Beware the Lady: April 4-22, 2000 A.I.R. Gallery, NYC
John Yau
I.
In a letter to Charles Olson
dated January 7, 1953, Robert Creeley
stated: "I wanted the fastest juxtaposition possible, and the least explanatory manner."Clearly,subject
matter--something seen from the outside--is not what is at stake. Rather, one
hears Creeley's determined desire to extend the technical advances made by Ezra
Pound and Sergei Eisenstein, both of whom had been influenced by their study of
ideogrammatic languages. The statement was made some time after Creeley saw the
paintings of Jackson Pollock and other American abstract artists in Paris. As he has acknowledged on a number of
occasions, it was in the innovative work
of Pollock and other abstract artists, that Creeley recognized that there were others who wanted to subvert
their own and others's habits of thinking and seeing.Juxtaposition, the speed and economy of it, was understood as one
way such subversion could take place.
It is in Susan Bee's use of juxtaposition that she shares
something with figures as diverse as Pound, Eisenstein, and Creeley, not to
mention with artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist.However,it is not what she and they have in common that is important, but what
she has done to make her juxtapositions particular to,as well as distinctive within, her
work.One of the most telling distinctions
between Bee's work and that of both Rauschenberg and Rosenquist lies in their
use of materials. Whereas Rauschenberg utilizes the silkscreen process and
Rosenquist the medium of oil paint to give their found images the same material
and visual presence, thus achieving an all-over consistency, Bee eschews this
approach, perhaps because she recognizes that it harnesses the differences into
a singleness that she can't accept.Instead, she keeps the paint as paint and cut-out images as printed
paper.
In Bee's assemblage paintings, disruption occurs on both a
material and visual level; it is both vertical and horizontal, reminding us
that however one can imagine the world fitting together, the things in it (and
we too are things) remain distinct and separate. Reconciliation is tentative
and fleeting, the result of the viewer's engagement with the work. Paint and
painted images co-exist with
cut-out images. In this regard, Bee's paintings have more in common with
Rauschenberg's early assemblages than with his later work, before, that is, he
began refining his own approach. For it is one thing to want the "fastest
juxtaposition" possible, and quite another thing to want the smoothest.
Neither art nor reality, Bee seems to be suggesting, fits into
any one scheme. There is no vantage point, material, spiritual, or otherwise,
from which we can see, much less understand, the entire world.
II.
On a formal level,juxtaposition extends the collage
aesthetic,as it was formulated by
Picasso and developed by Max Ernst, into a territory equally informed by chance
and intention.Bee's juxtapositions are
purposeful without becoming closed or overdetermined;she keeps finding ways to keep the door open to different and
seemingly incommensurable readings.Chance,
it seems evident, plays a part. Ultimately, the openness of Bee's work prevents
the viewer from reaching any final conclusion.Her refusal to reconcile the differences in her materials reinforces the
viewer's sense of dissonance and rupture.
On a cultural and personal level,Bee's juxtapositions enable her to embrace a wide range of diverse possibilities, as well as incorporate nuggets of disparate information into a viscous web of paint.In terms of style and image, she knowingly and artfully collapses together passages of high modernist abstraction with kitsch and sentimental images derived from cut-out dolls and the covers of pulp novels.In terms of color and image, Bee's vocabulary is charged rather than bland, heated rather than cool.In her combinations of paint and cut-out images, the viewer encounters a world that is simultaneously innocent and sinister.Knowing that she has a soft spot for the lurid,Bee is sure to never quite let go of her impertinence; it is an important key to her work.
Compositionally, the paintings range from compartmentalized and
sectioned grounds, each of which is visually distinct,to painterly fields and abstract landscapes.
Set into and against the paint,the
cut-out figures, parts of pages, and bright stickers are both contiguous and
disruptive.In Love is a Gentle Whip (1999), Bee divides the composition into three horizontal rows made up of
discrete areas (mostly different sized rectangles), each of which is painted
differently. The pink area in middle of the bottom row is both an homage to,
and parody of, the poured paintings of Jackson Pollock. It's Pollock perfectly
rendered in miniature.Finally, and
this is where I think it is more than either an homage or a parody,the pink ground reminds us that Pollock, for
all our sense of him being macho, had a predilection for such frou-frou colors
as pink and lavender.
The sunflower rising up from the Pollock-like ground both linguistically (it is "organic") and visually (it is a rhythmic line) echoes, as well as formally extends the swirling Pollock-like arabesques of drips and splatters into another reality or discrete area. At the same time, in the top row, a woman in a bright red dress lies sprawled on a receding, patterned, triangular, abstract ground,blood and/or red paint flowing out of her and dripping down the front of the painting.The resulting echoes--blood and poured paint--reminds us the extent to which the world, in the form of mass media, theatricalizes all of our experience, turns everything into a consumer product.
We can sell our feelings and experiences on daytime talk shows, to supermarket tabloids, or we can obtain an understanding of them from spiritual advisers via the telephone. There is always a stage, a place where we can act out. And yet, rather than being dismissive of this aspect of reality, Bee recognizes the difficulty of getting outside of the nexus of information, weird signals, and powerful images each of us inhabits, as well as takes root is us. In Love is a Gentle Whip, the distraught blonde on the left side of the middle row,her hands pressing against her head, is both kitsch and real, both fake and actual. The cut-out sunflower rising to greet the painted, child-like sun, reminds us that we were once innocent, and in that state of innocence we took a certain delight in being manipulated by the mass media; it gave us pleasure.
In Beware the Lady, Bee incorporates various cut-out
images of femme fatales into a lovingly insouciant,Mondrian-like composition of vertical and horizontal bars,
brightly colored rectangles.It's as if
Mondian and Liberace collaborated on the painting, with a little nod given to
noir writers and film directors such as Jim Thompson and Fritz Lang.Here, however, homage comes with another
edge, the way a woman can achieve notoriety in a world dominated by men is to
play a role, to become something larger than life.
In Beware the Lady, it's almost as if the painting has
become a screen onto which various male fantasies about women have been
projected.This is what I think Bee is
in touch with, the various unrealistic projections, oddball fantasies, goofy
and even dangerous thoughts any one group or sector of society has about both
others and themselves.How do we find
our way through this morass, she asks good naturedly? How do we know when we
are being manipulated by a desire that we have come to accept as original? How
can we resist the allure of bright colors, hotand/or innocent images,pulsating
patterns, intense drama?Are we simply
moths flying into the light? Or is there an alternative to the warmth each of
us understandably seeks, another kind of warmth?
Rather than propose a way out of this
maze, Susan Bee is determined to reveal it in all its wondrous complexity. She
gives the viewer a way to contemplate the meaning of pleasure, both guilty and
otherwise.
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