments on her art; exhibitions of her work always include her own blunt assessments. Aimed at personal demystification, this information prevents any speculation over her intentions, sources, and meaning. Within the context of postwar figure painting, Dumas assesses her own work as being an attempt to avoid representing “men as monsters,” while admitting to the difficulty of the task. She addresses things directly, without resorting to stylization, in order to arouse “an experience of empathy with my subject matter” in both her viewer and herself.[footnote=8]

    Beyond artist’s statements, writing is indispensable to Dumas’s work. Within the art itself, words are as essential as brushstrokes, particularly to the drawings. A sketch of a bespectacled gentleman bears the observation that WEARING GLASSES MAKES MEN AGGRESSIVE; beneath a drawing of an unbeautiful infant, Dumas declares, THE START OF IT ALL: OTHER PEOPLE’S BABIES, and she teases a naive-looking blonde to SAY SOMETHING ABOUT SOUTH AFRICA.[footnote=9] Such broad declarations render one unsure of the artist’s true position. Is Dumas actually of the opinion that “A weeping woman is disgusting”? Or are these statements meant to read like in a way that is comparable to Jenny Holzer’s texts? As if trying them on for effect, each artist vocalizes a spectrum of viewpoints, whose range encompasses a complicated state of moral ambiguity. When Dumas and Holzer mimic voices of authority, they are also recording the seductive sounds of oppression.

    Dumas’s drawings, which also come primarily from photographs, are more lifelike than her paintings. They seem to represent the moment when the shutter flashes open and shut, rather than including the processes of development and reproduction that are so much a part of the paintings. Coincidentally, several drawings show men with cameras, like Good Shot and Record secret sources. It’s also in Dumas’s quick-handed drawings that one finds the most explicit references to sexual and apartheid politics: there are images of police activities, torture, sexual aggression, and sexual politicking: a drawing of a man mounted atop a naked woman, who seems to be THE EAGER YOUNG ARTIST DISCOVER(ING) PROFESSIONALISM referred to in the inscription. The man’s ogling eyes are the same pair planted in the head of one of Snow White and the Broken Arm’s schoolboys, as if we were seeing the character in the drawing as a juvenile gaining youthful bad habits from a woman who is no fairy princess.

    Though moral ambiguity may not seem to be one of their chief characteristics, fairytales are always cruel stories, with punishment served up in excess for both good and bad behavior. Even though “the good” live happily ever after, it’s only on the condition that “the bad” are banished, burned, beheaded, or otherwise damned: misery becomes a requisite for happiness, which, though lifelife, hardly seems all good. As the Grimms put it in the preface to their Nursery and Household Tales:

    …we are not aiming at the kind of innocence achieved by timidly exercising whatever refers to certain situations and relations that take place every day and that simply cannot be kept hidden. In doing that you fool yourself into thinking that what can be removed from a book can be removed from life.

    Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s collection of folk stories began as an attempt to preserve a vanishing vernacular tradition. In the preface to the first edition of Nursery and Household Tales (published in 1812), they emphasized the anthropological nature of their original work, describing how they traveled throughout Germany, recording as accurately as possible the tales they heard told by each village storyteller. However, as their project continued, their objectives changed. They came to recognize that what sounded like an infinite number was actually only a handful of stories, endlessly embellished in place after place. Adapting these for the second and third editions of their book, the Grimms sought to strip away local variations in order to recount the essential story, making fairytales into literature.

    In a similar way, Marlene Dumas’s art repeatedly recounts what was, for her, the essential experience of learning first-hand what it means to be white under apartheid in South Africa. Except for Dumas, South Africa isn’t the place in which something has occurred; she is that place. At the risk of soiling her snow-white reputation, she disarms her alter-ego, a woman equipped to make pictures, and renders her the victim of a somewhat sinister voyeuristic scene. Dangerous tension between positions of power and vulnerability coexist throughout Dumas’s work. The nude levels a challenging gaze, seducing the viewer with his erotic presence at the same time that he is the subject of pornographic exposure. In another double-take, in a self-portrait image, the artist depicts herself as an apparition of blonde loveliness, in whom she also sees responsibility for enacting oppression.

    The portraits, nudes, and modern-day depictions of fairytale scenes that Dumas paints push her loss of innocence outside of a local situation into a cultural realm. They present a picture of reality complicated by conflicted points of view, aggressive sexuality, seditious words, and inexplicable acts. Central to each of these pictures, however, is expressed in her art a moral dilemma. She instills in her work all the imperative of a physical situation, in order to goad, seduce, wheedle and compel the viewer into a like struggle. And while these pictures do not provide tidy, or even grim resolutions to the questions they communicate, Dumas’s art actively investigates ambiguities of existence central to to cultural and political experience.