ArtOpticon.us

Disturbing Subject Matter

 In case you have been in a media fast for the past week, the big news in the little art world has been the heated controversy over the painting by Dana Schutz, shown in the current Whitney Biennial, called “Open Casket.” (If you are already heartily sick of this subject, after wave upon wave of angry rhetoric crashing over your screen, please surf on.) The painting is a semi-abstract depiction of the black teenager, Emmett Till, savagely murdered and mutilated in 1955 by bigots enraged by his alleged whistling at a white woman — a fabrication, she has now admitted. (Sometimes one longs for Dante’s specialized departments of hell.) Till’s mother demanded that his coffin be open so that viewers could “see what I have seen,” in all its graphic glory, and the painter used the photo as a starting point for handling—for processing through paint and painting— her own emotions of fear and insecurity as a mother, she pointed out, in these nasty times of snapping and snarling.

 What could be more important than to educate complacent, ignorant Americans about this stain on national history and honor?  Alas, nothing is ever simple in the art world. The painting aroused fierce opposition from the left, nicely described Robert Smith in her New York Times article, “Should Art That Angers Remain on View?” (March 27, 2017). Two black artists took extreme umbrage at what Smith wittily characterized as Schulz’s possibly  “Inappropriate appropriation.” Parker Bright stood in front of the painting, blocking the view to other museumgoers, while wearing a T-shirt imprinted “Black Death Spectacle.” Hannah Black denounced Schulz’s exploitation of “black subject matter … for profit and fun.” Many in my social media feed denounced the work as typical white hubris continuing to perpetrate the idea of black victimhood; and even, through its opting for abstraction rather than realism, whitewashing black history through aesthetic distancing. And if Schutz had replicated the graphic detail….?

 Race relations in the US are a mess. The interlude of liberal rationality that Obama hoped to inaugurate—the extended teachable moment— clearly failed, a victim to white working class economic rage  exacerbated by eight years of right-wing animus, sensationalism and alternate facts. (If no Alex Jones and Bill O’Reilly types failed to fan the flames on Schutzgate, it’s only because they were distracted by James Brown wig and the premature announcement of the death of Obamacare,.

 But to return to the artwork, which is successful on its own terms, not as a political statement—an interpretation which the artist never claimed, yet one which its detractors opted to emphasize. (To be fait, Schultz does seem to gravitate to s sensationalistic celebrity deaths, at times.) Smith adduces, in defense of creative freedom of speech, several powerful art-historical precedents: Ben Shahn’s moving tribute to the unjustly executed Sacco and Vanzetti (despite his being Jewish and the victims Italian);  Abel Meeropol’s song about race lynchings in the South, “Strange Fruit” (again by a Jewish person, and not just any, but one of the adopted orphan sons of the executed Ethel and Julius Rosenberg; and the white William Styron’s brilliantly complex novel about Nat Turner, the less-than-exemplary or heroic leader of the 1831 black slave revolt in rural Virginia. One could cite many other examples of the depiction of suffering by sympathetic cultural or racial outsiders: Delacroix’s Massacre at Chios, about Turkish atrocities; Dorotha Lange’s Migrant Mother, about the Depression tribulations of displaced Okies; or Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, still shocking today, five centuries after its creation, with its painfully mortal King of the Jews.  Any crucifixion painting, in fact, rebuts the racial exclusivity idea.. Kara Walker, who explores the horrors of slavery culture in her silhouette drawings, concurs, in opposing the ensorship and destruction of the painting sought by some; Smith: “[Walker] concluded that an artwork can be generative regardless of how it offends or falls short, giving ‘rise to deeper inquiries and better art. It can only do this when it is seen.’”  Another artist, Clifford Owens, similarly declared his opposition to what is in effect, to my eye, a kind of politically correct iconoclasm: “I don’t know anything about Hannah Black, or the artists who’ve co-signed her breezy and bitter letter, but I’m not down with artists who censor artists.”Why so much furor from the art world left then? The painting is unobjectionable in itself — but for its provocative title. The black artist Henry Taylor, in the same Whitney show, depicted, with a greater degree of realism than Schultz employs, the police murder of Philando Castile, and aroused no animosity. It is my belief that certain ideas that were almost universally taught in universities in the 80s and 90s—identity art, postmodernist relativism— have hardened into dogma, and can become  exaggerated and counter-productive. Making, seeing and ‘using’ art primarily or solely as Tendenzkunst, as propaganda, as the hypostatization or reification of sacred truths, is bad for the country and bad for art. Let creative people make their work, and let a thousand exegetical flowers bloom.; but let’s not become cultural commissars. Artists and citizens should be truth-seekers, not avoiders of trigger issues. We have serious challenges; one painting in one biennial—and it’s not as if all blacks are furious about it, as some imply—is a molehill, if that. Let’s keep our eyes on the prize, not minor distractions. —DeWitt Cheng

Stuart Davis: In Full Swing

…realism doesn’t merely include what one immediately sees with the eye at a given moment. One also relates it to past experience, … to feelings, ideas and … the totality of the awareness of it…. By realism I don’t mean realism in any photographic sense. Certainly not. —Stuart Davis

San Francisco is fortunate this summer in hosting three exemplary painting shows: young Monet at the Legion of Honor; Diebenkorn and Matisse at SFMOMA; and, less heralded but no less important or inspiring, or revelatory, Stuart Davis at the de Young. Davis is less well known than the others, but his dazzling work deserves the red carpet treatment, too. Donald Judd, not someone who might be suspected of maximalist tendencies, after seeing a Davis show, suggested that an appropriate reaction might be applause: “Stuart Davis has more to do with what the United States is like than Hopper.”

In Full Swing features some seventy-five of the artists works, mostly oils on canvas, but also preparatory drawings and smaller paintings in gouache and casein. The show originated at the Whitney Museum last year, and is accompanied by an excellent short film tracing Davis’s evolution from Ashcan-school street realism; through Cubism, which the artist encountered as an exhibiting young watercolor artist at the famous 1913 Armory show, and in more concentrated form on a 1928 yearlong stay in Paris; to his mature style, dating from the 1930s, which derived from American-scene observation but transformed it utterly into joyous, electrifying visual music.  Davis’s ebullient syncopations of bright colors and interlocking shapes are uniquely his own (despite occasional resemblances to Picasso, Matisse, Léger, and Miró), Peter Schjeldahl characterized Davis as “a polemicist and a happy warrior for modernity as the heart’s blood of what he called, invoking the nation’s definitive poet, “the thing Whitman felt—and I too will express it in pictures—America—the wonderful place we live in.”

Occupying several meandering galleries on the museum’s second floor, the works are hung chronologically, for the most part (although the careful viewer will need to look at dates, as the direction of pedestrian traffic flow is not always clear).  Deviating from this chronological progression are several groupings of paintings and drawings showing Davis brilliantly reworking themes, sometimes from decades past, like a musician riffing on old standards. Jazz was one of Davis’s longtime passions, beginning in his youth, when, “hep to the jive,” he frequented  the rough bars of Newark NJ, and continuing through his life.  A playful but telling inscription from Duke Ellington in American Painting (1932/1952-44) makes this clear: ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Swing.” (The painting also features stylized renderings of Davis and  Federal Arts Project colleagues Willem deKooning, John Graham and Arshile Gorky, whose cavalier attitude toward politics ended his friendship with Davis, who had abandoned painting for organizing, before becoming disgusted with lefty kowtowing to Stalin. Davis: “I took the business as seriously as the serious situation demanded and devoted much time to the organizational work. Gorky was less intense about it and still wanted to play.”  Gorky, who admired Davis’s stand on pictorial flatness and pure abstract forms, and killed himself in 1946, when the painting was yet unfinished, may be the figure who has been canceled out.)

While Davis’s paintings are timeless, they are also historic windows into the art of the early twentieth century, combining aspects of Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, and, with their playful deployment of the everyday imagery of commercial America, Pop. (Cubism did this, too , but on  the lesser scale of the Parisian café, calmer than the dynamic, commercial  American street.)  To follow Davis’s career is to recapitulate the phylogeny of American painting (except for Surrealism, which had no appeal to this son of artists, high-school dropout and student of real life).  Davis died in 1964 at the age of seventy-one, of a stroke. His final, unfinished painting is here, still bearing the masking tape that he used to achieve the crisp lines that contrast so well with his pastry-chef paint surfaces.  Its title, Fin, or End, inspired by a French movie’s final frame, is the last thing Davis painted. Holland Cotter wrote:  “What Davis got right was belief: the belief that he was doing the one sure, positive thing he could do, and that he would keep doing it, no matter what, in failure or success, in sickness or in health.  That’s the lesson young artists can take away from his show…” In our faithless, feckless times, governed by academic learned helplessness and commercially induced moral slackness, these are lessons worth learning or relearning.

SAN FRANCISCO

John Herschend: “YOUR LOST SHOE (or everything that happened since the last time)”

at Gallery 16

(Art Ltd magazine, May-June 2017)

 Corporate employment in the exciting widget business was treated with satirical gusto in the 1961 musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, with its catchy anthem. The Company Way. John Herschend’s YOUR LOST SHOE (or everything that has happened since the last time, with its similarly long, humorous title, continues the San Francisco artist’s wry fictional narrative of love and loss at work—previously treated in performances, installations, mock-educational videos and faux infomercials—in painting.

 Ten oils on panel, seven watercolors on paper, a bronze sculpture, and a digital projection depict Herschend’s uninhabited office stage sets. Although the paintings are not hung sequentially, there is a back story, which we join in progress. The Narrator works for a company that designs and fabricates amusement park rides (echoing the artist’s background). He loves Lisa, a co-worker; his romantic rivalry with Mark, another co-worker, leads to a break-room wrestling match, and the Narrator’s theft of Mark’s loafer, which he tosses into a drainpipe. (Alas, no boat shoe,) The workplace scenes of this drama are sketchily rendered in monochromatic or subdued palettes against white backgrounds. Projection screens, houseplants, copy machines, conference tables, ash trays, and desk lamps sit in oblique corners, as if lurking, or sit atop desktop landscapes, parallel to the picture plane, like Saul Steinberg’s deskscapes. “Collapse no. 1” shows a man’s hand, the fingers so stubby as to suggest a paw, and the arm seemingly boneless, grasping papers from a desk; it returns in the bronze sculpture, “The Sad Hand,” and the watercolor, “Deskscape Thursday 11:42AM.” In two “Copy Trouble” paintings, the small machines sit forlornly amid tangles of wires, smudged whiteboard messages or caption balloons, and grassy stubble emerging from the carpeting—nature invading culture?

 Accompanying the paintings are bound copies of A Quarterly Report from the Forest Office, comprising the Narrator’s account of events in the forest office, and an Arden Valley Community Wellness Center report by John Touchstone, PhD, aka artist Anthony Discenza, on the patient’s treatment with Alprazolam and art therapy. Shakespearians will note the reference to the sylvan setting of As You Like It; all the world’s a stage, including the tragical-comical-pastoral office. —DeWitt Cheng