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After Shock
John Haberin New York City
Peter Halley and the Shock of the New
What It Becomes: Contemporary Self-Portraits
I am as suspicious of Expressionism as anyone, I suppose. It comes only naturally to a proper postmodern.
I distrust its conventional ideal of beauty as coming from the artist's soul. I hate its all but religious loathing of the flesh. Maybe it explains why I also dislike some of the raunchier, most publicized art today—and why I find protest against "shock art" so trite and offensive. The Modern looks for an antidote to all the Expressionist shouting, and it finds one in Peter Halley, but did he really find the cure? Is self-expression still possible in a self-portrait? 
Every self-portrait is a boast—a double boast. Yes, says the artist, I am a worthy subject, and yes I can pull it off with my art. With "What It Becomes" years later at the Whitney make that a triple boast. Yes, its adds, I am worth hiding as well. There was more to me than you saw all along, and it is up to you, the viewer, to find it. As David Hammons has it, Close Your Eyes and See.
Escaping prison
In spirit, not to mention geography, those shrill installations in New York and London these days are far from central Europe. But then Modernism's shock has to keep changing its faces simply to exist. No wonder that, just weeks after Peter Halley, MoMA exhibits the art of Egon Schiele. Austrian Expressionism still has the power to shock. For now, though, the back room in the drawing galleries turns to an artist who can only fear and loathe Expressionism. Halley, a contemporary painter known for his cool abstractions, takes over the joint, for "New Concepts in Printmaking."
In the past Halley has filled block-like outlines with black, grey, and pale shades of yellow and pink. It looks like circuit diagrams for the simple-minded—or prison bars for the unwary. He applies his color mechanically but not flatly, at times with a thick, rubbery medium that makes the art even more industrial. Now he papers a room from floor to ceiling, and the one familiar bit comes across as a footnote to the artist. These walls include flowcharts about behavior modification and what I could easily call cartoon landscapes. I could, that is, at my peril.
Can such opposites in spirit get along, or are cartoons just how marketing controls the behavior of children? Is Halley softening up, or is his attack on fine art extending from grand old color-field painters to Keith Haring's followers. Can it challenge the subtle pleasures of geometric painters like Stephen Westfall today? A soft Halley amounts to a contradiction in terms. Yet Halley is still on the attack, even if one has to be enrolled in his legions to know. Along with his difficult prose, he provides textbook illustrations for postmodernist theory.
Critics these days often see art as less liberating than painters like to think. Museums have become giant corporate institutions with equally corporate sponsorship. Galleries are in business to make money. Both serve their purpose by categorizing artists and publics. In one famous theory dear to the heart of modern painters, they get to define art itself. The offended public should be jealous.
Critics have learned, too, from Michel Foucault, the philosopher and social critic. They often point to art's faith in the individual, but not as a sign of creativity and artistic freedom. Instead they connect an all-encompassing observer to the system of penal institutions and mental homes. Halley goes on from there in his own curious fashion, creating visual parallels between the color fields in abstract painting and, yes, prison cells. He sees parallels, too, in circuit diagrams and flowcharts.
Well, okay. I have to go now. But I found relief in the sheer extravaganza of Halley's installation. Painting and individualism have implications that not even he can control. Even as he contracts art to a prison, his artistic, unrealistic restrictions of actual circuitry show the limits of his own propaganda as art. It also sells short actual art from prison today.
The offence keeps changing
The broader public thinks of "shock art" and the trendy Brit pack as an offense against decency. A few Romantics instead see Expressionism as a gesture of creative rebellion. Thankfully, it is both, but it is also more. It is above all a creation of its time, of a collision between past and present. Before art can shock, there must be a series of shocks, each with its moment in art history. In the long run, the public can absorb anything.
In the Renaissance, artists were more than willing to offend. When art had the tough job of promoting a nation or a god, clearly someone out there had to suffer for it. Modernism offended, too, but the job had changed. The anger at Manet's nude Olympia meant the first true shocks in art. Manet shocked by asking what purposes art and its viewer can share, other than making art. And the protests grew with the first great performances of twentieth-century music and theater.
Before long, artists reflected on their art long enough to stop taking shock as merely inevitable. With Egon Schiele and others, it became personal. With works such as a urinal from Marcel Duchamp or Meret Oppenheim's fur-lined teacup, it became self-conscious. It tested the limits of art institutions and human understanding.
Once Jackson Pollock appeared in Life magazine, the meaning of shock in art was about to change once more. Now art had entered more than the museum. It had its fifteen minutes of fame, and it reached a culture calculated to deaden shock. In Andy Warhol's silkscreens, such as the automobile crashes and Warhol Shadows, deadening in response to death can have a poignancy and shock of its own.
Robert Rauschenberg changed things once again with his most famous image, a "combine painting" of a stuffed goat with an automobile tire round its neck. Before Andy Warhol, it looked ahead to a strange time after the poignancy is gone: it looked ahead to dead cows in the Royal Academy today. With it, Rauschenberg opened the trap of shock for its own sake, with no real consequences outside of art. With it, too, shock discovered the still-greater freedom of laughter, and the best art is still laughing.
Halley and Schiele share more than they think. They accept the burden of self-consciousness as they overlook its history. Their laughter is caught in their throat. Like Hamlet's "Denmark's a prison," Halley's analogies set out to reduce the world, but they remind one of art's power to unleash metaphor. If Schiele plays a part to achieve expression, Halley uses fictions to debunk artistic freedom. They are two sides of the same circuit board.
Vanishing act
Self-portraiture's dual or triple nature goes back to its origins, in the Renaissance. An artist like Albrecht Dürer could boast not just of his skill, but of a new-found status relative to his patron as well. For Dürer in silverpoint at age thirteen, he had not yet even earned a patron. With "Hidden Faces," covered portraits of the Renaissance at the Met last spring, every portrait was also a mask. Its sitter, after all, had an image to convey, too. By the end of 1960s, though, when the Whitney begins, the mask itself became a place to hide.
"What It Becomes" does not speak of masking. It calls art a way "to reveal the unseen" and to "make the familiar unrecognizable." In other words, it is about self-creation. The curator, Scout Hutchinson, also speaks of art's material presence, even in a space largely dedicated to works on paper from the museum's collection, just outside the education department. It is about "inscription, erasure, and tactility." It is a vanishing act all the same.
Presence is as presence does, starting with David Hammons. His body prints put himself into the act, but not to show his face. A famously reclusive artist, he reveals nothing, least of all his skill in drawing. They might as well be tire treads. He confronts, too, a black man's invisibility to white eyes or, worse, violent removal. Body prints by Yves Klein in blue, not in the show, seem an empty boast by comparison.
The small show could be a catalog of strategies for vanishing. Some play the part of others, like Darrel Ellis in black wash, posing after a photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe. Wendy Red Star leaves herself out entirely in favor of a leading Native American around 1880. The same red outlines in ink-jet prints frame her text and a hatchet in his hands, both as weapons. Toyin Ojih Odutola gives black skin to "famous whites." Jim Hodges works with his own saliva, but the results look more like pond scum than a portrait.
Naotaka Hiro promises to Map His Body, with pretty enough colors but not much else. Others appear explicitly, but masked. Rick Bartow takes on the teeth and smile of a wild animal, in pastel and pencil. Maren Hassinger takes pains to apply her mask, like a woman applying makeup, but as blackface. I cannot say for sure whether her video celebrates, defies, or condescends to gender and race, but it resonates. Blythe Bohnen acquires her mask simply by time-exposure, so that the blur of her features serves as a beard.
Catherine Opie hides behind nothing more than her back and its blood-red incisions. And Ana Mendieta, never one to hide, brings one last strategy for vanishing. She sets an effigy on fire, leaving her very body image in flames. Self-portraits have become all but a ritual these days, as an affirmation of personal and cultural identity. These eleven artists look back to a time after Modernism when such things came with irony and pain. For all their flaws, they could still mean more than what it all became.
Peter Halley ran at The Museum of Modern Art through February 8, 1988, "What It Becomes" at The Whitney Museum of American Art through January 12, 2025. A related review catches up with an even larger Halley installation.