ART REVIEW
The Artwork Runs Hot, With
Infusions of Cool
At the Parrish, Unsettling Works by More Than 30 Artists, From Egon Schiele to Ron Mueck
By Benjamin Genocchio
Aug. 26, 2007
When word got out that the celebrated painter and East End resident Eric Fischl was organizing an exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, the Long Island art community was gripped with expectation. Almost 25 years had passed since Mr. Fischl arrived on the New York art scene with provocative pastiche paintings combining popular cultural imagery and sexually charged nudes.
Mr. Fischl approaches curating as he approaches composition. He strives for images that are free, poetic, full of imaginative ambiguities and, at the same time, characterized by intimacy.
And the subject matter? Suffice it to say that Mr. Fischl has not lost his appreciation of the nude female form. Yet the show, titled “All the More Real: Portrayals of Intimacy and Empathy” and organized in collaboration with Merrill Falkenberg, the museum’s adjunct curator, combines two distinct if not entirely cohesive groups of artwork. One is devoted to Mr. Fischl’s explicit and painterly preoccupations, the other to Ms. Falkenberg’s preferences for more modest, cooler imagery.
Since the show is heavy on images of female nudity, it is reasonable to assume that Mr. Fischl had the upper hand. It is also reasonable to assume that Mr. Fischl had a strong hand in the hanging, which aside from being elegant and spare is arranged to suggest the gradual transformation of the body from birth to death.
It begins with a group of paintings that includes Alice Neel’s loosely brushed portrait of a pregnant woman sitting on a bed, followed by Ron Mueck’s photorealist sculpture of a naked woman and a newborn baby. From this opening the curators go on to present an engaging if highly idiosyncratic history of the body in art.
The novelty of the exhibition is the mix of contemporary and historical artwork. These days it is rare to see multigenerational art exhibitions, let alone one encompassing the work of artists as distant in time (if not temperament) as Lucien Freud, Egon Schiele, Chuck Close, Tom Friedman, Emily Eveleth, Vito Acconci, Cindy Sherman, Joan Semmel and Catherine Opie, to name a few of the more than 30 artists whose work is included.
The curators have done a marvelous job of assembling high-caliber artists and works. Several more paintings, photographs and sculptures of babies (Diane Arbus, Jeff Hesser, James Croak) are followed by imagery of early childhood and adolescence. It seemed to me that the show’s sensibility began to fluctuate at this point, with the introduction of more ironic, even detached imagery of the body alongside the visceral stuff like graphic nudity. No doubt Ms. Falkenberg had a hand in this selection, especially the inclusion of Loretta Lux’s austere, almost robotic photographs of children innocently gazing at the camera as if posing for a family portrait. They are prim and proper.
The next section is filled with compositions that juxtapose painterly images of voluptuous naked female figures (by Jenny Saville, Cynthia Westwood and Mr. Freud) with images of food and fruit evoking the female anatomy; for example, Joan Goldin’s photograph of two large melons poised against a sensual ochre background. There is no male nudity in this part of the show, unless you want to count a Robert Gober sculpture, an unlighted candle placed on a square base embedded with black hair.
The final room is a grab bag but perhaps the most interesting area, full of thoughtful images and objects whose aesthetic origins can be traced mostly to realism. Some of the works are concerned with the technique of realism (including those by Evan Penny, Alexandra Moore and Tim Gardner), while others have more to do with expressing intimacy and empathy (Karel Funk, Do-Ho Suh, Y. Z. Kami, Mr. Close, Ms. Sherman), capturing a gesture, look, mood or moment that otherwise might have gone unseen. In art, that’s what it means to be all the more real.
“All the More Real: Portrayals of Intimacy and Empathy,” the Parrish Art Museum,
25 Job’s Lane, Southampton, through Oct. 14. Information: (631) 283-2118 or www.parrishart.org.
UNSPARING
Clockwise from far left:
a 2001 Loretta Lux photograph;
a 1994 painting by Catherine Murphy; and
a 2002 photograph by Joan Goldin.
ART REVIEW | 'ALL THE MORE REAL'
Those Rumors of Painting’s
Death? Exaggerated
By Martha Schwendener
Aug. 24, 2007
SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. — Some battles in art are never fully resolved. Take the one over painting.
In “A Meditation on the Death of Painting,” a catalog essay for the current exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum, the painter Eric Fischl, who organized the show with Merrill Falkenberg of the Parrish, mentions a 1968 article in Art in America announcing that painting was dead.
At that moment the claim carried some weight. Vito Acconci was biting himself and calling it “Trademarks.” A few years later, in the performance “Shoot,” a gun was fired at Chris Burden inside a gallery near Los Angeles. And two years after that, Carolee Schneeman performed “Interior Scroll” right down the road from the Parrish in East Hampton, reading from a little scroll pulled from her vagina.
“By the time you have artists doing bad things to themselves in the name of art,” Mr. Fischl writes, “you have absolutely reached a point where the audience can no longer follow, at least not in a healthy way.”
But wait. Wasn’t Mr. Fischl part of the generation of artists that won that battle in the late 1970s and early 1980s, bringing painting and figurative art back in one triumphant stroke?
The show at the Parrish, “All the More Real: Portrayals of Intimacy and Empathy,” stems from discussions between Mr. Fischl and Ms. Falkenberg, who met when Mr. Fischl saw a film at the museum about the strategies artists use to elicit responses from viewers. With Mr. Fischl’s ruminations on the death of painting and Ms. Falkenberg’s catalog essay, which considers what she calls the “tentative emergence” of realism, “All the More Real” has the makings of a rather conservative, backward-looking show.
Yet on the walls and in the galleries, it doesn’t necessarily feel that way.
The show skims over the last century, plucking figurative works from different decades and installing them in a slightly disjointed fashion. At the entrance, scale is the issue. Tom Friedman’s tiny self-portrait head carved from an aspirin tablet is hung near Jeff Hesser’s larger-than-life-size “Baby Face,” a paunchy beeswax head that conflates bloated middle age with infant blubber.
In the next section objects are arranged to mirror the human life cycle. Newborns are cast in dirt by James Croak, painted in sickly watercolors by Egon Schiele and perched on a mother’s belly in Ron Mueck’s hyperrealist fiberglass and silicone sculpture. Loretta Lux’s ubiquitous photographs of unsmiling, alien-looking children are followed by Tim Gardner’s pastel copies of his 9th- and 10th- grade school photographs. Old age arrives in Tierney Gearon’s C-prints, which pair members of her family from different generations.
Then the show shifts gears. The next grouping considers the body as a site of anxiety, neuroses and disease, hallmarks of 1980s and 1990s art that responded to AIDS (and to theorists like Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva).
Louise Bourgeois, whose work often makes frank reference to her family, offers a grimacing fabric-covered head with the gut-twisting title “We Love You.” Cancer cells become delicate, decorative pointillism in Ross Bleckner’s canvas. Doughnuts oozing purple-crimson jelly conjure human orifices in Emily Eveleth’s paintings, and melons look like removed organs in Joan Goldin’s iris print.
Mr. Fischl hasn’t included any of his own paintings, but you see reflections of his work everywhere, most obviously in a freestanding wall of figurative oil paintings of nude women by Cynthia Westwood, Joan Semmel and Lucian Freud. Here brushstrokes, scale and different vantage points are deployed to connect the psychology of the sitter, the artist and the viewer. Other works that feel pertinent to Mr. Fischl’s oeuvre include Alice Neel’s painting of a wary-looking “Pregnant Betty Homitsky” and Chuck Close’s portrait of his wife built up from his thumbprints, which offers a new take on the artist’s “touch.”
You can also see Mr. Fischl’s interest in the psychological impact of the image in works by contemporaries like Cindy Sherman and Robert Gober, as well as younger artists like Karel Funk, who paints his subjects from oblique angles or seen from behind.
In its thinking about artistic strategies, rather than where painting and figurative art stand in the current art hierarchy, the show gets interesting. How do you make art “more real” than the objects — in this case, people — it represents? Or, to make things simpler, how do you pull viewers out of the rut of expectation?
Figurative artists have always borrowed and reconfigured what was before them, and imagined how their ancestors would have disapproved. The Greeks probably wouldn’t have liked the Romans’ portraits, in which heads were severed from the rest of the body. Some have argued that Michelangelo would be appalled with contemporary art’s focus on the abject, psychological and uncanny aspects of the body. (Though Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment” in the Sistine Chapel, with its steroidal figures and self-portrait painted on a flayed martyr’s skin, isn’t exactly for the faint of stomach.)
“All the More Real” feels at times like a master class led by Mr. Fischl, although a somewhat anachronistic one. Painting is hardly dead. And humans will undoubtedly be making images of themselves, in some medium, as long as they make art. Walk around Chelsea today and you’ll see no dearth of figurative painting. You also might discover young abstract painters who claim that they are in the minority and that the art of the last 15 years has shunned abstraction, banishing it to the sidelines.
In this sense, perhaps the best way to view this show is as an assisted portrait of the artist, seen through his own eyes rather than painted by his hand.