|
|
|
|
|
Hey, Boys and Girls
John Haberin New York City
Gallery-Going: Chelsea in Spring 2002
Bruce Nauman, Kate Shepherd, and Eileen Brady Nelson
Boys will be boys. This spring, male bravado fills the galleries once again, starting with Bruce Nauman.
Meanwhile some women artists seem all too eager to lay back and comply. Or do they? Art has a way of slipping the good stuff past you. But this is art, after all, so by all means attend to appearances, of gender as much as anything. But then be sure to pay closer attention on a 2002 Chelsea gallery tour to Kate Shepherd and Eileen Brady Nelson. 
Complicity
What is it about those men? After years of increasingly user-friendly installations, Richard Serra gathers those early prop pieces and other work, as phallic and frightening as ever in their lead or dark steel. The work pieces grow so assertive that his gallery has to borrow the warehouse next door. It had better, as he pursues the ultimate boy's novel for sober intellectuals, borrowing titles from Moby Dick.
If New York and Frank Stella long ago "stole" the idea of the avant-garde, out in Williamsburg the Paris-Brooklyn gallery exchange lets Europe fight back. Dominique Gauthier, for one, remaps Stella's colorful overlays in two dimensions. In virtually an encyclopedia of painting's tools, techniques, and history, Stella's mammoth constructions insist as ever that "what you see is what you get." Gauthier, in contrast, revels in the play of raw paint and illusion. With his squiggly line of acid green on top, he could be a little boy squeezing toothpaste right out of the tube.
Bruce Nauman acts less overtly confrontational than back in the days of Clown Torture and other early videos. In fact, nothing at all happens in his latest, beyond the casual movements of his cat or the Southwestern light. And he dares you to sit through it all—for hours, in multiple projections, and in two different versions, to boot, color and hazy black-and-white. I think of those Web sites that give one a choice of downloads for fast or slow connections. Here slow is definitely the operative word.
Art this bold leaves even a wimp like me on a high. But what about the women? At her Whitney retrospective, male critics did their best to praise Joan Mitchell for her feminine mystique. Forget the clichés suited to male artists, about agony and self-expression—or formal structure, and pure art. This time one heard only about indulgence and pleasure. But then you noticed my choice of the verbs lay back and comply back at the start. We cavemen must stick together.
Women have, thankfully, shaken up art pretty thoroughly by now—and the cause of diversity and the critique of gender roles are only beginning. One had better expect feminist challenges, from critics and artists alike. Still, face it: the art world manages to absorb pretty much every avant-garde and every challenge. So why not one more? Just this spring, the same old museum politics put a 2002 retrospective of Eva Hesse on the skids, making the Guggenheim's later welcoming of Eva Hesse all the more needful.
Of course, art hardly exists in isolation, and I live in reactionary times. Indeed, a feminist critique will note how often men and women alike play to stereotypes. But one can see what the stereotypes leave out. Instead of returning to the good old days, when men were men, artists find their own future. They may live in the present, but they can still represent it in unsettling ways. As they slip in and out of gender roles, the roles themselves can easily start to slip.
Men and boys
Younger artists get to play, too. Kate Shepherd paints right on the walls, creating the illusion of light falling from an imagined skylight. She, too, revels in light and illusion, only to recreate the very space of the gallery as an absence. She, too, returns to abstraction, only to refigure geometry as landscape. She even does the same favor for Minimalism. James Turrell with his hole in the ceiling at P.S. 1 and Dan Flavin turns late-afternoon and artificial light into the illusion of something painted or solid. With Radiant Room, Shepherd turns painted surfaces and solid walls into the illusion of light passing through the ceiling.
Once one starts paradoxes, however, they have a way of multiplying. I want women to escape their ghetto, and I want their escape to stand for an alternative. To do so, I have to create a narrative for them to dispel, and naturally I then have to take responsibility for that story, as one more male fiction. In fact, thanks to artists like these, one can revisit the men, too, as slipping out of gender stereotypes. Buys can hardly be boys without a trace of indulgence and pleasure.
Nauman pushes absence to the breaking point, over hours and hours in an artist's empty studio. Stella asks a painting to design itself, taking as his subject the same tools he uses to trace their forms. At the same time, he indulges in the simple pleasures of painting as never before in his art. One feels a dabbler, for better or worse, reveling in the texture of paint ladled into each crevice. The factory scale puts collective production above an artist's ego, and the textures let it emerge on a more approachable scale.
Even by Serra's prop pieces, from between 1969 and 1987, look different in a gallery today. Without museum barriers, they lose their identification with guards, institutions, and danger. The defiance of gravity comes to represent lightness. In their echo of a human figure, I could imagine a modest, awkward dance. Serra began by flinging molten lead around, in the tradition of action painting. For once, I can see his roots in that generation of sculpture as well, in a line from David Smith down through Mark di Suvero, Anish Kapoor, and Joel Shapiro now.
Actually, di Suvero has one of his lightest and grandest pieces ever. A huge assembly reaches to the ceiling of Paula Cooper's imposing cavern. For once, the art plays the role of an enclosure there, but an open, nurturing one.
I feel the terms of my own gender narrative slipping away. So let me end with one last woman and her game of absence, the photographs of Eileen Brady Nelson.
Nostalgia upon reflection
On a casual glance, one could mistake Nelson's photos for vintage prints. Looking a little closer, one could easily dismiss them as re-creations—or idle recreation. Either way, one would miss out on a modest but exceptional delight in the present.
Nelson's scenes stop just short of nostalgia, not unlike scenes by Claire Seidl poised similarly between photograms, landscape, and abstraction. She prefers monochrome, and the meticulous prints range in technique over the medium's history. Her Self-Portrait accepts the stark contrasts and slight smudging of a platinum print. Landscapes have convincing mists out of another era or the matter-of-fact crispness of the 1940s.
Subjects, too, have an eye to the past. The trees and lakes, beautifully devoid of human presence, evoke a vanished America. That assumes, of course, it was not a romantic or patriotic fiction all along. Still lifes, too, suggest a sanctuary. A book lies open, waiting for someone to return to it.
The sentimental aura draws one in—long enough to see how much one has overlooked. For one thing, Nelson represents the world of herself, family, and friends, not an ideal. She likes roads, suggesting a firm route home. No wonder the most retro print is a self-portrait.
Nelson can mirror nature, but only if the mirror turns back on itself, like Mitchell's paired canvases. A panoramic landscape has its own play with mirrors. One half reprints the other half backward, like a cheat—or in place of a sublime in which one can no longer believe.
Reflection, this one a color photograph, actually throws in a couple of reflections. Nelson stands at the right, her face covered by a camera that looks way too big for its own good. At left, improbably, there she is again, at a curious angle and a little too close for the room around her to make sense. In a moment, one finds one's bearings, sort of. The image at left is a mirror, and the whole shot appears in another mirror, right where one pretends to stand.
Face to face
Actually, Reflection comes closest to that studied air one at first distrusted. The trickery has a touch of art class in it. So does the likely allusion to Velázquez and his royal, mirrored double-portrait, Las Meninas. Yet even in a double mirror the allusive form seems palpable and wholly her own.
I thought of the games that Cindy Sherman, among others, has played with the male gaze. Sherman remakes her image—and even that of others—each time, just as Lewis Carroll remade his little girls as women. By covering her face but standing firmly, Nelson asks one to take her for whatever she is.
Nauman calls his lengthy videos Mapping the Studio (Fat Chance John Cage). For an ordinary person, however, even chance must give way to people and their own scale of time. In fact, that should read scales of time, as motives both seen and unseen compete for understanding. When it comes to sex, the motives get even more slippery. Lucy Irigary described women as the "sex that is not one." Art takes doubleness in stride, but only because it does not allow one ever to firmly separate the two.
As Nelson looks to tradition, she recalls critiques of authenticity, but without the distrust. When she shows masks, she owns them as objects and takes pleasure in their darkness. They lie cluttered and empty, confused with their own shadows.
In the platinum print, she appears with a whole camera and tripod, her back to the viewer. One sees her only at a distance, through a window, its lattice like a formalist grid set askew.
One sees her not as a face, but as someone at work on the charmingly sunlit landscape all around. The mist in one, the reflection in another, or the road without landmarks in a third—they all form part of the same serious critique and the same long love affair.
Richard Serra ran at Van de Weghe Fine Arts through May 26, 2002, Frank Stella at Paul Kasmin through January 26, Dominique Gauthier at Roebling Hall through May 20, Bruce Nauman at Sperone Westwater through July and at the Dia Center for the Arts through July 27, Mark di Suvero at Paula Cooper through June, Pat Steir at Cheim & Read through April 20, Kate Shepherd at Galerie Lelong through April 20, and Eileen Brady Nelson at Allen Sheppard through March 30.