An Informal Approch to Formal Relationships

In a stunning display of clean, medium mastery, Catherine Opie takes over the axillary galleries of the Guggenheim museum for a mid-career retrospective in Catherine Opie: American Photographer, which spans nearly the last twenty years. The work is capricious, contradictory and complex but never ambivalent. This show may make a lot of different statements, but it doesn’t back away from any of them. With each work Opie addresses not only a hyper detailed, often color intense world full of formal relationships, but the power photography has to offer up the very moments of our lives as a work of art.

Each floor of the four organic, bright, cave-ish galleries that spawn off the main spiral of the Guggenheim could be the work of a different artist. The few things that hold together a body of work as varied as Opie’s are: medium, intensity, and a strong grasp of design. For this reason the show’s title is slightly problematic. While what it means to be an American photographer is certainly a topic worthy of varied discussion, it seems like a cheap label for a photographer more interested in making exceptions than making rules. Undoubtedly the headline is an attempt to grasp at this conflict and add a sense of authority to the subject matter; but the work neither needs it nor embraces it.

The first two floors of the exhibition are the earliest and the most disparate. On floor one, a collection of ghost town photographs in black and white shift from large mantle piece sized prints, to collections of small snap-shot gatherings. The city and freeway locations are indicated only in the subversive subtitles to their dogmatic numbered and untitled status. Prints such as Untitled #14 (Wall Street) offer a deafeningly silent linear perspective at pedestrian view, while the series of arabesquing, fluctuating, slithering lines that make up the miniatures of the Los Angeles freeway ramps sing softly in violin. Each photograph rings of Lee Freelander’s intentionally formal observations on landscape, Charles Marville’s less intentional documentation of street forms, and Charles Sheeler’s majestically linear factories; in short an appropriate addition to the proud tradition of formally observant photography.

The following floor’s offering of portraits is a totally new game, not only with its lurid, high gloss color, but its unwavering documentation of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender community. In the early to mid nineteen nineties when these photographs were taken and displayed, no doubt they struck the eyes of more resistant audiences. The figures of Vaginal Davis (1994), a nude, African American drag queen whose naughty bits are obscured by a patch of neon green pubic hair and Daddy Irwin and Mark (1994), a Gay couple decked in leather, the younger of the two clinging to his master’s leg; now actually seem just a little passé. This selection is arguably the least interesting of the show. The portraits reduce each subject to a type, sometimes a just a stereotype, plastered against a candy colored backdrop; which says more the anti-gay culture that inspired the photographs than the subjects themselves. Now, they seem a little comical and unnecessary in an era when everything is shocking and everything has been done. Reduced to the outlandishness of their physical appearances, they can’t stand the test of time devoid of the nuances that would make them individuals.

On the third floor, Opie departs yet again, this time to the expanses of Minnesota tundra and California ocean. Creating the ultimate photographic meditative space, Opie incited her curators to position a series of stills from either landscape in a succession on each side of facing walls in a long corridor gallery. Both the tundra and the ocean are populated with tiny forms that create a greater contrast to the vast expanse they inhabit. On one side, surfers cluster together against the swells and on the other ice houses huddle in a blizzard. The effect is tender, or as Opie calls it, “human”; a gentle reminder in two acts of our insignificance to the whims of this world.

On the final floor, Opie ends the retrospective with grand gestures and personal insight. In the immediate gallery off the elevator is by far one of the most devastatingly beautiful photographs I have ever seen in my life. Ron Athey/The Sick Man (From Deliverance) (2000), is transcendence on all planes. This looming, one of a kind, Polaroid rushes deep sinking blue-black, down to the base of its nine feet where a great, dark figure emerges, as if from a surrealist’s dream or a mythical Louisiana bayou, to cradle the ghostly, tattooed form of a man in the throws of some terrible affliction. The intense compassion of this unconventional pieta is never more evident than in the subtle gaze of the dark man, which radiates sorrow, and the mercy in his gentle embrace.

Across the hall is Opie’s most recent work, a collection of photographs that document her personal relationships. In this context, the photographs or her son and partner, which are really nothing more than glorified snapshots, do not feel out of place. Having looked in so many other directions it seems only fitting that the collection should leave off on a note of introspection. Included are formal studies of her neighborhood such as Abandoned TV (2005), small Polaroids that serve as satirical impressions of the president, and a Rainbow Kite (2005). Introspection is just the place to end a show that has included Gay couples from multiple states, Opie breast feeding her baby son, people plastered in needles and tattoos, and the front doors of Beverly Hills homes. It is an appropriate reminder that while a mind and a lens can encompass an endless variety of ideas, the forms of them always take shape from a mind influenced by the things that happen in and around home.

Great Contemporary Painting? Maybe Not.

It is no uncommon thing in this age of art making to re-use and recontextualize ideas, images, or even text. We call it appropriation and generally list it as one of the hallmarks of postmodernism. It can be an innovative way to shed the light of evolved perspective on our preconceptions. However, there is a fine line between appropriation and a lack of genuine inspiration. It is this line that both artists on view at The New Museum seem to be tripping over.

In Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton, a mid-career retrospective spanning the last seventeen years of the artist’s career and on view from October 8, 2008 through January 11, 2009, viewers are offered a jaunty, glam look at pop iconography chosen seemly at random and painted to affect the disaffected. Each canvas over the two floors of the exhibition is situated at eye level, at the center of its own spotlight, and makes the walls of the gallery feel enormous in comparison to their relatively small size. The wall placement and size surface memories of icon paintings in the same way that Warhol did with his celebrity screen prints. By contrasting the dreamy, watercolor-like skin tones of her idols with thick, brush stroke laden clothing and scenes reduced to their formal qualities, Peyton imbues her figures with a luminous, ideal sensuality. These qualities are enjoyed by her subject matter which consists of likes of celebrities like Kurt Cobain, Liam Gallagher, Jarvis Crocker, Queen Elizabeth and Michelle Obama; takes dives into her personal life with paintings of former lovers; and embraces history by styling and cropping images of Georgia O’Keeffe, David Hockney and Frida Kahlo.

To be immune to the devastatingly lush colors of these paintings would be to be made of stone. Paintings such as Blue Liam radiate raw emotion by contrasting deep red lips with violet shadowed piercing blue eyes and Ben Drawing is all sweet pink skin, chocolate hair and plunging, bright diagonals. Peyton deserves credit for her ability to arouse passion through technique, but is that really enough to earn her a spot in the cannon of great painters? When read in the greater context of contemporary art, her work becomes soppingly sentimental; like the longings of a teenager after an idolized but unknown star. Peyton is often praised for painting her own nostalgia under the heading that it represents a greater cultural attachment, and while some of her subject matter does indeed fall into the category of widely beloved, the same-ness of her approach adds nothing to her subjects. There is no sense that Peyton paints her love of these people, as Hockney did, or her need to get to the real in them as Courbet did, or to comment on her belief in our cultural idealization of them as Warhol did. If Peyton can be compared to another portrait artist, it must be John Singer Sargent, who painted his subjects to paint them beautifully. Even that association misses the mark since Peyton leaves out all of the individual nuances of character found in a Sargent. The false spark of Peyton is that she fools us into thinking we are seeing something truly personal by remixing the ideologies of past favorites with tantalizing colors and close cropped intimacy. Peyton gives us our heart’s desire wrapped in rich cellophane; but the fault is ours if we mistake chocolate for love.

Downstairs at Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone, on view from October 22, 2008 through January 26, 2009, a slightly different type of informed borrowing is on display. Heilmann, a 68 to Peyton’s 43, also has some trouble separating herself from art history. The aptly named To Be Someone no doubt references Heilmann’s desire to express herself through process painting; something she expands on in her interview in the show’s accompanying pamphlet. In the interview Heilmann discusses how her meditations on things like a two-lane highways and The Simpsons inspire her to create her bright, organized mess of abstractions. The difficulty in dealing with her intentions here, however, is that the end result of this process is just a little too strikingly similar to the artists operating in New York when she was a girl. Upon stepping off the elevator one is immediately confronted with what turns out to be two massive red paintings titled Chinatown and placed next to each other leaving an almost insignificant white line between them. Each painting, though entirely within the same vibrant orange-red has a slightly different tone of this color in outline painted around the edges. The effect so totally represents the merging of a Barnett Newman with a Mark Rothko that it takes a few moments to remember whose exhibition one is at exactly. To the left is a collection of canvases reshaped, in the style of Frank Stella, covered in day-glo paint shapes and abstractions that could summon up the ghosts of any number of other artists from Piet Mondrian to Ad Reinhardt. Around the corner is a sculpture that hangs overhead in black with small, tin-foil looking protrusions extending downward that immediately conjures images of Louis Bourgeouis The Destruction of the Father. As the exhibition continues in a small, disjointed area off the lobby on the first floor, Heilmann’s celebrated Surfing on Acid makes an appearance in messy, blobs of wavy lines in reds blacks and yellows over a Pepto-Bismol pink canvas. It is in viewing this piece that one can fully come to the conclusion that the Someone Heilmann wishes to be is a combination of Jasper Johns and Morris Louis.

Back in the pamphlet interview, Heilmann is talking about going to New York in the late 1960s after her time as a sculptor at Berkley and wanting to join what she calls “the gang”, but finding herself excluded. All these years later it seems that despite her playful intentions, Heilmann’s process based throwbacks are just an homage to all of the artists she once wanted to be. There really is an element of glee in the gallery of messy rehashes, punctuated by colorful, woven backed chairs, made to accommodate all sizes, and outfitted with wheels to roll around the exhibitions with. Heilmann’s silliness is refreshing and very pleasurable to partake of, but outside what is clearly an earnest desire to engage her viewers with her sense of play, there is nothing new to see here.

It is no small thing to try and offer up something with unique characteristics; something that engages visually and challenges mentally in a time when everything has been done. There is also a value to appropriation when it does confront and recontextualize. Both Heilmann and Peyton manage to make connections with their audience, and it is good to be entertained. However, if this is our idea of great contemporary painting to best represent our times, we are in deep trouble.

Giving Thanks

I did not go home this year for Thanksgiving because plane tickets cost somewhere between 400 and 600 dollars. Grad school, for me, has been a return to impoverished life, and so that kind of expense is just not in the budget if I want to be able to eat; ever. This is the second time that I have not gone home for this particular holiday, but I think a lot has changed since the last time and the circumstances of my day where much different. I really enjoyed Thanksgiving this year, despite the fact that I miss my family and would have loved to see them. I'll be going home for Christmas in a few weeks (something I am looking forward to so earnestly I can almost feel their arms pressed around me in excited hugs, smell the warm cinnamon and sage of my parents house and feel the spastic furry licks of my dogs) and it seems unnecessary to head home for one day. I've never even really liked Thanksgiving that much, if I'm honest. Normally it is a holiday I am forced to spend making small talk with people I hardly know or don't particularly like or some combination of both. Last year I was dragged across the state to sit awkwardly in the kitchen of a family my parents had hardly been in touch with since we moved out of Grand Rapids nearly ten years ago. The only pleasant part of the trip was being able to sneak away to an old friend's house and share a few totally indulgent hours with her and another friend; getting sloshed on red wine and soaking in the hot tub. When I returned that evening to the house of the once removed family friends, I was put to sleep on an air mattress set up on a large cot. In short order the air mattress deflated, leaving me in a painful jumble of plastic and poking metal bars. As soon as I untangled my groggy, irritable self, I relocated to the small wicker couch in the corner and slept crouched, cramped and cold for a tumultuous five hours. Needless to say, I was stationed nearest to the coffee pot the following morning, anxious for my family to leave, and for the uncomfortable holiday to be over.

In years previous, since my parents relocated to the eastern side of Michigan, Thanksgiving is mostly spent at either my parent's our my paternal Grandmother's house. In either case, the same set of brash characters can be expected to attend. These include: my aunt, who practices the art of pleasant banter at the expense of anyone she can victimize, always certain to bring up the least welcome possible topic or most sensitive gaff, followed with pejorative criticism and her nervous cackle; My brain cancer survivor cousin and her husband, she, still able to issue sarcastic commentary from the shell of her enfeebled body and he, unclear on why the Gays, contemporary art, and vegetables continue to exist when he has made it clear how much he disapproves of them; these two are sure to bring their dog, a substitute for the children they will never have, an ugly, disruptive and spoiled pug, that spends the day flailing itself around the house like a rubber chicken flung out of a sling-shot; my Grandmother, a woman who makes a lack of depth an ornament of pride, and is adamantly incapable of conversations that do not include the olden days, her permanently ailing health, Jesus, and television commercials; And finally, my twice divorced cousin, considered the black sheep by the rest of her family for her sensitive heart, searching mind, and bumpy quest to find meaning and peace for herself in this world.

I do feel a little bad about abandoning my sisters to this fate, but they are mostly grown now, and I am certainly not more capable then they of deflecting the friction of these family gatherings. They are generally smart enough to disappear at some point, whereas I, as the oldest, am left at the mercy of the "adult" company; forced to represent my siblings as an ambassador of polite replies and best behavior. My absence is always commented on and interrupted. Thank God we aren't teetotalers.

This year, I got all the best of my family with none of the difficulties. I had a fantastic, hour long conversation via video-phone with my brother in California and a pleasant chat with my parents with snippets of my extended family (my Grandmother sitting in her usual aura of silent, self pity in the background, and my aunt barking some comment about my roommate's age) and a moment or two of my sisters. True, I did not have any turkey or stuffing and I did not get sloshed, but in place of that: I slept late, I made myself eggs and toast, I watched old movies that I love and read for school. In the evening I had a long, enjoyable conversation with my roommate over a warm mug of black tea with cream and sugar, and I watched the sun set over the rooftops of Brooklyn through my bedroom window. It was a totally enjoyable day, a rarity in my history of Thanksgivings; and for that I am very thankful.