Marina Abromovic “The Artist is Present”

We’re just past the halfway point of the run of Marina Abramović’s retrospective at MOMA, “The Artist is Present,” and chances are good you’ve already seen it, or maybe seen one of the blogs that has materialized in response. Abramović, born in Yugoslavia in 1946, is arguably the most enduring and prolific performance artist currently working. She has proven over the past half-decade that in the midst of reflecting on her past work and speculating on the possibilities of preserving and restaging past performances by herself and other artists, that she will soldier on (and I do mean “soldier”) in the production of performance work that brings herself, and her tests of the limits of body and mind as close to audiences as she can. The works presented begin with transcripts of her early instructions for theoretical (in some cases impossible) performances and photographs of her developing solo work (the “Rhythms”), through videos of her collaborations with Ulay, her former lover and collaborator of twelve years, and up to the present moment’s performance at MOMA, which is intended to extend through the duration of the exhibition. The retrospective occurs just four years past her widely praised 2005 Guggenheim show “Seven Easy Pieces,” in which Abramović performed five previously performed works by other artists, one of her earlier works, “Lips of Thomas,” as well as a new work by her, over the course of seven consecutive days, each work performed for seven hours.

The history of Abramović’s experiments in instruction, sound, rhythm, and partnership laid out through the galleries in photographs and videos possesses a beautiful and terrifying capacity to render the processes of comings-together indistinguishable from the processes of comings-apart. Somehow she manages this in both individual works and those with Ulay. In “Breathing In / Breathing Out” Abramovic and Ulay kiss, only breathing through the exchange of deep air from one pair of lungs to the other, until the action suffocates them for lack of new oxygen. In “Light/Dark” they casually and rhythmically tap one another’s faces with the soft parts of their open hands, almost like a children’s game, and gradually as the rate of touch increases, and the tempo of the sounds of their hands on faces and laps accellerates, the quality of their contacts shift from friendly acknowledgment to formal action, to percussion, to affront—faces that are initially impassive predict the impact in expressions something like concern, maybe indicating pain, but also commitment and determination, foolish or brave.

The naked bodies in the reperformance of 1977’s “Imponderabilia,” poised in near relation to one another at a passageway, are isolated in their vulnerability. In iterations of two women, two men, or a man and woman, they stand face to face to allow gallery visitors to pass between them to enter the next gallery. They are always about to come together, and constantly separated, the space between theoretically functional, forced into use. Fatigue here intensifies their relation, over time suggesting a desire for an inward collapse that would close off the traffic between them, but mark a kind of failure as well. In 1997’s “Luminosity,” the naked performer climbs a ladder into a box of projected light to perch on a bicycle seat, her feet placed on padded metal brackets, and her extended, taxed arms express a magnanimous benediction, wholesome stretch, and something nearing the “hands up” of a police arrest, one sense seeming to feed another over the course of the performance.

Live, unitary performances do ask that viewers acknowledge the human body in a way that documentation of such performances does not, and, I would argue, in a way that the witnessing of the reperformances here in the gallery challenges. These reperformances in the gallery do feel like iterations, echoes or layers of previous or future acts or encounters. The context itself makes the experience in the present very difficult. While the careful, if a bit clinical seeming, “changing of the guard” ritual allows the active performers to retire and new performers to take up their roles with a certain amount of gravitas, it seems to preserve an underlying sense of containment infecting these performances that ultimately undermines their impact. Accompanied by video or stills of their original stagings, surrounded by the chorus of sounds produced by so many videos, not to mention the bodies angled in multiple directions against the grain of your own, one feels invited to imagine the effects more than to actually experience them. The hollow bongs of Abramović and Ulay’s bodies striking the pillars outward along with the intermittent applause and “bravos” emitted by video of 1977’s “Expansion in Space,” become background for the two people framed in a kind of window box performing 1977’s “Relation in Time.” Their sag, their half-opened eyes are read through these sounds and through the dim wails and mumbles from the other room. The place of touching at their shoulder blades and down their backs begins to feel as incidental as the more violent collisions of Abramović and Ulay playing in loops all around. But ultimately, determining the success or failure of the live reperformances included in “The Artist is Present” seems less the point than realizing that each is staged as a kind of form, that one might, given permission, allow oneself to stand in the place of the standers, to point as a pointer, to lay with one laying, and lean and sweat with another who leans and sweats against you, to accomplish the
art’s function.

But let me end with what was the beginning, with what has become the main event: the opportunity to seat yourself at a table with Marina Abramović and look into her eyes, her face, meet her gaze with your own, offering her your eyes, and your face. This encounter is difficult to describe. What is suggested by its terms? Very public, streaming live, each sitter documented and web-published by photographer Marco Anelli, one is left with a somewhat curated series of faces suggesting nothing less than the fact of the loneliness of human interaction. Abramović is herself the concomitant illustration of our collective fatigue and the paragon of our potential to acknowledge, in transcendence and suffering, the endlessness of need that brings us to the silent stranger’s table. What do we see there, in those faces? How many conversations have I heard about jewelry, facial hair, iris color, and makeup? And her face—a stark and soft mask-mirror which shows the extent to which we, what we bring to our encounters with others, produce that encounter and that other. Whatever sense we make of it, using our knowledge of Abramović as an artist, whatever motivations we find to fund the ex post facto hermeneutics, the story of self and other that arises in this silent face-to-face is enormously private, individual, speculative.

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Kiki Smith’s “Silver Bird”

When walking into the Brooklyn Museum’s recent Kiki Smith exhibit, a large panel presents this  brief statement about the exhibit: “The idea of how women found space for creative inspiration in the past is the point of departure for Sojourn, this exhibition by Kiki Smith.” It praises Smith’s “lyrical and highly personal vocabulary of images,” and declares the work a meditation on the “course of a woman’s lifetime marked by struggles unique to female artists and the contemplative exhilaration that defines the moment of creative inspiration.”

The Brooklyn Museum is the home of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. It is also the permanent home of The Dinner Party, a 1979 work by feminist artist Judy Chicago, which features a triangular table with exquisite handmade plates and embroidered place mats displaying the name of famous women throughout history. The Dinner Party was praised by feminist art critic Lucy Lippard, who stated, “My own initial experience was strongly emotional… The longer I spent with the piece, the more I became addicted to its intricate detail and hidden meanings.”

“Singer” (2008)

But The Dinner Party was the source of controversy in the art world. Art critic Hilton Kramer said “The Dinner Party reiterates its theme with an insistence and vulgarity more appropriate, perhaps, to an advertising campaign than to a work of art,” calling it an example of “art so mired in the pieties of a cause that it quite fails to acquire any independent artistic life of its own.” Maureen Mullarkey called the work preachy and untrue to the women it claims to represent. She especially disagreed with the sentiment she labels “turn ‘em upside down and they all look alike,” an essentializing of all women which does not respect the feminist cause (Mullarkey also called the hierarchical aspect of the work into question, claiming that Chicago took advantage of her female volunteers.) Roberta Smith succinctly noted that “its historical import and social significance may be greater than its aesthetic value”.

It is true that Judy Chicago’s feminist politics are essentialist and far from nuanced. Years ago I took a class taught, in part, by Judy Chicago. What I recall of the experience is that Chicago’s insistence on essentialist, “first wave” feminism affected her perspective on second wave, “sex positive” or social deconstructionist feminists (including those important emerging feminist performance artists who engaged in a consideration of sex work—and the ways in which it potentially was or was not empowering—which I was particularly interested in).

The experience left me with a keen and intense understanding of the various battles going on in the feminist art community. I have been surprised to see one theme in the world of feminist art continue since then: it seems a celebration of women’s domestic art is the channel through which contemporary feminist art must pass, in order to be praised as doing the legitimate historical reclaiming necessary to feminist artists. This means turning the spotlight to what had been historically considered “women’s work”—china painting, quilts, sewing, embroidery. Considering the rich and varied tradition in tapestry weaving, samplers, and the like, it is an important tradition to reclaim from the recesses of “low art” categorization. As the Sackler Center website itself notes, “Throughout the history of art, decoration and domestic handicrafts have been regarded as women’s work.… Quilting, embroidery, needlework, china painting, and sewing—none of these have been deemed worthy artistic equivalents to the grand mediums of painting and sculpture. The age-old aesthetic hierarchy that privileges certain forms of art over others based on gender associations has historically devalued ‘women’s work’ specifically because it was associated with the domestic and the ‘feminine.’ That hierarchy was radically challenged in the 1960s by Pop and feminist artists, alike.… In the quest for a ‘female aesthetic’ or artistic style specific to women, many 1970s feminist artists sought to elevate ‘women’s craft’ to the level of ‘high art,’ and away from its derogatory designation as ‘low art’ or ‘kitsch.’”

In keeping with this tradition, Kiki Smith’s Sojourn exhibit is inspired by a late-19th century needlework piece from Prudence Punderson, entitled “The First, Second and Last Scene of Mortality,” included in the exhibit. The piece depicts a room with a woman’s life represented from birth through death. On the far right is an infant in a cradle; the center depicts a woman of middle age, sewing; finally, on the far left is a black coffin, with the initials “P.P.” embroidered on the front. It is a striking work, reminding us of the ways in which “women’s work” incorporated and transcended purely “domestic” subject matter. Interestingly, on the wall in the room is a painting, sewn in fine detail, depicting a woman who seems to be trying to escape or hide from a man with a staff. This image, combined with the coffin, underlines the overall effect of the work, which is a sense of the woman artist in the home, which is simultaneously a place of safety and security, and a place of suffocation.

The rooms of Smith’s exhibit progress roughly according to the “life” of a woman artist. The first room is dominated by a large aluminum sculpture in the center of the room—a woman seated, one hand raised, the other on her lap. The head is disproportionately large for the body, giving it a potentially cartoonish feel; however, the expression on the figure’s face is one of divine and quiet inspiration, and has an eerie quality which pervades the entire exhibit. The piece is called “The Annunciation”—the moment when Mary learns she will become the mother to Jesus. (The Annunciation has long—perhaps too long—been a symbol connecting artistic inspiration to spirituality, particularly for women artists).

Surrounding the figure are various large drawings on Nepal paper (a sort of translucent linen material) with nearly life-size figures drawn in pencil and ink, depicted in various stages of inspiration. Deliberately recalling Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, one piece entitled “Room Enough to Enter” depicts a woman seated, one hand (as with ‘the Annunciation’) raised toward a closed window. Outside is a bird—presumably representing creativity—attempting to enter

The subsequent rooms progress through a woman’s life; drawings of pregnant women, women with children, women whose bodies seem to produce the bodies of other women in a sort of religious transposition. Mirrors of antique glass with flowers, lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling dusted in glitter and gold, cages with birds—all of this has a pretty, delicate quality, quietly undercut by small details which make the items neither wholly innocuous nor peaceful. The lightbulbs are surrounded by broken, sharp wood which hangs above; in one drawing, the ubiquitous chair is knocked to the floor.

Later in the exhibit, the drawings begin to depict women gathered together; no longer romantic,  isolated figures, we see instead real women—women with tattoos and handbags, with bras and trenchcoats and glasses. This move to the real is relieving, giving us the sense that the life of the woman artist in Sojourn is coming into being. Another larger-than-life aluminum sculpture entitled “Singer” depicts a woman standing as though after delivering a great aria—she has her hand raised as though about to bow, and a bouquet of flowers in the other. This sense of triumph and success, of positive reception from the world, is optimistic and lovely. The last rooms include more large drawings of an older woman which seem to represent Smith’s mother’s recent death (one of the pieces is entitled “Mourning”). Finally the visitor enters a room with large drawings of black coffins, identical to the one depicted in the Prudence Punderson piece. In the center of the room a large pine wood coffin rests on a pine wood table; inside are clear glass dandelions, which sprout from the base of the coffin.

Leaving the exhibit one walks through “The Dinner Party.” It is striking to see both the similarities and differences between the two treatments of women and ambition, art, community. Sojourn is exponentially more subtle and interesting, less overtly political—in part because it depicts a life cycle in which one woman leaves (passes away) to make room for another woman’s spirit: “I put aside myself so there was room enough to enter” (as the title of one piece says).

Yet both also root themselves in this archeological dig into “women’s work.” Celebrating domestic art has been a foundational, aspect of feminist art; identifying visionary women artists who did all that they could with the materials available to them is a fine way of demonstrating the triumph of artistic inspiration over political and social oppression. Still, I wondered, as I finished walking through the exhibit, at what point women artists may slough off the perpetual handling of the domestic. Work which centers itself on sewing or embroidery, for example—a dying art, and something I grew up doing—risks romanticizing an art which in actuality, in part, was incredibly stifling. After all, the reality is that women turned to needlework in part because they could not turn to other materials with equal freedom (oil paints, sculpture, etc.).

Like The Dinner Party and its pervasive yonic imagery, Sojourn depicts women artistry as delicate, domestic, life-giving, natural, compassionate, and community-oriented. Yet, as important as it is to celebrate this aspect of female society and history, it seems equally important to avoid essentializing women’s psychology, and to engage more complex representations of being a woman in the world. A forty-five minute documentary on Smith’s exhibit in Venice in 2005, Homespun Tales, screens at the exhibit. It includes interviews with one of Kiki Smith’s assistants. On being asked how to interpret her work, Smith’s assistant used the word “intuitive” four times in about a minute, concluding with the statement, “Kiki’s studio is practically her body.” I cringed at this statement, which seems to center around the idea that women’s art is inseparable from their bodies and (relatedly) their supposed connection to “mother earth.” What does it mean to say her work is “intuitive”? What agency does it take from her, her reason and knowledge of women’s history, to believe that her work comes from animal-spirits (something she herself implies)? 

I became a fan of Smith after seeing her brutal and haunting sculpture “Tale” (1992), which depicts a woman crawling with a “tale” of excrement behind her. It is incredibly disturbing, pulling from motifs of shame of the female body and sexual violence which pervades the Western world and its art. It is unforgettable, and I appreciate the unflinching and yet complex perspective on corporeality which she offers in that piece. In Homespun Tales, Smith hung etched drawings of beautiful flowers, made with ink of her own blood. These pieces, to me, seem a commentary on the history of the “feminine sphere” which have real weight. In retrospect, though, even these two pieces leave me unsatisfied.

 In her book Proofs and Theories, Louise Gluck, former poet laureate, once wrote: “I’m puzzled, not emotionally but logically, by the contemporary determination of women to write as women. Puzzled because this seems an ambition limited by the existing conception of what, exactly, differentiates the sexes. If there are such differences, it seems to me reasonable to suppose that literature reveals them, and that it will do so more interestingly, more subtly, in the absence of intention. In a similar way, all art is historical: in both its confrontations and evasions, it speaks of its period. The dream of art is not to assert what is already known but to illuminate what has been hidden, and the path to the hidden world is not inscribed by will.” I suppose, ultimately, I have a desire for feminist art to move from Woolf’s concept of “a room of one’s own” to a hidden world of one’s own psyche—one which illuminates what has been hidden, one which interestingly, and subtly, depicts what it means to be an individual. Whether one can ever do this with the absence of intention is another question altogether.

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Medea and its Double

Auto Da Fe by Masataka Matsuda, translated by Kameron Steele and Shigeki Mori, directed by Josh Fox with Paul Bargetto. Presented by International WOW Company and the Baruch Performing Arts Center

On paper, there are so many points of contact, so many similarities between Seoul Factory for the Performing Arts’s Medea and Its Double and International WOW Company’s Auto Da Fe that constructing a double review around them should be easy. Both were written by East Asian playwrights; both rely heavily on “physical theatre” techniques of the Western avant-garde, ranging from Viewpoints to Grotowski; both are based on or inspired by material from classical Greece; and both were directed by Columbia graduates. When I ordered my tickets for these shows, this article was already very much on my mind. Perhaps the review would begin with an interrogation of why so many theatre artists, even those half a world away, have engaged with Greek antiquity in recent years. Perhaps it would focus on one of the two obvious differences in the pieces, contrasts evident in press releases and publicity material: Medea and Its Double is a Korean production, here on tour, while Auto Da Fe has been translated into English and directed by an American; Auto Da Fe has a specific political point of view, while Medea and Its Double is an exploration of passion and violence, both psychological
and physical.

In performance, however, these two productions are such different experiences that the only real connection between them is that each needs to be taken on its own terms to be understood. Each also serves as a reminder that, however much theatre you’ve seen, and however skilled you imagine yourself to be at reading publicity material, it’s impossible to know when you buy a ticket just what you’ve
gotten yourself into.

The concept of Medea and Its Double is to split the title character literally into two parts: the (jealous) lover and the (loving) mother, thus physicalizing Medea’s internal struggle and making the narrative more about her anguish than her crimes. Director Hyoung-Taek Limb adapted the story from Euripides, but only kept a fraction of the original text. In keeping with his company’s mission, Limb and his cast incorporate elements of Viewpoints and Grotowski techniques (which he picked up while an MFA student at Columbia) as well as elements from “traditional” Korean forms ranging from martial arts to p’ansori to masked forms like t’alch’um and ogwang-dae.

I had some qualms about the show as I entered the theatre, fearing the pitfalls that might arise from what seems to me an overly simplified psychological approach. I was also concerned about the likely stylistic result of merging the various forms and techniques at play in the show. I think directors should draw on whatever tools are available to them, but this kind of cultural pastiche too often results in a watered down “universal” aesthetic that neither serves its constituent influences nor adds up to much of anything new. Finally, the title gave me pause: Why Medea and Its Double instead of Medea and Her Double?

The only reason I could think of was a play on The Theatre and Its Double, a seminal book by theatre theorist and director Antonin Artaud; as important as Artaud’s work has been for contemporary theatre, artists who go out of their way to pay homage to Artaud tend to produce theatre that is self-righteous and pretentious in the manner of a trust-fund kid turned flower child. (I will owe apologies to several friends if they read this.) Thankfully, though, most of my concerns proved unfounded. While Medea and Its Double doesn’t shed much new light on its source material, it is a moving and idiosyncratic re-envisioning of the Medea tale that draws on the specific strengths of a terrific ensemble cast.

While Medea and Its Double was advertised as a performance in Korean with English supertitles, the only text that appears in this production—the title, followed by a brief and somewhat awkward bit of exposition—is projected onto the set’s upstage scrim/wall at the very beginning of the show. The fragmented dialogue, which is indeed in Korean throughout, is untranslated. Once the text has faded, though, and the performers have taken over, cerebral objections to the production’s approach seem petty in comparison to the grace, beauty, and commitment of
this company.

A children’s game accompanied by a sing-song chant serves as a thematic and aural motif. The game sets the stage for flirtation and then seduction, as children become adolescents, and then adults. A martial-arts-like ritual signifies Medea and Jason’s first sex; their children, represented by two puppets, soon appear. Jason’s negligence and infidelity splits an enraged Medea in two, eventually leading to tragedy. The children are ultimately reduced to fragile paper cutouts, unable to withstand their mother’s rage. Candles floating peacefully on two shallow pools embedded into the stage are suddenly full of menace as the “children” are torn asunder and exposed
to the elements.

Throughout, the melody from the game reasserts itself, reminding us that the seeds of all of this—the laughter, the sex, the resentment, the murder—were planted by a deceptively playful ring of dancing, singing children. Throughout, passages of chanted narration performed p’ansori style by a singer seated behind the upstage scrim, add another layer to the onstage soundscape.

It’s impossible for me to judge the quality of Limb’s textual adaptation, but it seems clear that his work with the performers is his real accomplishment here. While the staging is reminiscent of work from Joseph Chaiken, Anne Bogart, and other luminaries of the Western avant-garde, this Medea, ultimately, is one that could only have been created by this company. That specificity, that commitment to growing a piece of theatre from the bodies and personalities of the performers rather than mapping it on to them, is what renders Medea and Its Double more than the sum of its parts.

•  •  •

International WOW’s Auto Da Fe also seeks a kind of theatrical synergy, but there are so many parts that the whole simply can’t keep up. This isn’t to say that there is no value in the production, only that Josh Fox, who directed with assistance from Paul Bargetto, sometimes blurs the line between artistic ambition and artistic hubris, and the grander the statement he’s trying to make, the less coherent he is.

Masataka Matsuda’s dense, difficult play is a meditation on history as an act of erasure, of creative forgetting. Set outside of time in a place called the “History Processing Center,” the play finds Odysseus (or a version of him) abandoning the battlefield and seeking a kind of peace. While publicity materials summarize the plot as Odysseus’s “return home,” Auto Da Fe doesn’t depict a return so much as a kind of retirement. To transform war into history, workers at the Processing Center shuffle papers, bathe soldiers, write articles, sing ballads, cart files, and tell stories. Little by little, the present recedes, trauma becomes mythology, and entire cultures are erased in the service of a grand narrative.

Fox and his collaborators have pulled out all the stops in their attempt to theatricalize Matsuda’s very abstract text. The cavernous Performing Arts Center at Baruch plays right into Fox’s penchant for epic stagings. Ushered into the theatre a few at a time, the audience is confronted, even assaulted, by the sheer size of the experience and the number of cast members making their way from point to point. A woman perched high above the stage lip-synchs an aria; half a dozen performers push carts and boxes along an imaginary grid, trying to keep up with the pointing fingers and shouted instructions of their supervisors. Little by little, the war theme emerges, as the audience realizes that a pile of downstage rubbish is made up of military uniforms, and that there may be bodies living and dead writhing within. All of this takes place before Odysseus has even entered the space.

My audience-mates at Auto Da Fe, which I saw on a Saturday afternoon, were nonplussed and confused. Several older people fell asleep only to be awakened by a particularly loud moment in the sound design, while the younger women to my left kept whispering things along the lines of “I don’t know what the hell this is.” This is not an unusual response to Fox, who belongs to that strain of the avant-garde that preaches populist politics and aesthetics but paradoxically creates relatively inaccessible work with a high barrier to entry. Critical response has been mixed, ranging from fawning praise to lukewarm befuddlement to righteous indignation.

My own response was a mixture of admiration and frustration. International WOW’s aesthetic ambition and political engagement remain worthy of praise, but their work remains intellectually and emotionally muddled, the result of a lack of conceptual and intellectual rigor. Fox clearly has a knack for eliciting incredible commitment from a large cast but, thirteen years after the company’s debut, and nine years since they garnered attention with one of the first theatrical responses to 9/11, his work doesn’t seem to have developed much beyond its initial
(considerable) promise. 

Medea and its Double by Euripides, adapted and directed by Hyoung-Taek Limb. Production Manager: Soo-Mi You; Lighting Designer: Tae-Jin Chung; Cast: Min-Jung Kim, Kyoung Lee, See-Yeon Koo; Do-Yup Lee, Su-Yeon Lee, Kyu-Hwa Choi, Da-Il Lee. Presented by Seoul Factory for the Performing Arts and La MaMa ETC at The First Floor Theatre at La MaMa ETC, 74 East 4th Street, NYC through January 24th.

Auto Da Fe by Masataka Matsuda, translated by Kameron Steele and Shigeki Mori, directed by Josh Fox with Paul Bargetto. Lighting Designers: Charles Foster and Jeremy Cunningham; Set Designer: Nate Lemoine; Sound Designer: Julian Mesri; Costume Designer: Cait O’Connor; Dramaturg: Heather Denyer. Cast: Lydia Blaisdell, Adam Boncz, Mike Callaghan, Melissa Chambers, Stefani Charitou, Lisa Clair, Herbie Go, Sara Gozalo, Beth Griffith, Ikuko Ikari, Georgia X. Lifsher, Joanna Lu, Tommy Mcginn, Mary Notari,Jennifer Oda, Blaire O’leary, Martina Potratz, Brent Reams, Iracel Rivero, Pedro Rafael Rodriguez, Robert Saietta, Kristina Siapkara, Brandon Smith, Carlton Tanis, Evan True, Aya Tucker, Michael Villastrigo, Deborah Wallace, and Folami William. Presented by International WOW Company and the Baruch Performing Arts Center at Baruch Performing Arts Center, 55 Lexington Avenue, NYC through January 24th.

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There’s quite a lot riding on Vermeer’s Masterpiece, the headlining act in the Metropolitan Museum’s fall exhibition calendar. At a moment when the slumping economy has drained the Met’s endowment, forced major layoffs within the institution, and threatened to shrink the number of annual visitors, the museum desperately needed a shot in the arm to boost morale and draw big crowds. And it got it, in the form of a temporary gift generously proffered by Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. Ostensibly celebrating the 400^th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s voyage from the Netherlands to New York, the Dutch shipped Johannes Vermeer’s astonishing Milkmaid to the Met where it was quickly made the centerpiece of the museum’s autumn program.

The mini-marquee exhibit, which runs through the end of November, offers a blueprint of what to expect from the Met as it moves forward with a new model of recession-special installations—small shows anchored in a prominent work or two, and bolstered by a supporting cast drawn from the museum’s expansive permanent collection. The logic of the move is clear: with a contracting endowment and significantly reduced operating budget, the Met’s recently-appointed director Thomas Campbell decided that looking inward and relying on the occasional munificence of partner institutions was the museum’s most promising tactic to cut costs without sacrificing quality. But concerns challenging the utility of this approach persist, making Vermeer’s Masterpiece the most important trial of Campbell’s young career.

Unfortunately, the budget blockbuster falls flat. To be sure, the exhibit betrays hints of limited resources. Including period reproductions of ceramic bowls and tile work, for example, is charming but suggests a quiet desperation to fill space without clear purpose in the absence of relevant content, while the comic book-length catalogue (stapled at the spine) indicates that the Met has abandoned its tradition of producing gorgeously hefty companion pieces to its major exhibits. But this is hardly the problem.

If the curatorial cocktail animating Vermeer’s Masterpiece comprises one part inadequate funding, it is most certainly met with three parts conceptual incoherence. Not content to let The Milkmaid’s reputation as one of the finest paintings in the Western tradition serve as reason enough to scramble uptown for a viewing, the show’s designer, Walter Liedtke, insists on spicing it up for the oversexed masses with promises of a radical rereading of Vermeer’s masterwork. All of which would be fascinating if it could be sustained throughout the entire exhibition. But it can’t, and the show deteriorates with impressive velocity into a slapdash arrangement of pictures bound together more by proximity than through the rhythm of an internal logic.

The exhibit’s central argument advances the proposition that Vermeer endows The Milkmaid with a heretofore unappreciated degree of eroticism. In order to mount this attack against traditionally staid interpretations of old masters, Liedtke, curator of the Met’s Dutch collection, convenes a small parade of the museum’s holdings in the first gallery to demonstrate that the stereotypical “milkmaid” colonized the landscape of European sexual imagination, exciting noblemen with the prospect of a little pinch n’ giggle when their ladies of the manor weren’t looking. According to the accompanying brochure, milkmaids were summed up by an early modern poem in which “a woman in the act of milking a cow (‘A sinewy thing she has seized with joy,’ and so on) is compared with grabbing a man’s…attention.” And certainly, the images gathered here—populated as they are by buxom women and admiring men with their bulging codpieces and cocked crossbows set “to shoot…bolts”—support the curator’s contention that milkmaids had acquired a reputation for being “sexually available” by the time Vermeer came along. Says Liedtke, “It was the old joke of the farmer’s daughter and the travelling salesman.”

If one considers, moreover, the overt sexuality of Vermeer’s early work—a topic strangely not broached by the curators in this show—the bridge between the naughty milkmaids of Dutch lore and Vermeer’s masterpiece might be easily crossed. As a young man, Vermeer saturated his work with salaciousness, painting scenes of seduction that range from the sexually subdued—as in Girl with the Wineglass, where a man eagerly plies his uncertain female companion with drink and lecherous looks while a third friend dozes in the corner—to more direct depictions of debauchery, perhaps best represented in The Procuress, where a john feels up a drunken prostitute while her madam and some random lout look on.

Still, even theoretically, Liedtke’s attempt to eroticize Vermeer’s Milkmaid wears thin quickly. Beyond his claim of potent sexuality inherent in all period representations of the milkmaid, the curator’s most straightforward charge holds that the maid’s milk jug—out of which she measuredly pours milk into a pudding bowl—represents what Liedtke prudishly refers to as “a portion of the female anatomy.” Fair enough, for the moment, but what more? The curator directs our attention to the painting’s lower right hand corner, where a small painted tile decorated with a naked Cupid poised to strike abuts an ochre foot warmer. One might question just how a dull-colored foot warmer would provoke lip-biting arousal from Vermeer’s contemporary audiences. Yet they would surely scratch their head even more vigorously at Liedtke’s giddy answer: “The mistress of the house would put her feet up. It heats everything under the skirt.” And with that, the case is closed.

But when confronted with the sheer weight of The Milkmaid—finely wrought exquisiteness packed into each pore of canvas, tender attentions that produce the painting’s photographic effects—it becomes clear that Liedtke’s theory cannot withstand the magnitude of Vermeer’s creative ambition. The piece hangs together in perfect balance, allowing its painter to showcase his dazzling command of perspective and light, in turn establishing The Milkmaid’s moving sense of serene contemplation. Far from injecting it with signposts of an ulterior motive, Vermeer strips the work of possible distractions that might interfere with an appreciation of his technical brilliance.

Digital imaging studies of the painting (also not mentioned in the exhibit) bear out the point. An infrared reflectogram of the painting demonstrates that the sexy foot warmer was not even included in the original composition. Instead, Vermeer had first painted a hulking basket piled high with clothing in the right corner, which, had it not been replaced with the smaller heating device, would have cluttered the canvas, ruining any sense of depth that the stark, bare wall behind affords. As it is, the floodlit void in the upper-right hand corner directs the eye’s attention to the lower-left hand sector where it is held captive witness to Vermeer’s serial acts of virtuosity.

How exactly he achieves such a degree of precise pointillism in the spread of bread and pottery laid out on the maid’s worktable defies easy understanding, but the effect is spellbinding. From the torn chunks of bread collected at table’s edge and the surviving loaf safely within its wicker basket, to the smooth shell of a blue beer jug and worn brittleness of the milk pitcher and pudding bowl, Vermeer uses pinpricks of paint to establish an illusionistic play of light, endowing otherwise mundane subjects with a jaw-dropping, three-dimensional voluptuousness. Indeed, there may exist no other work that so successfully ascends the heights of hyper-realism—save that found in the liquid eyes, moist lips and teardrop jewelry of Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring—and certainly not in such concentrated fashion.

Young Woman With A Water Pitcher

Once museum-goers, however, successfully negotiate the traffic jam of camera-flashing tourists and scolding guards gridlocked around The Milkmaid—roughly halfway through the exhibit—they quickly enter a labyrinth of curatorial disorder and poor judgment. Apparently having shot his wad on the milkmaids theme at the start of the show, Liedtke doesn’t seem overly concerned about what comes next. As a result, the exhibit becomes a string of pretty pictures that takes on the feel of the museum’s permanently installed Dutch gallery in the Met’s European wing, minus the majesty of its considerable collection of Rembrandts.

Haunting the vicinity to The Milkmaid’s left hangs Study of a Young Woman, perhaps signaling the most bewildering missed opportunity of the show. The painting offers another example of Vermeer’s masterful deployment of light and shadow, and the gentle brush strokes that mysteriously breathe life into his subjects. The angelic moonishness of the girl’s face, her porcelain-perfect skin surrounding a simple smile and invitation to eye contact, make for arresting portraiture. But the picture possesses no other characteristics that directly connect it to The Milkmaid, nor for that matter any other paintings in Vermeer’s oeuvre with the exception again of Girl with a Pearl Earring. What’s it doing here?

In its place should have been Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, a painting executed towards the end of Vermeer’s life, and also on view in a separate gallery. Of the paintings in the artist’s small body of work, Young Woman with a Water Pitcher offers the greatest opportunity to compare and contrast the middle and late periods of a career in full blossom. Like The Milkmaid, Study of a Young Woman offers no narrative intrigue, privileging instead mood and composition in its intimate contemplation of domestic tranquility. Here again, a young woman is depicted in placid repose, her attention apparently captured by something off-stage as she prepares her morning bath. Vermeer employs the same pointillist technique to highlight the glistening pitcher, the soft touch of velvet covering the table, and the reflections caught by the water basin’s rim. Yet these perfectly rendered details are overwhelmed by the oppressively rigid geometry that structures the space. In startling contrast to the supple curves organizing The Milkmaid, here Vermeer traps his young woman’s serenity within the stern constraints of unyieldingly straight lines, achieving a dynamic balance that frees the image to

jump off the canvas. No two works in Vermeer’s catalogue are more similar in structure and different in execution.

Another painting curiously tucked away in an adjoining gallery, Hendrick Sorgh’s A Kitchen, should have been granted pride of place in the same room as the show’s star. Sorgh’s dark, domestic interior scene, painted when Vermeer was still a child, clearly proved influential in The Milkmaid’s development. Aside from Domenico Fiasella’s Queen Artemisia, perhaps no painting made more of an impression on Vermeer in this period. Liedtke acknowledges this, of course, but understates the case. “This thinly painted and somewhat worn panel dates from about 1643 and anticipates some aspects of Vermeer’s domestic interiors, such as the abrupt recession from the left. The Delft artist [Vermeer] achieves a more naturalistic effect by bringing the viewer in much closer to the scene, and through his more sophisticated study of daylight.” True enough. But were one to crop the painting down to nothing but the maidservant in the corner, the extent to which Vermeer copied Sorgh’s composition for his own purposes becomes abundantly clear. The Met makes this point itself in the show, all the more reason to question why the two paintings have been sequestered in different rooms.

While most shows are designed to end with a bang—if for no other reason than to get museum goers excited about purchasing items from the little gift shop barnacles affixed to every exhibit these days—Vermeer’s Masterpiece peters out with a trickling whimper. Having assembled a pageant of images depicting people—their appetites, labors, and loves—the show closes with an isolated pair of paintings wildly out of place. Interior of the Oude Kerk, the shared title of these nearly identical works by Hendrick van Vliet and Emanuel de Witte, respectively, are almost completely devoid of human presence, emphasizing as they do the beauty of Delft’s iconic church. According to the Met, each work “evoked a spiritual environment and anticipated the optical approach of Vermeer,” which is fine, but why consign them to the end of the line? Had they come earlier to set the stage for understanding Vermeer’s milieu, influences and development, the church interiors would have nicely complemented the other works, building momentum toward a climactic viewing of The Milkmaid. As it is, guests leave the exhibit with the feeling of
seeing double.

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Martha Rosler’s homeless project is back, only this time in archival form.  The exhibition, “If You Lived Here Still…,” currently on view at New York’s e-Flux gallery, revisits numerous materials on homelessness and housing, which Rosler first began collecting for the exhibition, “If You Lived Here…,” held at the Dia Art Foundation in 1989.  In the mole-hole space under 41 Essex Street one finds a documentary video,  a slideshow projection, a tac-board wall of documents (flyers, posters and advertisements), five file boxes (with lecture notes, real estate holdings, letters and articles) and five work-station tables—all part of the 1989 exhibition which now makes up the current archive. This text-laden version of Rosler’s ongoing project includes several new document additions as of August 28^th, 2009. These inclusions have helped keep the essence of her activist-oriented, research-based artwork alive. Since homelessness has reached record levels in New York City recently, e-Flux seeks to encourage viewing and research by opening up the archive to the public. However, it is uncertain as to whether the transformation of the archive into an art exhibition subtracts from or strengthens the intensity of Rosler’s original concept.

In the heyday of the original Dia exhibition, Rosler confronted multidimensional aspects of America’s and New York’s festering-sore-like social system to address the causes of, and remedies for homelessness in America. Her work, in keeping with the spirit of many other socially-minded artists from the early 1990s, embraced tasks—such as holding public meetings, conferencing with architects, interviewing the homeless—akin to those of a small-town politician, social service educator, urban planner or human rights activist (out went Modernist aesthetics and formalism, in came interventionism).  At different times over the course of the year-long exhibition, Rosler recruited and involved a team of urban planners, designers, architects, film makers, Rutgers University students, homeless people, and advocacy groups. These people along with other key collaborative players—the artist Dan Wiley, the self-organized group of homeless people known as Homeward Bound, and the Atlanta-based group of young architects and designers known as Mad Housers—formed the core team in Rosler’s real-world, real-time engagement approach. Their entire exhibition production consisted of four public meetings, a three-part exhibition cycle followed by “Town Hall Meetings,” and numerous auxiliary events. The first exhibition, “Home Front,” acknowledged those in jeopardy of losing their homes in various cities as well as their bench-sleeping prevention efforts.  “Homeless: The Street and Other Venues,” followed as a second exhibition, responding to questions of “(in)visible” homelessness.   More answers finally arrived in the last of the three exhibitions, “City: Visions and Revisions,” which examined urban problems and solutions of all kinds—from realistic to utopian schemes. This collective and cumulative project, while belittled as non-art by US art critics at the time, seems to be one of the more appropriate ways in which an artist utilizes the high art of exhibition making. Borrowing Dia’s authorial “space,” both mental and physical, Rosler was able to draw attention to a new platform from which the voices of the city’s homeless could be better heard.

E-flux’s present archive installation seeks to reactivate similar concerns, to revive awareness a second time around, of an issue increasing in its severity in New York City: that of homelessness and the almost-homeless which Mayor Bloomberg’s take-a-hike plan (one-way ticket “home” for homeless people) has failed to curb. Yet, I am not entirely convinced that any one particular argument is clearly articulated within the confusion of discursive propaganda found at the e-Flux space other than the one inherent in the exhibition experience itself:  that despite the rise of media attention, new social programs, and activist involvement, there remains a never-ending and still increasing occurrence of housing loss.

My first serious encounter with Rosler’s work came in a course on twentieth-century photography. This medium, aside from her own art historical writing, is what Rosler is best known for and it shows up often in her art projects—photomontage, photo-texts duos, and documentary photography—which range from installations to video to the gelatin silver print.  After studying other photographers who captured poverty, housing or property loss as subject matter in their work (I’m thinking mainly of the Farm Security Administration photographers here), I soon developed an appreciation and preference for Rosler’s work, particularly her photo-texts entitled The Bowery In Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974–75).  Not that the FS A photographs lacked any particular aptitude or insight, but they drew upon a Christianizing humanism when rendering their images, evoking pity and sorrow from all those who had a bit of change in their pocket and a stable home. Rosler’s Bowery photographs oppose any necessity of creating sympathy for the down-and-out “bum.” In fact, she avoids the representation of the human subject altogether and instead creates a visual account of an emptied-out urban environment ridden with beer bottles, litter, and other human remains. Juxtaposed next to each of her forty-eight black and white photographs are a few typed words: synonyms for drunkenness in the middle of a white page.  The absence of the human subject, referenced to only by images and words of their environment, allows the viewer to come to terms with the circumstance and presence of homelessness itself without sentimentalizing individuals, an act that might ironically yield an enabling passivism or misunderstanding of real socio-environmental factors.

The disallowance of contemplating human subjects, which proved profound in the Bowery photo-texts, is precisely what I dislike about Rosler’s archive project at e-Flux. There is too much absence or talking around the subject that leaves me wondering: what is really being addressed by her work? The inundation of text-based materials from the late 1980s—a pamphlet pinned to the wall from the “NFHA: National Fair Housing Alliance,” a magnet with writing, “311 Save Your Home Hotline,” an article on the “Protest in Detroit; Photographers Show a City ‘Demolished by Neglect,’” and a book entitled Artists’ Housing Manual—speaks to the ambitiousness of Rosler’s personal media collection on housing issues more than anything else, but leaves unanswered the question of who her intended audience is.  Rosler’s exhibited archive also raises questions about the consequences of particular art-exhibition practices, which I believe do injustice to the real concerns found in the works of some artists, including Rosler. The organization and layout of materials at the e-Flux space made them impossible to really use; pamphlets and documents were overlapping and tightly pressed underneath a thick layer of plexi-glass on a workshop table. More flyers were pinned to the wall—again, presented in a way that precluded any thoughts of thumbing through their contents.

A month earlier  I was leafing through fifteenth century pages barehanded in an open-air pavilion at the State Archives in Venice. This gallery, by contrast, asked me to wear white gloves when flipping through twenty-year old files. It is not the ironic, hyper-genetic preservation issue that annoyed me most, but rather my sense that the archive was not meant to be a user-friendly archive-art project at all.  Instead, it is an archive visually on show, at a safe distance so that the viewer can admire the materials but not necessarily learn from them.  The formal aestheticizing cleanliness, and the white cube setting that accompanies too many institutionally-conformed art exhibitions and which had, indeed, seemed intentionally ejected from Martha’s first “relational” project, felt clearly reinserted for this show. The exhibition style beckoned art connoisseurship, point blank, whether it wanted to or not.

Art on the theme of homelessness has not always crystallized under the auspices of an art-designated space.  Two years prior to the opening of “If You Lived Here…,” Krzysztof Wodiczko, a prominent Polish artist, beamed up individuals displaced by urban planning in Boston, New York, and in many other cities by projecting their photographed image onto monumental buildings in a work he called “Homeless Projections” (1987).  A year later, based off ideas he received from interviews with homeless people, Wodiczko began designing “Homeless Vehicles,” which were tubular carts designed for sleeping and carrying bottles and cans.  I tend to favor Wodiczko’s ambitions to Rosler’s for the simple fact that Wodiczko views society’s perception of homelessness as more of a problem than housing loss itself. However, I would also entertain the idea that Rosler’s and Wodiczko’s work is, together, complementary and harmonious. Rosler’s work provokes, creates space for unknown voices to be heard, cheerleads, fights verbally and textually, wakes up the public, and continues to document the challenges of the entire affair in an archive.  Wodiczko takes the hands-on approach by inventing practical tools with an aesthetic, urban sensibility.  One finds emotional fervor in Rosler’s work, such as her 1989 Times Square animation “Housing Is a Human Right.”  In contrast, one finds stability in the Buckminster Fuller-like inventiveness of Wodiczko.  We should feel lucky to have both artists living in the New York City area, at least part time.

For the current revisited exhibition, I am certain that e-Flux and Martha Rosler were well aware of just how timely the archival publicizing would be. The show opened August 28, 2009 and will close October 31, 2009, just days shy of the mayoral elections. Is all the info-loading to push politics?  I actually don’t think so.  But, the drop-hint texts, marrying negative connotations with the word “Mayor,” found scattered about the archive space, were no subtle message either. I am left wondering to what extent the political nature of the “archive presentation” will provoke critical rehistoricization of Rosler’s less politically-geared content.

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Let’s get right to the point: if this is the best the so-called Millenials have to offer (myself being one of them) then the art world as we know might as well pack up and leave. It’s been a good run. Everyone should be proud. Lots of great memories. Tons of money. Successful careers. Names in the pantheon. It was bound to come to an end sometime. But that it was going to be so soon no one could have known. So mediocre is the New Museum’s newest and perhaps most important show, The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, that if this is the best of the future then the future is bleak and boring.

Culled from the recommendations of 150 artists, critics, and curators, 500 artists, all younger than the age Jesus was when he was crucified at the age of 33, were narrowed down by the curators Lauren Cornell, Massimiliano Gioni, and Laura Hoptman to get to a final headcount of fifty artists from twenty-five countries. It must have been a Herculean task–if one wants to get a sense of its enormity, one can purchase the show’s Artist Directory, a phonebook sized tome of those who made the cut and those who didn’t. But, as is the fate of so many things of the Herculean variety, the ambition proved to be its own undoing. This is not to say that an attempt to try to give a state of the young art world is invalid, quite the opposite, but the situation that we are presented with could easily have been predicted. The last two major group shows at the New Museum, the terrible Unmonumental and the better After Nature, set the stage for Younger Than Jesus by showing us the New Museum’s chosen aesthetic. And what have we learned from the exhibition? Well, apparently young artists really love video and photography. Conceptual art is back. And painting and sculpture are too much work.

It is well within the New Museum’s institutional right that it have its own sense of the type of art it believes to be important, but asserting that the New Museum is in fact the most qualified voice and venue to tell the viewing public what is definitively happening seems tenuous at best. That there was a dearth of good painting is especially troubling. Only one can be recommended, the Polish painter Jakub Julian Ziolkowski whose medium sized to large scale canvases have a strangely surrealist freneticism to them but also manage to succeed in their illustrative qualities. I’m not sure what it means that so few painters, let alone good ones, were represented in the show. Perhaps patient, considered work is falling by the wayside in favor of the immediate gratification of more technologically driven mediums such as photography and video art.

Although the New Museum makes no claims otherwise, there seems to be no real cohesion to the show other than the age of the artists in it. It’s a shame really, because this could have been a chance for the New Museum to shine. As Holland Cotter observed, “it is, despite its promise of freshness, business as usual. Its strengths are individual and episodic.” Personally, I didn’t get it. There is no real narrative structure, no consistent through line. There are, however, a number of middling, dull works. For The Consequence British conceptual artist Ryan Gander has instructed the museum that whatever gallery attendant is on duty on the fourth floor he or she is to wear a white Adidas tracksuit with two dark bloodstains on it. The title of course is directly linked to the unknown story that we make up in our heads. I had to look for the blood, that was my consequence. Two insignificant bloodstains do not a compelling narrative make. Polish video-artist Anna Molska’s video of two beautiful, muscular young men dressed in some sort of warrior costumes pushing around enormous puzzle pieces and magically making something that approximates Malevich’s Black Square feels more like a failed fashion shoot from “America’s Next Top Model” than a work of any consequence. Both artists are on the fourth floor. Stay away from the fourth floor.

Czech artist Kateřina Šedá’s video, however, depicting her depressed grandmother drawing her way out of her sadness is truly a moving work. Elad Lassry of Israel engages with the same mimetic themes that Richard Prince addressed in the early 1980s when he re-photographed magazine ads. Prince, however, did it better. Chinese photographer Cao Fei’s images of cos-players (people that dress up as characters from video games and comic books) have no weight. They look exactly like what they are: photographs of people dressed up in constumes; not very interesting and reminiscent of freshman year photo-lab work.

Continuing to list all the mediocre art that comprises Younger Than Jesus would be unfruitful while making me look like some sort of angry Hilton Kramer-esque critic, constantly lamenting the downfall of art. Younger Than Jesus is not entirely devoid of good art. Oddly enough, the best piece is video, which as a heavily saturated medium can’t usually make such a claim. Three artists in particular stand out. Add me to the list of people overwhelmed by Cyprien Gaillard’s 30-minute video, with its spectacular soundtrack by the French composer Koudlam. Gaillard’s video, told in three parts and shot at a distance, is a stunning meditation on violence, desperation, desolation, and the problem of forced community building. It begins with rival gangs of “underground fight clubs” in St. Petersburg, Russia housing projects beating the shit out of each other. It then cuts to an elaborate light and fireworks show projected onto a Parisian suburb housing project before it is imploded. A weird, almost sentimental send-off of an obsolete object that is at once the face of a community and yet is not deemed worthy of existence. The final third is an aerial view of snow-covered public housing in a suburb of Kiev. The camera shakes as the airplane flies around buildings and grounds. The buildings look as if they have always been abandoned, that there was never any intent to have people live in them. Gaillard lets us know that America doesn’t hold a monopoly on failed community building and public welfare. It is a work that is both disturbing and exhilarating. It’s one of the best things I’ve seen in New York in two years.

Philadelphia-based video artist Ryan Trecartin’s absurdist installations/video works are so screwball that they defy explanation. His heavily made-up, gender bending performers rant and rave, the digital effects are decidedly low budget. The viewer sits in a two-room installation that resembles a plane and watches as Trecartin’s performers bounce around the television screens. The work is not only morbid and perverse but hysterically funny, each video displays a distinct narrative that veers toward Dadaist exuberance. South African video and installation artist Dineo Seshee Bopape is wonderfully strange. Her installation thewebula/uhthwebula (the process of making someone into a zombie which is also the same word for taking a picture) features black walls, reflective foil, plants painted black, a disco ball, and glitter on every available surface. Couple that with her moody black and white video dreamweaver, which features her with what looks to be a beard, sunglasses, an umbrella, and white sacks tied around her waist while a single exposed light bulb swings above her head as the only source of light and nonsensical mash-up soundtrack plays in the background, and the effect is incredibly haunting. It is as if one has stepped into private ritual from another world, producing an experience that is ghostly and unsettling.

I was heartened that most of the reviews (Holland Cotter of the The New York Times and Peter Schjeldahl of The New Yorker) reserved heaping praise on Younger Than Jesus. It’s good that they didn’t buy in to the intoxicating qualities of youth. The same can’t be said for New York Magazine’s Jerry Saltz, a habitual praiser of youth. Perhaps the main problem with his assessment of the exhibition, other than his belief in it as a success, is that he somehow manages to argue that the sublime has “moved into us” and is no longer the province of “God or nature or abstraction.” The sublime, and thereby its potential, is always in us. It is not an exterior event but its power rests in its inherent interiority. Burke understood this and so did Kant. The external terrors trigger our internal collapse. We step into the sublime experience because it, the fear of our death, what Burke calls “the king of terrors,” is awakened within us. The sublime is there to remind us of the immanence of our death and the reality of flesh. Kant argues we are made better, more human, in our experience of the sublime. This does not happen with Younger Than Jesus. There is no being “made better.” If anything, one exits it entirely unchanged. And that is why it amounts to a nothing experience.

The very problem with the exhibition is that it really isn’t “bad” in the sense that the work in it is awful and unconsidered. There are standouts, including German minimalist artist Kitty Kraus along with the ones I have already mentioned. But most of it is just a sort of bland rehashing of work we’ve already seen. It doesn’t feel terribly original. The one thing that remains consistent is that it’s all remarkably thoughtful; even the works I have singled out to chastise are smart and thoughtful.

But that isn’t enough. Being thoughtful and smart doesn’t make art good. It makes it thoughtful and smart. There is a difference and that is where Younger Than Jesus gets lost in its own ambition. It’s not a terrible exhibition and it is without question important. If one has been following the art world at all for the past five to ten years then none of this should be surprising. The problem lies in the fact that so much of it is spectacularly mediocre, signifying that, possibly, art is on its way to a long period of pedestrian work that neither surprises nor excites. And this is fine. Art can’t always be great but let’s not celebrate this. Perhaps there is hope. Maybe video art is going to be the new important medium. A lot of people think so. I’m not sold, though. Three really good artists, video or not, out of fifty isn’t great odds. 

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The Installation View of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Universal Gym

I have always been suspicious of Swiss-born installation artist Thomas Hirschhorn’s art; it always strikes me as a little too easy. The blatant in-your-face qualities of his installations recall a petulant teenager who really wants to shake things up but can’t get out of his own way. Hirschhorn’s 2006 show Superficial Engagement, at Barbara Gladstone, was at its core an assault on the viewer, one which seemed more intent on being upsetting than saying anything of real value. Made up of four large platforms that the viewer had to navigate through, the jerry-built work combined ghastly images of violence and war in the Middle East, mannequins studded with nails and screws–made to look like African fetish objects–textiles, references to the Swiss mystic Emma Kunz, video monitors, and newspaper articles with headlines stuck to the walls. The space became so cramped from the mass of objects that it was impossible for the viewer not to be confronted with some image of horror: a headless body, a dismembered corpse, the disfigured body of a small child.

Hirschhorn’s argument for the piece is that by never letting the viewer relax the engagement with the images becomes superficial, which is to say that the experience is kept on the surface; we remain confronted by the things we see, unable to argue or pontificate our way out of the encounter. The things we see remain unfilterable and through this experience art might allow us to be healed in the face of the world’s terrors. A nice idea, but it ultimately fell short. The chaos of the installation made it impossible to be truly horrified or indignant. Those that did feel that way are always looking to be offended in some way or another. Pictures of terror are just the things they saw at that moment. Yet with all these images leering at the viewer, one ultimately became inured to the experience. Superficial Engagement turned out to be less terrifying and merely interesting, perhaps even comic in its absurd aggression. The use of Emma Kunz, as the New York Times critic Ken Johnson pointed out, seemed out of place in Hirschhorn’s narrative. As Johnson aptly put it, “For all its brutal obviousness and faux-populism, there is something deeply confused and confusing about Mr. Hirschhorn’s project…He bullies the viewer and induces a vague, free-floating guilt.” Is a work really so powerful when we have to be deliberately hit over the head with our own helplessness and impotence so that we can’t help but succumb to an agenda, in this case one that is both political and artistic? One never gets the sense when viewing a Hirschhorn that the art is dangerous, that it has menace and can wound us. Not like Edward Kienholz (and later Nancy Reddin Kienholz), whose installations really are terrifying and unsettling. Duchamp was right when he declared that Ed Keinholz was “a marvelously vulgar artist.” The same can’t be said for Hirschhorn.

And now Hirschhorn is back, pointing out the problems of the world and still carrying the torch for art as social critique. But what if that social critique is empty? What if its meaning really is meaningless (and not in the way Camus believed in the freeing power inherent in lack of meaning) and it all comes down to trying too hard? There is no denying that Hirschhorn is smart and thoughtful, but that isn’t enough. There are plenty of smart and thoughtful people in the world, though most are probably not as ambitious as Hirschhorn, and this is where his work falls apart. It coasts along on its own painfully evident intent. Universal Gym is his first New York solo show since Superficial Engagement and once again he is forcibly making his point known. There is something to be said for subtly, for not providing all the answers to the viewer at once. Thomas Hirschhorn doesn’t believe this. He lays it all out and explains it away, negating any chance for real involvement with the work. I had heard that Universal Gym was really just that, a gym for anyone in the heart of Chelsea. It seemed like an inspired idea. It is not. Instead Hirschhorn is still bound up in his old ways, still slapping things together with tape and cardboard, going for that D.I.Y approach, and as heavy-handed as ever.

Taking up all of Barbara Gladstone’s West 21 Street gallery space, Universal Gym is a simulacrum of an upscale health club, replete with workout equipment, mirrors, fans, free weights, exercise balls and mats, stationary bikes, treadmills, and TVs. Hirschhorn has put motivational imagery of steroid-ripped muscle men on the wall next to a wallpaper image of an exotic beach at sunset. The word “Sculpt” is emblazoned on the back wall. There is a map of the world on the other. Plastic water bottles and aluminum cans of Coke are taped to the floor. And then, as is his tradition, he goes over the top. Never content simply to let things alone, Hirschhorn can’t help but fill things to the brim as if he has some sort of obsessive-compulsive disorder that doesn’t allow him restraint. There is an enormous black medicine ball that sits in the middle of the room; to the right of it is a make shift room filled with TVs and a treadmill, the televisions displaying what look to be readings of heart and lung function, like some sort of sports-science training facility. Behind the medicine ball are four mannequins in Plexiglas cages. They stand with their right arms extended: one holds a weight, one a heart, one an enormous pill made out of a globe of the earth, and one a tub of protein supplement. All are missing their hearts, a hole in each chest signifying where they once were. One of the mannequins has no flesh but is wearing expensive trainers, one is nude, two are clothed.

All of the workout equipment is unusable, taped up to itself or down to the floor. Hirschhorn’s familiar cardboard and brown tape is everywhere. Apparently this is some sort of commentary, the gym as metaphor for all of us. The press release states that, “the Universal Gym becomes somewhat comic, a ship of perfected fools sailing blindly through the storm.” Hirschhorn himself has written that the piece “is a space for exhaustion, for hanging on, for staying upright, and staying in shape while the world falls apart.” Is this what passes for social critique, poking fun at those who go to the gym, analogizing that concern with one’s physical appearance is akin to removing one’s heart? How trite and easy. There is no bravery to this art. Even as misguided as Superficial Engagement was, there was some heart to it, some attempt to say something. With Universal Gym, Hirschhorn is merely making empty value judgments and providing the viewer with no legitimate questions to ask herself.

Edmund Burke wrote that “a clear idea is therefore another name for a little idea,” Hirschhorn tries so hard to be clear and is so desperate to say something that his ideas become little. But one gets the sense that his thought itself is not little, and this is what makes him all the more maddening. That he is so deliberate, so committed to his ideas, ultimately serves to undo him. The point is made the minute one enters the gallery and forgotten as soon as the doors close on the other side. I had hoped that Universal Gym would really be just that, a gym open to the public in blue-chip Chelsea. Now that would have been daring. Were Hirschhorn to have provided a free gym for two months, a place where all walks of life could congregate, the work would have been legitimately interesting. Perhaps that little slice of life would allow us to see if we really are trying to “stay in shape while the world falls apart.” Instead we are presented with an unusable space filled with empty metaphors on the human condition, a condition that needs no sugarcoating, for the very act of living allows us to know the problems of being human.

By playing at social critique and engaging with the most obvious ideas Hirschhorn succeeds in being just as ineffective as if he had remained silent and made nothing at all. He has written of his work: “What I want is to stay disobedient! I want to try to resist, protesting and I want to refuse myself the tendency of making things ‘arty’, nice and clean. I want to work without cynicism, without negativity and without self-satisfying criticism–I do not want to be critical–I want to do work, which resists the moralist and nihilist tradition!” This, however, is not the work of protest. He succeeds in not making things “nice and clean,” but fails not to make things “arty.” This is not cynical art, but it is nonetheless deeply self-satisfied and moralist. Hirschhorn is nothing if not a moralist. His critiques are couched in making us disappointed in ourselves, in trying to make us better, the better becoming that which we are not. I am unsure if this is actually us becoming better or becoming little Thomas Hirschhorns. Hirschhorn should embrace his moral high ground and tell us how to remake our disastrous selves. Perhaps his work would be more powerful if he was overtly cynical and a little surlier. As it stands now he tries to terrorize us from afar, pushing us around but pretending he has no agenda. He’s slick, but he’s also transparent and clumsy. The only people that find his work upsetting are those longing to be upset. Let them have him and leave the exploration of really terrible things to those artists who not only know them when they see them but are unafraid to let those things run amok and be truly terrifying.

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A view of MoMA’s second-floor atrium with Pipilotti Rist’s “Pour Your Body Out” installation.

Pour Your Body Out (7345 Cubic Meters), by Pipilotti Rist. At the Museum of Modern Art.

How do we approach Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist’s video installation Pour Your Body Out (7345 Cubic Meters)? The criticism, if it can be called that, up to now says that one should be completely enamored with the visual spectacle of seeing MoMA’s atrium transformed into a psychedelic video experience. The wall text encourages visitors to “feel as liberated as possible, and move as freely as you can or want to! Watch the videos and listen to the sound in any position or movement. Practice stretching: pour your body out of your hips or watch through your legs. Rolling around and singing is also allowed.” So people lounge about, leaning against the walls, lying on the floor, sitting or lying on/in the massive round blue couch (modeled after the eye’s iris) in the center of the atrium. In a video interview at moma.org, Rist explains that she is always concerned with the comfort of the viewers and how they are able to move. By providing pillows for one to sit or rest one’s head on, the experience becomes focused on the viewer’s comfort as the video is taken in.

And what of the video? There’s no denying it as visual spectacle. Rist’s sixteen-minute video loop is shown on three sides of the atrium, creating an almost completely immersive experience as ripe strawberries, a pot bellied pig, earthworms, red tulips moving in the wind and naked girls floating in water and crawling along the ground, are projected twenty-five feet high in color so rich and saturated that it becomes slightly overwhelming. One cannot help but be taken with the whole thing. Yet the fawning praise for Pour Your Body Out is odd and perhaps a little desperate.

Art critics seem always to want either to praise or condemn, not to take a balanced approach and measure the moment of their feeling. It is for this reason that we are now inundated with gushing about Rist. But how does it compare to her past work? Is it better than Ever Is Over All from 1997, an oddly moving meditation on the beauty in violence? Or worse than Pickleporno (1992)? The answer, in both cases, is no. There is a sweetness to Rist’s work, a playfulness and whimsy that makes it compelling. She produces fantastical environments that have an inviting quality; they want to share themselves with the viewer. This is not mean-spirited art, not something that seeks to teach us of our own failings but is, as Peter Schjeldahl asserts in the New Yorker, “art and, also, in its sumptuously and modestly passing way, something other and better than art?” What does this mean? Could anyone possibly know this, and would knowing this make any difference? No, it is not better than art, it is simply art. That Schjeldahl would make such a declaration succeeds in placing on Rist a burden that is far too heavy to bear.

Pour Your Body Out is not the “best thing to happen so far in the Museum of Modern Art’s space-splurging, pompous atrium,” as Schjeldahl would have his readers believe. That honor goes to Martin Puryear and his 2007 retrospective, an exhibition so awe-inspiring and magical that it came much closer to the vaunted status of being “better than art” than Rist’s installation does. Puryear’s monumental sculptures succeeded in making the atrium seem even bigger than it is and by doing so made the viewer feel like a child again, returning to a world where enormous things regained the quality of the extraordinary. Nor is it an “exorcism,” “impregnation,” or “incantation” as Jerry Saltz argued in his New York magazine review. Yes, MoMA is a bastion to maleness, specifically the white kind that was born between 1903 and 1945, but Pour Your Body Out is not the first real assault on it and one cannot lump in Marlene Dumas’ underwhelming and boringly dour survey into the conversation. Saltz would do well to remember the four Joan Mitchell paintings that hung in the atrium a couple of years ago. Those paintings, like most of Mitchell’s work, possess real power that isn’t limited by the confines of the picture plane. Nor do they need sound and movement to register that power to the viewer. If anything it was those paintings that put a serious dent in the masculine armor and signaled that the big boys are not the best artists in that most Faulknerian mausoleum of hope and desire.

That dark pink drapes hang on the wall or a woman is submerged in water and blood pours from her body shouldn’t be a cause for excitement nor a testament to MoMA’s coming of age, as Saltz declares. How can this be praiseworthy? Haven’t we moved beyond this sort of blatant message sending? There is absolutely no question that MoMA should feature more women artists but the fault is as much the rest of the art world’s as it is MoMA’s. Critics should write about, and galleries should show, more women. Collectors should buy more art by women and curators should stop being enamored with clever men. But Pour Your Body Out is not the vehicle by which the art world is to be transformed.

Critics want it to be more, something institution altering, but really Rist could have put anything inoffensive up on the walls and the reaction would be the same (though if she had covered the walls in silver and made a video with sports cars and hardcore pornography she probably would have been condemned). It seems that at base critics like it for no good reason, or perhaps the better way of framing it is that they like its ease. One need only look at it and be entertained. If one is going to find fault with the atrium at least find fault with the fact that the installation fails because it is not truly immersive. Its three-wall projection is incapable of creating an environment deserving of the praise it has received. One never really gets lost in the experience, in direct contrast to the feeling one has in James Turrell’s Meeting at P.S. 1, which completely consumes the viewer’s sense of self and place. Instead, the experience of Pour Your Body Out is one of continually trying to find the right angle to take it all in.

I do not want, however, for the reader to feel that I am in some way indicting Rist. She has managed to make a work of video/installation art that has the wonderful feeling of shared experience. This is no easy task, for as by dint of the performative nature of this type of art the individual making the work is placed at the center of the experience, thereby putting the pressure on the viewers to figure out what it is they are witnessing. The experience is not one of sharing, the chance for connection hinges on the vagaries of the artist’s intent. The art is still about, as Barnett Newman once said, the handling of chaos. But it seems that it is the handling of the chaos of the self, not the chaos of the problem of what it means to live in the world with others, which Newman maintained was central to the creation of art. Perhaps the best thing that I can say for Rist is that she manages not to position herself as the focal point for experience. Instead she allows her viewers to make of the piece what they will. Stand, sit in or on the circle, lie down, run around, fall asleep, daydream, talk to a friend. All of these are viable and necessary options in a work like Pour Your Body Out. There is, oddly enough, a sense of connection with the rest of the viewers and this resides in the experience of looking at the video. By allowing for myriad modes of watching, Rist fosters a community of viewers. We look together and we look at each other as we watch, and it is this that makes the work valuable. We experience those around us and are thereby released from the solitary act of looking that so often goes hand-in-hand with viewing art.

But is that enough? Sure, but unfortunately it has been made into so much more, and that more is why Pour Your Body Out collapses. It is a perfectly pleasurable way to while-away sixteen minutes, but the blind and overzealous praise is ill founded. Instead it’s a place for the weary, somewhere to lounge, for tourists to take a break and relax. Usually one is not able to relax at a museum, the pace is a deliberate march towards specific things, but with Pour Your Body Out the viewers are allowed to take a moment to breathe, listen to the droning score by Anders Guggisberg, and sit. Students who don’t care for art and tourists who are making all the stops will be delighted to see that big blue couch, but critics, always desperate for bigger and better things, are best served to keep looking. Or perhaps not look so hard. Let Pour Your Body Out be what it is: a typically pleasant experience in a typically pleasant institution. It succeeds because of its sweetness and charm and fails because of the desire to praise it. Though, perhaps the best way to look at it is a conversation between two teenagers who were sitting behind me:

Girl (hovering over the edge): My shoes are a struggle   to take off. Boy: Ah, take ‘em off. That’s the point of all this.

Yes, it certainly is.

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Gino De Dominicis at P.S. 1. On view October 19, 2008 — February 9, 2009. 22–25 Jackson Ave at the intersection of 46th Ave, Long Island City.

P.S.1, the official affiliate of the Museum of Modern Art in Long Island City, has recently become a more attractive place of pilgrimage for art lovers than its revered parent. A series of exhibitions opening there this past month enhance this trend. Amongst them, Gino De Dominicis’ solo show stands out in scale and ambition. De Dominicis is relatively unknown in this country, but he has achieved a legendary stature in his native Italy. He entered the art scene in the late 1960sat the onset of the Conceptual art movement. Although the P.S.1 exhibition does feature some works from the late 1960s and early 1970s that appear to be influenced by this movement—such as a small drawing 1+0=0 or The Rubber Ball Dropped from Two Meters at the Moment Immediately Preceding the Bounce—the artist vigorously denies any ties to Conceptual art. According to Laura Cherubini, the curator of the exhibition, he always insisted on remaining outside the art “system” in order to oppose the dominance of the Duchampian readymade principle, underlying the Conceptualist aesthetic. In 1982 De Dominicis made an unequivocal gesture to that effect when he showed his painting In principio era l’immagine at the Sperone Gallery in Rome and displayed a toilet seat next to it to make the point that the painting was an art object, whereas the toilet seat was not, despite being shown in the same context.

Continuing the critique of Conceptual art by the Italian group Arte Povera De Dominicis made works such as the painting Zodiac, where he depicted animals, people, fishes, and ancient pottery with great truthfulness to life, all set against a bright blue background of photographic paper. Because De Dominicis is a very skillful draftsman, the painted figures, objects, and animals look like photographs. The entire work looks like a collage, which it is not—it is a painting. De Dominicis makes an unambiguous pictorial statement here in an attempt to return to images their power to enchant and transfix, rescuing them from their transformation into signs or ideas that could be best presented in ways not visual. In his audio recording D-IO, which broadcasts the artist’s laugh ad infinitum, De Dominicis literally makes fun of the multi-tasking of much of post-1960s art—of its stepping outside the strictly visual framework of a two-dimensional painting or drawing and engaging with theater, performance, architecture, and technology. The title of the piece clearly refers to the famous “0.10” exhibition of 1915 where Tatlin and Malevich displayed for the first time their iconoclastic works, such as three-dimensional counter-reliefs and Suprematist paintings, including the Black Square. In D-IO, however, the artist proclaimed himself the Creator with a capital “C” (“D” stands for De Dominicis; “IO” is Italian for “I”) and ridiculed the Russians’ attempt to extend art into three-dimensions for the benefit of the communal utopia (Tatlin) and to bring painting to its “zero degree” (Malevich). D-IO, shown as part of an installation including Unique Work: Unique Image of a Non-Existent Statue—a 1973 painting of a laughing statue of the Virgin—serves as the ultimate rebuttal to the attempts to bring art closer to the earth, to desublimate it.

In a predictable and even inevitable way, this quest to return the sacred aura to a work of art was extended by De Dominicis into his own life where he transformed himself into a mythic figure of sorts. As a result, unbelievable stories about the artist abound and, because of his eccentric personality, it is sometimes difficult to separate truth from fiction. From his friends and acquaintances we learn, for example, that he is an inveterate gambler; that he comes from a noble family wealthy enough to own palaces; that he likes the night life, wine, and women; and that he, as his friend Andrea Bellini says, always “demands and receives absolute devotion, unconditional love.” Giovanni Giuliani recalls that when he invited the artist to his palazzo to see the installation of one of his paintings, De Dominicis suggested sending an assistant to paint over the sixteenth-century frescoes on the ceiling, because he felt that they were making his work look less impressive. The supreme ego of the artist manifested itself on multiple occasions, which were transformed into stories and anecdotes by those who knew him as well as by the artist himself. As Alanna Heiss, the director of P.S. 1 recalled, describing his behavior at the 1972 Venice Biennale: “Gino spun tales and myths about himself without any corrective mechanism or inhibition. … He was known to intentionally mythologize his past to a point beyond lying, to a level where fantasy became confused with reality, by not only himself, but also those around him.” One of the most enduring myths that he perpetuated concerned his own death. He predicted his own death to the very hour, day, and year, and was supposed to have died on November 29, 1998—a fact that still remains unchallenged by Wikipedia. In 1999 a posthumous exhibition was organized by Alanna Heiss; some friends deplored his untimely end, but some had the temerity to doubt its authenticity. They were incredulous, because even at the beginning of his artistic career in 1969, the poster announcing the artist’s first solo exhibition in Rome looked like an obituary. For the artist who suspended temporal sequence in his works and abolished the difference between the past, present, and future, this introduction was appropriate.

For De Dominicis, the medium of painting constitutes the supreme mode of artistic expression and what we see at P.S.1 this year is mostly paintings. Many of these paintings are meant to be icons—in form, technique, and spirit. The works are grouped not only by color—“golden” paintings in one room, “blue” in another, “red” in a third—but also by iconology. In different rooms De Dominicis investigates different attributes of iconic representation: for example, one room is devoted entirely to faces while backgrounds are the focus in another. A third room is dominated by studies in perspective, and clouds in a fourth. All of these studies are extremely abstracted and look as eternal as Brancusi’s sculpture.

In the “faces” series, for example, we can observe the incredibly fine work of a brush or a pencil tracing the contours of a three-quarter turn of the head or its profile we usually see on an icon: a fine aquiline nose, a beautifully rounded contour of the face, a Mona Lisa smile (at least in one Untitled painting). In the room dedicated to “backgrounds,” several canvases, display the lushness of the gold-leaf settings of Byzantine icons accentuated by what looks like almost accidental cut-outs of geometric figures—circles, lines, and triangles—which in fact may be painted on top of the gold. The artist is characteristically secretive about his materials and his methods: as a rule, labels do not clarify the subject of the work or the materials used.

Apart from icons and paintings inspired by religion and despite his dissociation from other artists, De Dominicis is strongly influenced by his compatriot Giorgio de Chirico. The “blue” room in particular has many of the same timeless, open vistas with sharp shadows and partially lit mysterious objects, and uninhabited landscapes. For many artists of his time, de Chirico exemplified a “new order” for which the European sensibility was yearning as a refuge from the Futurist and Dadaist turmoil and disintegration. The dimension of de Chirico’s pittura metafisica which brings the discombobulated world back together in an eerie, surreal, eternal space is definitely present in De Dominicis’ work, although he seems to pay more attention to materials, craftsmanship, and the sacred, awe-inspiring aspect of the work than de Chirico.

Death and eternal life are not the only subjects that De Dominicis deems worthy of exploring. Another recurrent theme in his work is unconditional, everlasting love. The basement room of the exhibition space, where Zodiac and D-IO are displayed, also features the Urvasi and Gilgamesh drawing from 1980, where—somewhat like in the Etant Donnés by Duchamp—a perspective opens up to our view. Instead of the Duchampian erotic spectacle, however, we see a Renaissance vista with lakes and mountains in the distance.

Upon closer inspection, it is clear the uneven edges framing the vista, which resemble a broken mirror, are in fact profiles of a woman and a man. The woman is Urvasi, a nymph from Indian mythology and the man is Gilgamesh, a Sumerian king and inventor who wished to live forever. As Gabriele Guercio remarks, for De Dominicis the imagined love between a celestial nymph and an earthly king, a goddess and a mortal, a woman and an artist exemplified a path to immortality. Apparently, the artist developed an interest in the Sumerians in the late 1970s, when he learned that the European civilization and spirituality may be traced to Sumerian myths, cultures, and institutions. The bringing together of an Indian goddess and a proto-European man who died several millennia ago into an image and a story about love is an act that transcends time and space, myth and reality, cultural borders between East and West and creates a beautiful legend, which we all want to believe. Consistent defiance of the laws of narrative and history brings De Dominicis to the image as the only force that is able to bear witness to what is left sacred to man—his immortality.

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Piotr on Couch, 1996 (detail)

Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton. At The New Museum (through January 11).

One must be careful with how one approaches the work of Elizabeth Peyton. It is too easy to dismiss her, to fault her for her own seemingly bottomless devotion to the seductions of youth and beauty as Sarah Valdez did in her review of Peyton’s 2001 show at Gavin Brown. In that review Valdez wrote that Peyton was “achingly vacant” and that her paintings hung “around like so many posters of celebrities on a pining teenager’s bedroom wall.” Her wispy, dreamy figures do recall the analogy that Valdez made: their fashion school-like illustrative qualities lend them an inherent weightlessness that seems the stuff of wistful infatuation. And yes, it’s true that Peyton loves her subjects. She admitted as much in a recent New Yorker profile by Calvin Tomkins, when she remarked: “I really love the people I paint. I believe in them, I’m happy they’re in the world.” Her enthusiasm for those she paints is apparent, and at the risk of being sentimental, this enthusiasm is not a negative. If anything it is refreshing in an art world that has not only taken to viewing any sort of unironic enthusiasm as dubious, but seems to believe that aggressive disinterest is somehow an aesthetic stance that equates belligerence with intelligence. Peyton’s love, though, is also distracting. It detracts from her paintings, taking them out of the realm of painting and transforming them into devotional objects. Her gaze often feels clouded by her worshipful relation to those she paints.

However, it is also too easy to buy into Peyton, as so many do. The accessibility of her emotions is a boon for viewers who want to have artistic intent cleanly laid out before them. It is a disservice to Peyton that these same people are only interested in her candy veneer and not in the depth that lies within her work. They only see, as Jerry Saltz wrote, “dazzling portraits of radiant youth.” Saltz is right, her paintings do have a dazzling quality to them, a dazzle that is bound in her sense of color, which is not only bold but has a depth of understanding about who her subjects are. Her fascination with youth is what should make Peyton problematic, not her love for the people she paints. If anything, Peyton’s easy relationship with the concept of love should be commended. It lends her an emotional availability and vulnerability that positions her as someone the viewer can feel sympathetic towards. She is distinctly different from her contemporary John Currin, who, up until his strangely intimate November 2006 show at Gagosian, displays an often bitter and detached vision of women that comes dangerously close to outright misogyny. Currin paints with a hunger for his subjects that is off-putting, as if he seeks to re-imagine women so that they might fit his own desires, while Peyton’s hunger is perhaps best characterized as one that seeks to reach out and touch; to feel connected with those she paints. It is this longing which envelopes her work and opens it to attack.

I cannot help but be reminded of Hart Crane’s poem “Hieroglyphic” when I think of Peyton: “Did one look at what one saw / Or did one see what one looked at?” Peyton can be accused of answering both questions. If we consider the first part of the poem—the question of looking versus seeing—the answer is apparent. No, Peyton did not look at what she saw. Instead she saw something in her subjects that negated her need to look at them. She saw the magic of youth and her own unbiased affection, but she did not look at them as human beings, because to do that would have necessitated painting them as that. Peyton transforms her muses, making them softer, more feminine, and in the process negates them as living things. At the risk of being glib, they become something else. Peyton succeeds in othering her subjects from themselves, of choosing to see in them a beauty that is available to no one but her. Nick (La Luncheonette 2002), is a profile view of a young man with delicate features. His skin is painted a mix of purple and white. He has a thick mass of black hair that blends with his body. Behind him is what looks to be a street painted in the same muted yet vibrant palette. It is a beautiful piece and a testament to Peyton’s skill with color that it does not feel outlandish and alien, but it resides more in the world of fantasy than in reality. The painting, like so much of her work is the manifestation of her dream for this world.

Peyton paints with an intuitive feeling, choosing not to capture her subjects the way they are, but how she sees them to be. To lift a line from the Importance of Being Earnest, Peyton doesn’t paint with accuracy, she paints with wonderful expression. And it is her wonderful expression that makes her work so compelling and also so aggravating. That she has no ability to stand at remove from those she paints positions her as being guilty of fawning over her subjects. Consequently Peyton answers the second question in Crane’s poem and the answer is also no, she did not see what she looked at. It may seem that this divergence between looking and seeing is paradoxical, but that is both to misunderstand the poem and discount the scope of Peyton’s vision. By committing to her own aesthetic agenda Peyton absolves herself of the responsibility of either looking or seeing. Thus she sees but does not look at her subjects while at the same time she looks at her subjects but does not see them. Her devotion obscures the faculties of her sight. And as a result of this the paintings become about the life of her own imagination, the way those she loves might be presented. To put it another way she paints the emotional sensation of her own love. Her paintings of Kurt Cobain and Liam Gallagher, the lead singer of Oasis, present them as peaceful, willowy things, two notions of them that do not come to mind when one looks at the men or listens to their music. But in Peyton’s world there is a calmness that surrounds everything. Her paintings extinguish the fires that burn inside.

However, this calming, and ultimately this longing, because what Peyton is really painting is her own longing, are where the work becomes problematic and difficult. In succumbing to her own desire the work loses rigor and reverts to the status of the dreamy sketchbook. There is no question that there is something bold and interesting in a woman portrait painter choosing to portray men in a lithesome, feminized way. In fact, were John Berger to revise Ways of Seeing he would do well to mention Peyton in his chapter on the use of women in European oil painting, as Peyton manages to offer and imbue an odd even awkward femininity to those she paints. But as interesting as it is, this action, whether conscious or not, ultimately feels like a lack of rigor, as if she couldn’t be bothered to attempt an unstylized rendering. Regardless of the fact that the people she paints are famous, an argument against her that has always been hollow and a little lacking in rigor itself, her paintings falter because of her own longing. So intent is Peyton on translating her love to that powerful rectangle that she gets lost in the magic of the experience of art making. She paints with so much fondness for her subjects that she paints them out of existence. Peyton has said that she is overwhelmed with the passing of time and this is evident in her paintings. She seeks to capture those she loves and hold them forever, lest the ravages of time claim them before she does.

Unfortunately, time has caught up with her subjects but Peyton, surprisingly, has adjusted to this, as reflected in her mid-career survey, “Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton,” at the New Museum. Those that love Peyton will continue to love her and those that hate her most likely will not be swayed, as their prejudices run too deep and are often well founded. Yet those who are willing to reconsider their position on Peyton’s work will not necessarily be rewarded but will come away with the sense that there is more to Peyton than was previously evident.

Comprised of 104 works, there are many paintings that will irk Peyton’s detractors, from the overly delicate paintings of Kurt Cobain to the self-conscious charcoal and ink drawings of Ludwig II of Bavaria from her 1993 show at the Chelsea Hotel. But something happened to Peyton’s work starting around 2003; she seems to have given up her fight against time and has instead come to accept it if not embrace it. Green Nick and Walt (both from 2003) are simple colored pencil line drawings portraits that show an emerging restraint. One would expect, based on her work from the 1990s, that Peyton would make these men more delicate than they are, instead Peyton draws them as men and not as anachronistic Victorian dandy fantasies. Peter (Pete Doherty) (2005) is a startling watercolor on paper. Peyton has succeeded in capturing the beaten up and worn out quality that exemplifies Doherty, lead singer of The Libertines and Babyshambles. His vacant eyes, a motif that frequently appears in Peyton’s work, here make sense. Doherty doesn’t feel longed for. The love is there but it has been replaced by a sadness for the life he has chosen to live. Her paintings are losing their weightlessness, replaced by a real sense of, if not gravity, then concreteness that before was missing. Jonathan (Jonathan Horowitz) (2007) shows the artist Jonathan Horowitz scruffy and middle-aged sitting in a chair. His blue eyes are alive and intense. It is unclear that in the past Peyton would have had the inclination to paint these bright, real things as such. This is not to say that there aren’t stumbles, she still has an inherent preciousness and her paintings from magazine images and movies feel like throwaway exercises, as evident in the interesting but ultimately empty painting of Michelle Pfeifer and Daniel Day-Lewis from Days of Innocence.

Yet it is not “girly art,” or at least it is moving away from that, as Roberta Smith concluded in her review of the exhibition. And though Smith ultimately gives “Live Forever” a positive review and does not mean for her characterization of Peyton’s art to be a pejorative, she does Peyton a disservice by classifying the work as “girly.” For it is assertions like this that only serve to reinforce the tired idea that bearing one’s emotions for the world to see is a distinctly feminine act. Peyton is not an aggressive artist, she is not Jenny Saville—a fellow portrait painter whose works are so startling that one cannot help but be overwhelmed by them—she is instead a painter of softness and emotion. Her art is imperfect and at times too self-absorbed but she is worthy of consideration because she strives to display love as an actual thing. Camus wrote of being in the custody of love and the wonder of a loving heart.

It is our relation to these things that allows us to feel an exalted emotion. While not Camus, Peyton nonetheless strives for the same thing in her work. We may fault her for subject matter and longing but we must accept the sentiment that she commits to. For in an increasingly divisive and unloving world perhaps it is enough to try, even if the execution is suspect, and bring a little love into it.

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