What is Real?

Josephine Halvorson, "Coral", 2009, 18" x 23", Oil on Linen (image courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.)



Anne Sherwood Pundyk, " A Little Kiss for Me", 2009, 10" x 8", Oil and Acrylic on Panel


Flesh or living matter is not a subject in Josephine Halvorson’s trompe l’oeil paintings. All of the materials, objects and substances she chooses to paint are inorganic or formerly organic at the time she paints them. Nothing alive can be found in her modest-sized paintings. So why do her paintings have such a palpable presence?

I turn to my own work to help me think through the answer. Several years ago, as I was sorting out an approach to painting, I decided that objects, landscapes and people were three distinct conceptual categories. The way I used paint when approaching each category would have to be completely different. With objects, I felt comfortable painting them. They were known entities and I could use a type of mimicry. With the brushwork I could construct with paint, more or less, how the object itself was constructed, situated and lit.

Landscape, I understood, could be painted (not represented, but conjured in paint) through a dance-like process. Landscape is everything beyond the object or outside the skin. Movement, as orientation, not mimicry, was the key to landscape. And then there was flesh. I studied traditional portraits; I looked extensively at other figure paintings. Sargent, Manet, Vermeer, Morisot, Cassatt. Time passed. My obsession with finding the alchemical formula for painting flesh continued. And it wasn't merely the flesh I wanted to paint. It was the resemblance, the form, the anatomy, the skeleton, the movement, the breath, the expression, the person, and the presence. Cecily Brown's work seemed to point the way -- other artists, too, including Amy Sillman, Francis Bacon, and even almost purely abstract work such as Joan Mitchell's.

Immanual Kant's Critique of Judgment provided the key. His methodological, categorical approach to the mysteries of beauty and the sublime opened a door. I became aware of the correspondence of the painter's body (and consciousness) to the world and the same correspondence shared between the artwork to the audience. I think it is just in my most recent work that -- by not trying to contain the notion of flesh, but paint the spirit contained in the flesh -- I can paint a living presence and world.

Now, back to Halvorson’s work. She has a clear-eyed, stripped down approach to both selecting her subjects (does she find them or do they find her?) and painting them in situ. Her choices appear to be the universe of the inorganic -- the breath, life and growth of her subjects are no longer present. But then it occurred to me what was happening. Her paint is the flesh. The act of painting her “overlooked subjects" (as she describes them) gives them their life.

Halvorson has linked her work to the children’s story The Velveteen Rabbit: or How Toys Become Real by Margery Williams (with illustrations by William Nicholson.) An inert toy rabbit grows conscious of the possibility of becoming not only beloved by the boy he belongs to, but a real flesh and blood rabbit. The toy rabbit must gain the boy’s love while surviving a lifetime of wear and tear. Another toy tells him, “…Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand." Halvorson’s planks, embers, gravestones, twigs and bricks have weathered several lifetimes and through her understanding they are resurrected in paint.

Introspective Shout Out: 2009

Notable moments in my interior life from the past year. A list. Not a complete nor comprehensive list. And, not listed in any special order --more a way to lasso a few impressions from a herd of unruly ideas.

• Re-reading Critique of Judgment about Beauty and the Sublime: Kant reinforces the identify-defining role of the individual in making judgments.
• Experiencing Linda Norden's game-changing programming of art exhibitions at CUNY Graduate Center’s The James Gallery.
• Attending Diana S. Pitt's memorial service.
• Working with Susan Eley Fine Art.
• Realizing that having cancer is like getting fired: you are now "the other."
• Seeing, reading and writing about paintings by Amy Sillman, Cecily Brown, Alice Neel, Joan Mitchell, Louise Fishman, Josephine Halvorson, and Angela Dufresne.
• Working with Theodore Hamm, Thomas Micchelli (from The Brooklyn Rail) and Jeff Pundyk, to edit my ideas in writing.
• Catching the “Beg, Borrow, Steal” show from the Rubell Family Collection in Miami with Karen Yama (reminding me of our good old days.)
• Seeing Evan’s performance in School Lite.
• Sitting on the floor of Borders bookstore with Rita Halbright talking about good books on feminism: my current favorite being “Women Who Run With the Wolves,” by Clarissa Pinkola Estes.
• Refreshing my conception of photography with Walter Benjamin, Tacita Dean, and Andrew Bush,
• Remembering Charles Daugherty, my art professor from Pomona College, who, of all my teachers from college through graduate school, attuned his responses to my expansiveness, not his own agenda.
• Going to see Alice Neal’s work at David Zwirner with Mary Hanlon.
• Being tipped off by Jeff about movie director, Kathryn Bigelow's interest in Jaques Lacan and how it's embodied in her film, "Hurt Locker."
• Savoring Peter Scheldahl's art reviews, and those of Roberta Smith, Holland Cotter and Michael Kimmelman, and Barry Schwabsky.
• Being reminded by Phoebe Pundyk about early Modernist art manifestos; and then thumbing through Herbert Read’s “A Concise History of Modern Painting,” pausing to read about Kandinsky and Cezanne while waiting for my radiation treatments.
• Learning about post-Freudian ideas on psychotherapy, such as inter-subjectivity, following the recommendations of Beth Mehan and Barbara Faden
• Having multi-directional conversations -- spun out from aspects of my work -- during visits in my studio with, among others, Orren Alperstein, Josephine Halvorson, Mike Quinn, Peter Scott, Wynn Kramarksy, and Linda Norden.
• Touring "Younger Than Jesus" at the New Museum with Julie Saul and learning from her about Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
• Digging into Jacques Lecan's ideas, especially about the gaze, as explained by Zizek in "A Pervert's Guide to Cinema."
• Seeing Francis Bacon's exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- noting the annex showing his source photographs -- after reading Gilles Deleuze’s “Logic of Sensation” (one of many readings suggested by Timothy Quigley.)
• Appreciating the aesthetic qualities of the French while reading “Camera Lucida” by Roland Barthes. (More thanks to TQ)
• Wondering why seeing Marlene Dumas's exhibition at MoMA was both upsetting and gratifying.
  
• Talking to Lenny Cassuto about the theme of captivity and at his suggestion reading Sigmund Freud’s “Civilization and Its Discontents.” Seeing, later that Andre Agassis's autobiography "Open" was pried from him using some of Freud’s thinking about the death instinct as applied to Agassi’s self-destructiveness.
• Swimming lanquidly through essays by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “Cezanne’s Doubt” and “Eye and Mind.”
• Running to see Monet’s Waterlillies at MoMA particularly after reading about their first installation in the 1950’s in Achim Hochdorfer's "A Hidden Reserve" in Artforum
• While recuperating, watching on DVD all 8 seasons of "The Gilmore Girls" which blends effortlessly lessons from the Myth of Persephone with “What Not to Wear” (Thank you Phoebe and Tala Ginsberg)

Above image: Anne Sherwood Pundyk, "You're There and Then You're Not", 2009, Oil and Acrylic on Linen, 65" x 63"

"Unconsciousness Raising" article in The Brooklyn Rail

I contributed this article to the September 2009 Brooklyn Rail:

This summer it was possible to wade in the waters of pornography, erotic art, psychoanalysis, and feminism by visiting four almost concurrent art exhibitions: Peeps at CUNY’s James Gallery; John Currin: Works on Paper—A Fifteen Year Survey of Women at Andrea Rosen Gallery; Dorothy Iannone: Lioness at The New Museum; and The Female Gaze: Women Look at Women at Cheim & Read. Taken together, these shows trace a line of erotic imagery from the crass commercialism of pure pornography to the more refined commercialism of the art gallery, raising questions about how these forms relate to modern sexuality. Let’s be explicit: sex sells. It sells itself—always one click away—and it sells other commodities: beer, cars, tennis rackets, and, yes, art. Certainly, the aspiration for erotic imagery presented in an art setting is that it would stimulate reflections on desire, sexism and human rights. Working from the opposite direction, however, the exploitative forces at work in the making and selling of pornography cannot be completely sugarcoated in a fine art frame...(read full article here.)

Tonight! ARTWALK NY 2009 Benefitting Coalition for the Homeless

ARTWALK NY 2009
Art Auction Benefit for Coalition for the Homeless
Co-chairs: Alec Baldwin, Richard Gere and Carey Lowell
Artist Honoree: Pat Steir

Skylight Studio, 275 Hudson Street, NYC
6:30 pm doors/8 pm live auction
Tickets are $200 and $500
Full details here

ARTWALK NY unites artists and art lovers in an effort to help our homeless neighbors, and to celebrate the most important artists of our time. Coalition for the Homeless provides housing, food, job training, crisis services and children's programs to thousands of New Yorkers each day. We believe that affordable housing, sufficient good, and the chance to work for a living wage are fundamental rights in a civilized society. Since 1981, we've fought successfully for lansting solutions to homelessness through our renowned advocacy.

Article on Andrew Bush's Photography in The Brooklyn Rail

I contributed "A Glance Backward While Driving Over the Edge" to The Brooklyn Rail's May 2009 Issue:

"Owning a car is an American birthright. It is the personalization of American power, prosperity, and autonomy. Regardless of the impact on the environment or national security, we Americans go where we want, when we want, and in the car of our choice. Speed is the hook: put your foot on the accelerator and go. At least, that’s the way it’s always been. Now, with the rapid slow-down of our economy, we are being forced to confront our relationship to our cars. Andrew Bush’s “Vector Portraits,” photographs of people driving their cars, can give us a place to start. Opening April 23rd, two Chelsea galleries—Yossi Milo and Julie Saul—are showing Bush’s near life-size color images taken in the 1990s..." (read full article here.)

Sigmund Freud Snack

Freud's clearheaded description of religion's myths encourages further thinking about its ongoing pitfalls. In "Civilization and Its Discontents," published in 1930, Freud quoted below his own writing from another book, "Future of an Illusion," from three years earlier.

"...I was concerned...with what the common man understands by his religion--with the system of doctrines and promises which on the one hand explains to him the riddles of this world with enviable completeness, and on the other, assures him that a careful Providence will watch over his life and will compensate him in a future existence for any frustrations he suffers here. The common man cannot imagine this Providence otherwise than in the figure of an enormously exalted father. Only such a being can understand the needs of the children of man and be softened by their prayers and placated by the signs of their remorse. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.

Above image by Anne Sherwood Pundyk: "Dispersions (with Josephine in mind)", 2009, Oil and Acrylic on Panel, 10" x 8"

Judy Glantzman: The White Paintings, 1999-2001 at Betty Cuningham Gallery

To die, to sleep.

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub,

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause.

It’s only from observing someone else’s death that we can get any clues about what dreams may come. All we have to go on is our experience as a witness to another’s death -- its approach, occurrence and aftermath. Our response to this sequence of events is shaped by how well we know the deceased and how well we know ourselves. There is a special pull and fascination with having proximity to another’s death. What we see “gives us pause.” Eventually, we know, it will be our turn.

Nearly a decade ago painter Judy Glantzman kept her father company as his health deteriorated. She briefly tried sketching him, she told me recently, but was not comfortable representing her father’s decline directly. Glantzman took the impulse of recording her experience of his death back to her studio. She wrote of bringing to her painting a heightened sense of the provisional nature of our “physical selves.” The resulting work was not shown widely at the time it was painted. It is, however, the basis for Glantzman’s show at Betty Cuningham Gallery this summer, “The White Paintings 1999 -2001.”

The focus of the show is five large, mostly white oil paintings. In each work there is a single, ambiguous presence drawn in contours of paint using minimal color – mostly reds and muted blues. Centrally placed, the lone figure is female and has a youthful, fidgety appearance. The effect is spare, as opposed to the colorful, populated feel to much of Glantzman’s prior and subsequent works.

The figures are incomplete and misshapen, missing arms, a torso, or legs. Rendered quickly in narrow painted lines, several wear a veil or headpiece and some are clothed in a full gathered skirt. The most prominent element in each painting is the subject’s doll-like face. The stylized facial features have similar proportions as they face the viewer. They could all be drawn from a classicized conception of the human face rather than from a specific individual.

Overall, the works have an interrupted and erased feel as if the artist made multiple, incomplete attempts at rendering her subject. What is left of the figure for us to see has been partially covered or reworked. However, the unfinished quality of the rendering does not result in an unfinished work. The striving and repeated attempts to understand her idealized subject suggest that which we can never really know.

Above image courtesy of the artist and Betty Cuningham Gallery:

by Judy Glantzman "Angel," 2000, Oil on Canvas, 90" x 80"