In an attempt to censor the critic Ken Johnson, an anonymously penned “open letter,” actually a petition directed to Johnson’s employer, The New York Times, is posted on iPetition.com where more than 1500 have signed it. The charge made against him is serious: in a review of an exhibition of mostly black L.A. artists, “Now Dig This!”—currently at P.S. 1—as well as in a preview squib about a women’s art show in Philadelphia, Johnson is said to have compared “women and African-American artists to white male artists, only to find them lacking.” Did he?

The P.S. 1 review is of a show clearly meant as a historical exhibition, defined by a period and a place. The show as presented at P.S. 1 is significantly different from the one seen at the Hammer Museum in L.A., however, where it was one component of a huge historical survey, “Pacific Standard Time”; in New York, it is, in effect, a showcase for black artists and some fellow travelers on the West Coast. Johnson admires, at the beginning and end of his review, works by the two best-regarded artists in the exhibition, Melvin Edwards and David Hammons (who also are given pride of place by the P.S. 1 curators). In the middle, he asks, in effect, what is it about the rest of these artists that has been an obstacle to their success and wider appreciation of their art?

Anonymous Petitioner states that Johnson “starts with” the claim that “Black artists didn’t invent assemblage”—a remark that actually comes seven paragraphs into Johnson’s review, after a respectful and informative description of a sculpture by Edwards and mention of the artists in the show who responded to the Watts riots of 1965. Wherever it appeared, this seems to have been the flash point for readers, and it certainly seems like a provocative statement if taken out of context, as Johnson has since acknowledged. The assemblage remark is a lead-in, however, to a passage whose point is not to naively assert white artists’ priority in artistic discovery, as Anonymous Petitioner supposes, but to set up a subsequent observation about form and content. It appears paradoxical, Johnson thinks, that a genre of art associated with Dadaists and other artists aiming to liberate themselves from conservative aesthetics and social mores would be adopted by artists of the mid-1960s attempting to express a sense of solidarity with their community. (One might draw a parallel in the adoption by committed artists of the 1970s and ’80s of the pristine forms of ’60s Minimalism as vehicles for political content.)

It does not follow from this paradox (if it is one) that black artists adapting a widely practiced art form of the time (William Seitz’s Art of Assemblage show was seen at MoMA in 1961) are in any sense inferior to their white contemporaries.  What troubles Johnson, and this concern has found expression in other of his reviews, is that focusing on a specific “race” (or gender or sexual orientation or even nationality in some circumstances) may result in excluding or alienating viewers not part of that group.

I think that some of Johnson’s critical comments misfire; for example, he imagines that those with a “distanced perspective” would interpret the grasping hand of John Riddle’s Untitled (Fist) as a social realist cliché of a defiant raised fist, where I would expect reasonably sensitive viewers to see it in a more nuanced way, as evoking resistance certainly, but also aspiration and suffering. But if that and other remarks seem wrongheaded to me, I can simply disagree with him; I don’t need to threaten his livelihood by petitioning his employer.

As an editor who has worked with Johnson on a book project, I’m going to claim a modicum of insight into his concerns as a critic and thinker. I believe the central issue for him, whether it concerns an individual viewer, an artist, or the audience for art, is expanding one’s mind and removing obstacles to shared experience. His questions, if I may reframe them, seem to be: Has identity politics in art, and the consequent splintering of audiences, erected barriers that limit our capacity to understand or empathize with work by artists who are of another class, “race,” religion, and so on? And have these barriers marginalized and impeded the careers of some artists who turned inward to their communities, in “solidarity” as Ken puts it, but who fail to also engage effectively—in however ironic or challenging a way—the larger art audience?

To focus the question more acutely: why is it that David Hammons’s Bag Lady in Flight, praised by Johnson, is so thrilling and affecting? Is it because this riff on Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase adds humanity to Duchamp’s abstraction, leveraging our shared familiarity with that icon as it simultaneously draws from Hammons’s artistic and social identities? Or is it simply that the grease-stained shopping bags from which Hammons’s “bag lady” is constructed firmly root her in the street reality of the homeless even as her spirit, and ours, is made to soar?  CHRISTOPHER LYON

The exclusionary rhetoric of a formalist critique

Ken Johnson deserves “whistle blower status” whether or not he intended his review of Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles to expose art world pathology. By writing that ““the art of black solidarity gets less traction because the postmodern art world is, at least ostensibly, allergic to overt assertions of any kind of solidarity,” Johnson attempts to lift the race out of art’s ghetto by providing a template or map to guide black artists into the sanctifying “light” of Duchampian mischief and away from the disenchantment of social mores.

“Formally, you have a dialogue between stasis and dynamism, and psychologically, between reason and feeling” Johnson writes. “Such dualities would be enough on which to base judgment and interpretation were this a piece by, say, the white junk sculptor Richard Stankiewicz. But it makes a difference to know that Mr. Edwards is African-American…”

It seems that Johnson is saying when an artwork contains general and formal binaries such as reason vs. feeling or stasis vs. dynamism, there is enough information to make a decision.  But when information is too complex or there is too much of it, Johnson and the high-end art world are unable to interrupt it. Therefore, when Johnson speaks of the “‘white’ high-end art world”, his own comments seem to negate the mental or conceptual sophistication of this art world in favor of the sort of sophistication that can be assumed due to proximity with money.

“Herein lies the paradox,” he continues. “Black artists did not invent assemblage. In its modern form it was developed by white artists like Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, David Smith and Robert Rauschenberg. It did not come out of anything like the centuries-long black American experience of being viewed and treated as essentially inferior to white people. It was the art of people who already were about as free as anyone could be.”

Since when do people or groups of people have to invent a motif or mode of artistic production in order to have the right to use it?  Picasso did not invent African or Iberian masks nor did he use this cultural iconography in relation to its historical/cultural precedent. It should go without saying that Western art has appropriated from Asian, Islam, etc.  Herein lies the (real) paradox, that Johnson is seemingly arguing for the integrity or respect of modernist customs and traditions. His formalist interpretation of them must be obeyed even though as an epoch Western Modernism appropriated and transformed cultural signs and symbols at will.

Furthermore, Johnson’s totalizing analogy between white men and untrammeled freedom, beyond his essentialism that disregards war, sexual orientation, cultural and material determination, his words speak to a colonialist mind frame. Colonialism is based on control and domination, the subjection of one group of people by another group. This dominance can often lead to the disregard or denial of humanity/voice/perspective of the colonized group.  This denial grants the colonizer permission to employ systematic violence not only physical and psychic but cultural as well.  The displacement of a group’s culture allows the colonizers to use “newly discovered” cultural currency as they sees fit.  Johnson views a black artist’s use of assemblage as a transgression of “white” cultural heritage. Therefore this misappropriation doubles as an inversion of historical power relation’s in regards to the colonized and the colonizer.

My biggest concern with Johnson’s approach is that it devalues black art made decades ago by applying the exclusionary rhetoric of a formalist critique to artists who cared little for Greenbergian discourse working in a milieu of political and cultural upheaval.  Not to mention the fact in 2012 – the year in which we and presumably Ken Johnson live – black art, unequivocally, can no longer be essentialized.

And by the way, Robert Rauchenberg was part Native American.  DESHAWN DUMAS

The Mandarin Mentality

Ken Johnson seems fond of the term “mandarin” in his reviews, and his critical opinions indicate that he himself may be a somewhat conservative and reactionary art journalist, who evidently trivializes women and simplifies minority aesthetics.  But before we insist that any publication for which he writes should castigate Johnson for voicing his opinions, let’s think about possible implications of that demand.  Should any publication bow to such hostility, what would prevent the editors from agreeing to censor writers with other points of view, should the Huffington Post or a similar juggernaut scream loudly enough?  Our First Amendment deserves to be respected.  Anyone has the right to complain about a critic, but in this country no one has the right to silence that person.  As for Ken Johnson, whose writing informs me quite a bit more than it annoys me, the man does love art and has dedicated his career to teaching and art criticism.  Just because his art politics may be old-fashioned is no reason to throw out the baby with the bath water.  We also might note how much enlightening discussion has resulted from two of his recent reviews, however offensive they may be. SANDRA SIDER

Judged in Fair Ways

We art writers love binary oppositions. But they can cause trouble.  Johnson’s review of “Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980” makes a distinction between social interpretations, which suit the African-Americans in this exhibition and art historical accounts, which are the way to describe their white peers. Question that opposition, and his analysis falls apart. Was Robert Rauschenberg, one of Johnson’s white artists, someone who was “about as free as anyone could be”?

Johnson’s second opposition, between “those who, because of their life experiences, will identify with the struggle for black empowerment, and others for whom the black experience remains more a matter of conjecture” is equally problematic. Surely many people who are not black identify with the African-American struggle for empowerment.

Johnson’s review of “The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World” asserts that “the nature of the art that women tend to make” might explain the marginal position of women in the art world. What kinds of art do women make? In the recent exhibition of abstract painting at the Hunger College/Times Square Gallery, for example there were many female painters.

Why did Johnson’s reviews inspired such a response?  His comments, as I read them are about how the art market works. Distinguishing between the ways that black and female artists choose to respond to that market, he really is criticizing the way that people in the art market respond to art dealing with race and gender. Because of the history of racism and sexism, and because of obvious present inequalities it’s very important that African-American and female artists be judged in fair ways. And so it would be a good thing to continue this discussion, looking at a broader range of examples.  DAVID CARRIER

Important Questions Left in the Background

Two things can be unequivocally said about racism and sexism in our culture – they are horrible, and they still exist to far too great an extent. Reading Ken Johnson’s review of “Now Dig This!” my take away was that it was attempting a subtle criticism aimed at the community of overwhelmingly white collectors.  That is, if many of the artists in the exhibition were under-appreciated, the fault lay more with the art power network than with the art.  Admittedly, this could have been more clearly stated – one wonders if the editor could have done more. But conversely, the rather lukewarm argument presented by Johnson is typical of writers attempting to present an indictment of the power broker structure within a newspaper of the power brokers.  Clearly, the petition writers came away with an opposite reading, and precisely because of the imprecise and couched language used by Johnson, and his editor, one cannot convincingly argue that the petition writers are incorrect.  The same, I think, can be said of Johnson’s short piece on “The Female Gaze”.  I read it thinking he was attempting to stir up interest in another large group exhibition, making a bit of controversy by questioning his own assertion of sexism in the art world.  Again, the petition writers not unreasonably took the opposite reading.  Pushing this reading into an on-line petition, however, evokes for me unpleasant memories of bad graduate art school critiques, wherein one person would make an assertion about the nature of a work, and rather than question that assertion, everyone would just pile on.  Groupthink and preemptory judgment replacing wider analysis for nearly all present.  In the case at hand, social networking in the form of a petition becomes a ferocious multiplier.  So we are asked to sign a petition against a critic who has offered decades of valid commentary and who has often carried the banner of those on the outside.  Meanwhile, the important questions being raised – who gets to decide what is art and how those empowered to make those decisions effect what we get to see – remain to an unsatisfactory degree in the background.  DEVEN GOLDEN

Editing Down of Art History

Regarding Johnson’s comment on his review of “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles” he states “Black artists did not invent assemblage”  – a matter that historian Kellie Jones does not imply from her catalog quote stating the artists were simply “using the artistic currency of the time.” Johnson further mires himself in controversy by adding that assemblage was developed by “white artists” who were “about as free as anyone could be.”  Yet Dadaism was a critical part of the invention of assemblage (as was collage, Futurism, etc.), with messages steeped in anarchism and scathing social commentary following WWI.  If you include this Dadaist history what does Johnson’s statement about “being free” mean within a war torn European society that was given to elements of instability and corruption (think Weimar)?   This socially critical element seems to be something that numerous artists in  “Now Dig This!” admired.   Johnson’s editing down of art history and use of language seems tailored to be reactionary to dichotomies articulated by political correctness to begin with – and ends up circumscribing a double fault.  Art History, and the depth of historical consciousness implicit in it, is richer and more complex than either the narrowing language of politically correct theory, or Johnson’s partial and insensitive reaction to it.   DIANE THODOS

Picking Up the Gauntlet

At best insensitive and biased, Ken Johnson’s remarks about black and female artists only serve to reveal his own limits as a thinking person.  But the “Open Letter” is interesting.  On the surface, the letter critiques Johnson’s writings as sub par for the New York Times and requests that he be brought to task. But behind the polite palaver about editorial standards, a more substantive complaint is implied about the nature of criticism itself: who is determining value and on what basis?

Indeed.  While of course art critics do not set prices or directly profit from their critical activity per se, (indeed critics are the lowest paid entities in the entire economic system of the art world), to pretend that criticism is somehow pure and unrelated to the market is naïve and disingenuous.  Reviews equal revenue, and the art world economy is still pinned to the Romantic idea of rare, and thus expensive, genius.  But why, in a postmodern, post-feminist and postcolonial present, are we still investing in a societal notion that genius is rare and that art is best understood by the elite?   The net result of this intellectual shell game is a strained set of relationships between the art critic, the art market, the artist and the audience for art.

Critics don’t like to hear that – it undercuts their role too deeply and exposes a conflict of interests between aesthetics and money, two arenas which ought to be distinct from one another but which clearly blend with wanton disregard in the contemporary art market.  And in practical terms, who would pay for pure criticism if it did not support the matrix of museum patronage, gallery shows, magazine coverage, expensive production and graduate degrees?

The questions raised by the open letter lead inexorably to a critique of the entire art world economy and until critics are also willing, along with artists, to critique the roles of power and authority that underpin their paychecks, no one will be free of the dinosaur values that have been given voice of late by Ken Johnson and crew.  There needs to be a truthful discussion about the actual nature of art, not as a product, not as a commodity, not as a symbol of power and status and certainly not as a vitiating discourse amongst a canon of the anointed, but as something of actual cultural value that is meaningful to everyone.  That is the discussion that the open letter ultimately requires.  Let us see who is willing to pick up this gauntlet and really critique the institutions.  Looking at the re-writing of power relationships that are slowly taking place all over the globe, it is inevitable that this one will need to be rewritten as well.  And frankly, it is way overdue. TOBEY CROCKETT

Opening the Reader’s Eyes

The purpose of criticism is to invent new paths of thinking, not to protect or conserve the same worn and trodden ones. Criticism is about developing new associations, synapses and constellations of meaning. If there is a so-called new coalition of voters post-Obama’s re-election, then there also should be a new coalition of criticism that is more democratic and culturally, aesthetically and ethnically diverse. Like “Where Are All the Women Artists at MoMA?” article by Jerry Saltz opened the museum’s eyes to their own biases, Johnson’s article ““Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980” has opened his reader’s eyes to his own unchallenged biases. GREG LINDQUIST

The Issues are on the Table

Whether the general consensus determines that Ken Johnson is guilty or not and what he would be guilty of, clearly, the provocations of his recent reviews have generated a multitude of much needed exchanges.  If the discussion can be maintained on the level set by the contributions of Bill Donovan, John Yau, Anoka Faruqee, and William Villalongo, to mention a few that were memorable in posts I read, there is a chance that significant change will come out of it.  The Varnedoe/McEvilley argument was a similar moment; it gave us a new awareness of the “other” and shaped discourse afterwards.

The critical questions for me are:

First, should the same critique be leveled across the board to all works of art or should critical arguments be based on criteria that stem from how the works themselves set their own terms?

Second, does the notion of the avant guard still determine our reception of works of art by relegating to an inferior position those things that are not deemed to be “the first”?  Can we develop an alternate model of equal persuasion?

Either of these questions could be extended into a full discussion, article or panel.  They point to aspects of a crisis in criticism, a crisis that is full blown in response to the intensity of Johnson’s remarks.  Yet must continue to allow the freedom for each of us to speak and represent our respective positions.  Whether or not we agree, without a clear delineation of positions we have no place from which to argue.

As director of the Leroy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at MICA where Ken Johnson will serve as Critic in Residence in the Spring, I can say, on a personal note, that the balance between sensitivity and incisive critique, which is charged with upholding standards, is a difficult one to strike.

If Johnson had erred on the side of sensitivity, could this much needed discussion have emerged?    Let us make the most of it, it is a rare moment when the issues are on the table and there is something at stake.  JOAN WALTEMATH

The post Ken Johnson’s Burden appeared first on artcritical.

Nov. 3, 2011 to January 14, 2012 (now by appointment only)
19 East 70 Street at Madison Avenue
New York City, (212) 794-0550

The elusive Little People who notionally build the tiny dwellings and inhabit the miniature landscapes made by Charles Simonds have had to endure everything from heedless vehicles to curious children demolishing their abodes in broken curbs and abandoned buildings in the forty-some years since the artist began to “follow” their migration through SoHo and the Lower East Side. Recently they faced a new challenge uptown, in the sudden collapse of the 165-year-old Knoedler & Company, where Simonds’s most recent work was shown, just a month after the show opened.

The exhibition was organized mainly in two galleries. In the smaller one were two porcelain sculptures, technical tours de force made nearly twenty years apart at the Manufacture Nationale de Céramique, Sèvres, that are striking departures for Simonds. Tumbleweed (1993) is a realistic, impossibly intricate rendering of the plant that detaches itself from its root when it is mature and dry, rendered ghostlike here in the porcelain’s pure white unreflective finish. Unlike Tumbleweed, stubbornly turned in on itself, ready at any moment to roll away to parts unknown, Life, with Thorns, completed in 2011, reaches outward threateningly with its spiked stems, commanding the space around it. The earlier work, emblematic of rootlessness and desolation, and the later one, recalling traditional depictions of the Crown of Thorns, are like a two-sided portrait of the artist as existential prophet: rootless, peripatetic, and yet in the end defiantly messianic and even darkly judgmental.

Despite the fantasy and miniature scale of Simonds’s work, the messages they convey are far from comforting or child-friendly, as shown by two new tabletop pieces in this gallery, which recall his earliest work. Ruined Blossoms (2011) displays three plantlike miniature brick structures, seemingly in successive stages of growth. The smaller “juvenile” brick plants seem to have been aborted in some way—dead of thirst perhaps or crushed by an outside force. A third “mature” brick plant apparently has survived: two tower-stalks remain erect, though the remaining ones wilt or are prone on the desert-like surface of the piece. Growing morphs into building—a basic paradigm of Simonds’s work—in Grown Walls (2011), which relates as well to the cycle of life in depicting an androgynous male-female form in the middle of a landscape that grows outward in successive rings, initially circular but becoming rectilinear as they approach the limits of their compact clay realm.

The larger rear gallery was devoted to flying, twisting landscapes, hanging from the ceiling or projecting from walls, that embody the twin themes of building and growing—male and female principles, respectively, that in some works can be teased apart, but in others are folded or collapsed onto each other. In addition there were a pair of wall-mounted “smears,” excretory swipes of hardened clay that speak to “body function issues,” as Simonds delicately put it. Each is a captured primal gesture in his primary medium, clay. More than a medium, clay has, as Arthur Danto points out in a thoughtful catalogue essay for this show, a “primordial nature,” and one has long noticed a Golem-like aspect to Simonds’s work, a conjuring of larger-than-life beings out of base clay. The question becomes, as Simonds put it in an email message that informed the venerable philosopher’s essay, “Where do ‘will’ and imagination meet material (material reality, meant physically and ‘philosophically’)?”

As if in response, an expressionistically rendered hanging sculpture, Mental Earth (2002), captures the collision of psychic experience and actuality at the core of the art and, one imagines, the psyche of this son of a couple who were Vienna-trained doctors and psychoanalysts. The ambitious, “post-analytic,” tortured figure, a “smear” more than ten feet across, looks to this viewer like an inside-out rendering of the self, flayed and monumentalized. A serpentlike “head” at one end (or so one imagines it) and a coiling tail with shit-brown coloring at its other end—and less extravagant extrusions also projecting from the core of twisty rock supporting the work—appear to represent a kind of roiling id, whose miniature brick structures twist and curl in sync with the spiraling, seething rock to which they cling.

Four works flanked Mental Earth like courtiers, providing the best viewpoints of the large piece. Moving around them, one felt like a visitor in a virtual helicopter, cruising past impossibly lofty and inaccessible mountain fastnesses. Two Streams (2011) is a wall-mounted piece mostly made from squared-up granitic forms on which are perched seemingly abandoned miniature dwellings, reminiscent of ancient ruins like those in the American Southwest. The streams of the title are tongue-like forms snaking across and beyond the site, implying an extensive unseen landscape.

Arabesque and Twist, both 2011, are more fantastic pieces, both projecting from the wall in alternating clays of gray and orange (roughly the color of burnt sienna pigment), which are Simonds’s basic palette. Arabesque terminates in a set of towers, torquing wildly, as if seen through a distorting lens. In Twist, the most overtly phallic of the wall-mounted pieces, an erect projection grows from a cracked, clifflike “parent,” smooth orange forms developing brick-textured “skin,” maturing into gray, and terminating in a wizened but still vital tip.

The projecting and hanging rock formations, partly body, partly landscape, bring to mind venerable traditions of Chinese art: landscape painting, certainly, with rocky heights floating among clouds, seemingly disconnected from the earth, but more specifically the miniature rock formations that became popular during the T’ang Dynasty.

“Orphanness” is the term Simonds himself has used to describe his existential stance, while “finding his way home” is the impulse that drives him and, presumably, the restless, elusive Little People. A tale has survived of a Taoist at court in the ninth century who longed to go home but the Emperor would not allow it. In the palace there was a miniature landscape, representing the three mountains on the sea. “Unless one is immortal, one could never enter that region,” said the Emperor, pointing.

“The mountains are only a foot high,” laughed the Taoist. “I am weak but I will try to inspect it for Your Majesty.” * At that, he leaped into the air, became smaller and smaller, and disappeared into the little world, never to be seen again.

* Michael Sullivan, Chinese Landscape Painting (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980 p. 85)

The post Little People Orphaned Once More: Charles Simonds at Knoedler appeared first on artcritical.

“When I found my voice I allowed the work to become celebratory, I allowed myself to say that there is a sense of possibility.” Nancy Spero, 2000 [1]

With the completion of Notes in Time, in 1979, Nancy Spero began work on the final  entry in the trilogy of ambitious frieze paintings that define her classic period, The First Language, first shown at A.I.R. Gallery in 1981. In it Spero left behind the intensive engagement with found texts that had characterized her work since 1969, and though she occasionally used texts afterward, the focus of her work now became the figure, understood as a kind of hieroglyph.

She had come across the phrase “peut-être la première langue — c’est la danse” in a “little book I have in French on prehistoric art, called Forty Thousand Years of Modern Art, which is where I found the first images that I used of prehistoric women. Of course, I don’t just use images of women, many times I find images of men but then transform them into their female counterparts. Anyway, I was looking up ‘women’ in the book and I couldn’t find it, but I did come across the phrase ‘perhaps dance is the first language.’ Then I thought that the work wasn’t really ‘dance-like,’ although there were a lot of running athletic women, so I cut ‘dance’ out of the title, leaving ‘The First Language.’” [2]

The concept of a preverbal figurative language dates to a much earlier moment in Spero’s thought and work. Jung’s “primordial language” is prominently discussed by Erich Neumann in The Great Mother, as is the notion that dance can be thought of as a kind of language.[note 3] The following quotation from The Great Mother appears in Notes in Time:

In this connection the dance plays a crucial role, as expression of the natural seizure of early man. Originally all ritual was a dance, in which the whole of the corporeal psyche was literally “set in motion.” Thus the Great Goddess was worshipped in dance, and most of all in orgiastic dance. [4]

Artaud also had referred to the idea of a preverbal figurative language in A Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumara, which Spero had quoted in the Codex Artaud: “one knows that the first men utilized a language of signs.” [5]

In a 1994 interview for Bomb magazine, Spero concisely described the development of her work after the 1960s: “To jump to the ’70s, it was then that I decided the figures were hieroglyphs. I used text along with image, as extensions of each other, at times in opposition, but always in relation to each other, even if contradictory. The figures themselves stand for language, just as in the symbols from ancient calligraphy or Egyptian art.” [6]

Spero’s earliest experiment with using figures in an explicitly language-like way may be Codex Artaud VII . Near the figure and above the texts of the central vignette appear hieroglyphic forms in five short rows, including one of scarabs (the scarab is an actual Egyptian glyph); two scarabs also appear over the rightmost text. The invented hieroglyphs include an acrobatic female figure on her back with arms and legs raised, touching toes with one hand to form a kind of O or D; and two bodiless heads, one a face-forward Medusa, the other in three-quarter profile with extended tongue.

She told her interviewer that she had stopped using text in the 1980s, agreeing with the comment that she did so “under the conviction that the image itself was a hieroglyph, inscribed sufficiently with language.” In the 1980s, Spero explains, “The image superseded the text. The language of the body, of the female body, its gesture and movement as in dance, or in movement to music, or ritual, took precedence. It all goes together — scribble to gesture, gesture of action, sexual roles. All of this is primal stuff, but taken up to the 20th century in a seemingly sophisticated way. You know, I don’t believe in progress in art. Prehistoric art can’t be beat! Sophistication isn’t progress. It’s just that now there’s a realization and an analysis on our part.”

The development of Spero’s figures, and of her use of language, is more complex than her comments allow. The figures are not hieroglyphs in the sense of characters that have an unvarying meaning, but linguistic signs, which mediate between the artist and the viewer and alter their meanings depending on how they are used. Similarly, her use of written language in her work evolves considerably from the early, brief scrawled phrases and French obscenities to the many quotations from Antonin Artaud’s writings, to the elaborate interweaving of texts drawn from a vast array of sources in her works of the 1970s. She does not, in fact, cease to use texts after 1980; indeed, some of her most powerful deployments of text occur in her late work.

However, as Robert Storr has observed, Spero’s “prematurely postmodern recognition of the semiotics of picture making” operated to her disadvantage. “I say ‘prematurely postmodern’ only to signal the discrepancy between Spero’s early understanding and use of linguistic concepts, and the general dissemination of structuralist and poststructuralist concepts of the 1970s and the 1980s, a discrepancy which explains why she is so seldom mentioned in the literature of the field. That is the fate of precursors who survive to become the contemporaries of younger artists styled as the personification of the new.” [7]

Spero’s Stock Company

As we have noted, a major change in Spero’s working process occurred from the late 1970s to the early 1980s as she moved from handpainted, collaged figures on paper with bulletin-type letters to the use of zinc or magnesium letterpress plates to handprint figures directly on paper. She drew from her own imagery and from published sources to make photoengraved matrices from which she could handprint multiple impressions. From about 1981, she worked closely with the artist and photographer David Reynolds to make the plates. He had recently graduated from Rutgers University, where he had been a student of Leon Golub. Reynolds saw that arthritis was restricting her ability to draw, and thinks her adoption of handprinting with letterpress plates was in part a response to her increasing difficulty in using her hands. [8]

Reynolds would make a photograph of a source image and give her a continuous-tone 8 by 10–inch black-and-white photographic print, and she would then determine whether it should be further processed for a line-art effect or remain a halftone image (that is, with shades of gray, as in a standard photograph). Spero might rework the print with gouache and ink, and then Reynolds would shoot the retouched 8 by 10 to make a copy of the photograph, adding photographic elements as needed — greater contrast, for example — following Spero’s instructions. At this stage the size of the eventual figure was set: she would specify the height she wanted, usually 20 inches or less, and Reynolds would adjust the photographic enlarger. Spero might again retouch the resulting print.

It now would go to the platemaking company in New Jersey. They would use a copy camera to duplicate the image, either in high contrast or preserving midtones, as instructed, and using a relatively coarse dot screen — Spero wanted the fact that images were derived from a printed source to be apparent (rather like the approach to photographs taken by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, though with a different aesthetic). This film was then transferred to a blank zinc or magnesium plate in a standard commercial photoengraving process. Finally, the plate was etched with acid to create the incised image for printing. In 1987 Spero wrote:

In recent years I have cut down (but not eliminated) the collaging of painted figures on these extended linear panels. I generally prefer printed images. In using zinc letter press plates (made from my drawings and appropriations), a hand printing process rather than a printing press, I am able to get many variations of imprint. Depending on the pressure of the hand, the angling of the plate, the amount of ink rolled onto the raised image etc., I can repeat and differentiate an image, emphasizing the staccato of the mechanical, varying hand printing directly on the paper itself with collaged hand printed images. Extremes: the collaged figures can be colorful, bold, celebratory, carnivalesque — or greyed and diffused with an unhealthy look of disintegration, outlines of iridescent color — figures printed to resemble x-rayed human forms — as in the moment the bomb blasts. All manner of processions, conflicts, interruptions, and disruptions. Gravity and ground plane are referenced or inferred and continuously contravened. [9]

Peter Soriano, who first encountered Spero’s work in 1979 when still in college and who subsequently became friendly with Spero and Golub, closely observed Spero’s printing technique. “Nancy never just stamps an image onto a surface,” he wrote. “At times the image is barely pressed onto the wall or paper, like the relaxed after-roll of a drumstick striking a drum. Her closely grouped repetitions are reminders of the control used in inking the plates and the range of pressure used to transfer the images to the surface. . . . Ephemerality and touch are the paradoxical bedfellows of her uncompromising subject matter.” [10]

In the late 1980s, Spero began using flexible synthetic polymer plates, as she was beginning to work directly on walls, and the metal plates could not be used effectively if they were even slightly uneven. At one point, Reynolds recalled, both zinc and polymer plates were being made by the studio.

A total of 416 metal-plate figures were made. In addition, beginning in the late 1980s, when Spero began printing directly on walls, 412 flexible polymer plates were made. There are, further, approximately 60 hand stamps, which repeat metal or polymer plate images in a much smaller size. [11] In all, then, Spero produced almost 900 printing plates. Of the metal ones, approximately 300 depict unique figures, and the remainder are alternative versions — at different sizes, cropped, or otherwise changed. Although the majority of the polymer plates reproduce existing metal ones (but often sized differently or reversed), nearly 140 of them are new images or substantially alter the earlier metal one. Thus nearly half of the 900 plates depict unique figures. Many of the polymer plates were produced for specific installations in the final two decades of the artist’s career and the images on them do not appear in other works. Other plate images were scarcely used. Of the 450 or so primary images represented by these metal and polymer plates, about 200 constitute the core of her stock company, and of them perhaps 50 can be counted as Spero’s stars.

As arthritis made it increasingly difficult for Spero to participate in the actual printing of the plates on the long paper works, she began to have multiple prints of figures made and cut out for her, assembled in an inventory of “paper dolls” that could be used as needed. Samm Kunce recalls that Spero would have the studio assistants put out several lengths of paper before leaving for the day, then Spero would lay works out on her long tables during the night. When the assistants returned in the morning, they would note the locations of the figures with pencil marks and collage the figures in place. “She rarely worked with anyone in the compositional stage,” Kunce recalled. “She would work at night and magically there would appear another art work in the morning.” [12]

In a 1968 lecture at the Museum of Modern Art, “Reflections on the State of Criticism,” Leo Steinberg quoted a paragraph by the poet and critic David Antin about Andy Warhol, which resonates for Spero’s art made with printed figures. “In the Warhol canvases, the image can be said to barely exist. On the one hand this is part of his overriding interest in the ‘deteriorated image,’ the consequence of a series of regressions from some initial image of the real world.” [13]

“The picture,” Steinberg resumes, is “conceived as the image of an image. It is a conception which guarantees that the presentation will not be directly of a world-space, and that it will nevertheless admit any experience as the matter of representation. And it readmits the artist in the fullness of his human interests, as well as the artist-technician. The all-purpose picture plane underlying this post-modernist painting has made the course of art once again nonlinear and unpredictable.” [14]

Spero adopted the technical innovations of Warhol as well as Rauschenberg — she allowed in a late interview that she must have been aware of Rauschenberg’s image transfer technique, which he developed beginning in 1958 — but used them in a way diametrically opposed to Warhol’s. She focused not on the image’s deterioration, but on rescuing it. Where Warhol is cavalier, even indifferent to the image’s survival as he kicks it down the street of technical translation, Spero engages the image, nursing it back to the surface of her work. She is impressed by the endurance of these iconic images, by woman’s “continual presence”; she respects their perseverance.

Spero’s use of found images needs to be understood in this active context. She extensively cannibalized her own work — photographing or otherwise copying key images and retouching and resizing them — and reworked found images, lifted from newspapers, books, and other mediums of reproduction. She deleted or altered elements, emphasized qualities, strengthened graphic impact, and of course printed the figures in colors unrelated to the original context. Spero’s figural approach was not so much one of copying as of adopting or casting, in the theatrical sense: choosing a figure and then using makeup, costume, and staging to draw out its meaning in the context of a specific work.

The First Language

Her second-longest work, at 190 feet, The First Language is constructed, like the previous large works, in twenty-two panels, each 20 inches by about 9 feet, assembled from four sheets of 20 by 27-inch handmade paper. Panels 12 and 13 are two and three sheets long, respectively. Completed in 1981 and the final major work of Spero’s classic period, it is the last large piece to combine cutout gouache-painted figures and figures handprinted using letter-press plates.

The First Language is perhaps Spero’s most overtly cinematic work. Its panels read from right to left like a series of film stills in Cinemascope, with figures in similar poses repeated in consecutive panels. That is, panel 1 should be at the far right when the work is shown, panel 2 to its left, and so on. Though it is not cyclical in a formal sense, as are Notes in Time and some later works, it has the feel of a compressed life cycle of figures rising up from abjection, gaining physical confidence, overcoming obstacles, and in the end finding a bond.

Spero brings together figures drawn from all eras, from the Paleolithic to the present, emphasizing the synchronicity of her world. In this work she has arrived at a mature, confident method of using the stock company: she constantly recasts figures in different roles. For example, the handprint of a standing figure with arms raised is a Victim when printed horizontally; multiple impressions of the same figure, superimposed on the first, depict a massacre (in panels 5 and 6, a scene that recalls the drowned figures in the Beatus illuminations).

The most striking addition to Spero’s repertoire of handprinted figures in The First Language are pictographs of leaping female figures adapted from Aboriginal art of Australia. The earliest of the Aboriginal figures she used appear to date from the Freshwater period, roughly from 1,200 years ago until the Contact period, when native peoples first encountered Europeans, a century or more before the present. It is not their position in chronological history that gives these dancing figures priority as expressing “the first language” — they are not more ancient than some Egyptian figures that Spero used — but their position outside, and prior to, the development of written language.

We sense recollections of Giacometti as well in some of these elongated, isolated figures. After this point, however, as painted cutout figures gave way to handprinted ones, Spero’s focus naturally shifted from the single figure to the reiterated multiple, and there was a corresponding shift in her artistic thought from the personal and solitary to the idea of art as an expression of community. Overtones of existential anxiety remained important until the end, however, as a comparison of Giacometti’s Head of a Man on a Rod (1947) and Spero’s Maypole/Take No Prisoners (2007) demonstrates (see page 315).

The critical response to The First Language included an evocative review by Peter Schjeldahl in the Village Voice, which mentions that the sheets of hand-molded paper were arranged “frieze-fashion, in two tiers,” when it was shown at A.I.R. [15] He responded to the musical dimension of the work: “Like notes on a staff, female figures of many sizes and shapes — primitive and hieroglyphic and medieval and modern (roller skates!), suffering and raging and ecstatic — surge around the walls. Cadenza-like congestions of images alternate with blank sheets like passages of silence. Indeed, after a while I seemed less to see the work than to hear it — an insouciant and savage music, pipes and drums. . . . Spero’s quality has to do with that mysterious ability — basic to expressionistic eloquence in art since Blake, Fuseli, and Goya — to invest complex emotional states in figurative images, ventriloquizing through the tilt of a head or the turn of an ankle. Only an extraordinarily direct and uncensored imagination can produce art like Spero’s.”

NOTES

1. Spero, quoted in Enright, “Other Side of the Mirror,” 31.

2. Spero et al., Nancy Spero, 32. The book to which Spero refers probably is Jacques Mauduit, Quarante mille ans d’art moderne (Paris: Plon, 1954) with fifty-one illustrations.

3. Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, Bollingen Series ([New York]: Pantheon Books, 1955), was one of the earliest sources of Spero’s art and artistic thought.

4. Neumann, The Great Mother, 298–99; on page 299 there is an illustration of a “dance group” in a Paleolithic rock painting in Spain. Neumann speculated about a “first language” at length in The Great Mother, explaining Jung’s concept of a “primordial language” (page 15): “The archetype is not only a dynamis, a directing force, which influences the human psyche, as in religion, for example, but corresponds to an unconscious ‘conception,’ a content. In the symbol, i.e., image of the archetype, a meaning is communicated that can be apprehended conceptually only by a highly developed consciousness, and then only with great pains. For this reason the following remark of Jung’s is still applicable to the modern consciousness: ‘Myth is the primordial language natural to these psychic processes, and no intellectual formulation comes anywhere near the richness and expressiveness of mythical imagery. Such processes deal with the primordial images, and these are best and most succinctly reproduced by figurative speech.’ This ‘figurative speech’ is the language of the symbol, the original language of the unconscious and of mankind.”

5. See “A Mountain of Signs,” in Antonin Artaud, Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 379ff. Artaud experienced a veritable orgy of signs, in figures and in the landscape, as he traveled through the land of the Tarahumara in Mexico.

6. Marjorie Welish, “Word into Image: Robert Barry, Martha Rosler and Nancy Spero,” Bomb 47 (1994).

7. Nancy Spero, Robert Storr, and Leon Golub, Nancy Spero: The War Series, 1966–1970 (Milan: Charta, 2003), 10.

8. David Reynolds, interview with the author, November 11, 2009.

9. Nancy Spero et al., Nancy Spero: Dissidances (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2008), 158.

10. Peter Soriano, Raise/Time: An Installation by Nancy Spero, exh. brochure (Cambridge, MA: Arthur M. Sackler Museum/Harvard University Art Museums, 1995), n.p.

11. These figures are according to the card-file reference system used in the Spero studio.

12. Samm Kunce, interview with the author, November 23, 2009.

13. Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 91. David Antin organized the first presentation of Spero’s Artaud Paintings, at the University of California, San Diego, in 1971.

14. Ibid., 36.

15. Peter Schjeldahl, “Opposites Attract,” Village Voice, April 15–21, 1981: 83.

The post The Figure as Hieroglyph: Nancy Spero’s “First Language” appeared first on artcritical.