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.