November 9 to December 23, 2017
83 Grand Street, between Greene and Wooster streets
New York City, teamgal.com

In a cliché of the desire for art objects, sometimes found in the critical literature, the beholder wants to touch or caress or lick the work, especially if it is a painting. This lust is often mentioned with erotic fervor (or its pretense) as if describing some profound, taboo-breaking magnetism. After all, contact with artworks is prohibited: they are too sacred or fragile for such casual molestation or frottage, even by a, like, serious admirer. We police ourselves against such fantasies, desires, but that physical and moral defacement of the image also seems to be the greatest compliment that can be given. At Team, the recent exhibition of paintings by London-based artist Dawn Mellor confuses these responses.

Called “Sirens,” the show is Mellor’s first solo with the gallery since 2008, and consists of 20 oil paintings, all made in 2016, each 32 x 24 inches and depicting a policewoman from a British TV series, such as Gillian Anderson playing Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson on The Fall (2013 – 16). Almost all of them are named for the character they depict, with the actor noted parenthetically. (Two are simply called Unnamed Extra.) Consequently, the exhibition’s title cleverly refers to both the bleating of alarms and the dangerously seductive allure of Mellor’s subjects. She is also working on an artist’s book by the same name.

Mellor’s painting moves between delicate and crude, depending on her need. In places, her affection for these characters is fraught. Their images are defaced—erotically, absurdly. Mellor’s career has included a lot of juvenilia, such as drawings made of the Jacksons when she was a teenager, and stiff paintings of celebrities that have been zealously roughed up with smeared paint and obscene personal notes. The paintings in this show follow a few patterns of disfigurement: each character reduced to a bust immersed in something resembling an apocalyptic flood, brightly colored lingerie-like coverings stretched over her head. The paint is candy-ish, often bright and smirking. The veils in Police Constable Donna Windsor (Verity Rushworth) and Detective Superintendent Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman) both echo the subjects’ high-visibility safety-yellow jackets. Police Constable Ruby Buxton (Nicola Alexis) has its heroine with pink fishnet over her head, purple lipstick, and similar colors reflecting, sunset-like, in the deluge around her.

The protagonist is nearly untouched in Police Constable Jamilla Blake (Lolita Chakrabarti), leaning hard against a blue brick wall as icy water rises against her. Her face is a little reddened, but otherwise she is untouched by the growths, injuries, hallucinations, and other violations to the fantasy world Mellor uses.

These characters don’t menace. Cops are embodiments of abstract state authority still sometimes referred to with the colloquial metonym “The Man.” Mellor’s policewomen are pretty acutely objects of desire, whatever their demeanor in the original shows. Here, with a deluge rising, icicles forming, bodies defaced by scribbles and scrawls and suggestions of bondage, they’re threatened, vulnerable. They invite TV spectation’s secret thrill in watching the attractive and imperiled heroine skillfully turn the tables, a recurring trope of many police dramas, giving an audience all sorts of satisfaction in seeing archetypal fantasies play out: of female empowerment, female endangerment, of good’s triumph over evil only after struggle, of the rhetorical power/authority of truth and justice over chaos and irrational violence.

A queer woman, Mellor’s relationship with her subjects assumes suggestive valence, a desirous gaze. But it’s a conflicted one, as well: In this era when the social gap between the police and the policed is so visibly vast, expressing desire for a cop is a loaded act. For Mellor it has always been, not only for the erotics. She has described ways that police and military recruiters would trawl working class schools in Manchester during her youth. “Often it was those who did not expect high level academic achievements who would abandon study for job security, a pension and a civil service role,” Mellor says. It was a good job with benefits for working people.

“People in the police, though,” she continues, “would often hide the fact they were police officers from neighbors and, for example, not go home in uniform, because other working class people also condemned police.” And now her work arrives at a time well suited to be seen, as police, and the sexual dynamics of those with power and those without, and racism have all come under intense scrutiny, and the public is hot to have some real and/or symbolic comeuppance, and maybe some role reversal, too, on the way to greater parity.

“Defacement works on objects the way jokes work on language, bringing out their inherent magic,” writes Michael Taussig, in the introduction to his book Defacement (1999). It flatters the subject by paying regard with violation, as Mellor does by her adoring vandalism, or her vandalism of adored subjects. It emphasizes both terrifying power and absurdity, earnestly recognizing authority by trying to negate that authority, or to cast it out. It attempts to drive the cop out of one’s head, or into one’s arms and mouth.

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The Surrealist writer André Breton once declared that beauty would have to become convulsive, otherwise it would cease to be. As if in late vindication of this injunction, the paintings of Dawn Mellor set off a chain reaction of anger and lyricism. She is an artist driven by both sociopolitical protest and ambiguous, personal longings, which makes the link with Surrealism particularly pertinent in her case. Her paintings are at the dual service of Eros and Thanatos, awash equally with alienation and empathy, desire and indignation.

Her vulgarity and iconoclasm are truly prodigious, even within the context of a popular culture that is permeated by brash assaults on traditional values. Her latest show, “A Curse on Your Walls,” has two themes, or perhaps, more appropriately in her case, targets. The first is Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz,” shown in six mammoth canvases, engaged in bizarre, macabre activities. The second involves a salon-style hang of 71 of Ms. Mellor’s sadistically satirical easel portraits of contemporary and historical celebrities — an ongoing series she titles “Vile Affections” — culled from cultures high and low.

An extremity of attitude comes across in both her paint handling and a visual imagination that is at once vivid and vicious. But through it all is a love of the sheer dynamics of translating mediated images into paint, of handling space, of describing details while keeping up an appearance of frenzy and desperation. She is that rare, wondrous thing: a “bad” painter who really knows how to paint.

At the younger end of the Young British Artist movement lead by Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin, Ms. Mellor came to attention at the same time as Cecily Brown, who could be described as a cooler version of Ms. Mellor’s “bad girl” update of Philip Guston. Closer to her particular fusion of the erotic and the political is American painter Nicole Eisenman, whose imagery, like Ms. Mellor’s, has a love-hate relationship with media constructions of girlhood.

The shifts in scale between the Dorothy paintings and the “Vile Affections” is galvanizing. The Oz pictures are up to 10-by-12-feet; the anti-portraits are generally 2 or 3 feet tall. Both brim with a Gothic humor that is richly disturbing. In her journey through the dark corridors of Ms. Mellor’s imagination, Dorothy survives more than the Wicked Witch of the West would have concocted for her, although certainly the West, in the geopolitical sense, has much to blame for her travails. In “Yellow Bricks Dorothy” (2007-08), for instance, the heroine triplicates into a row of slave workers schlepping bricks in wheelbarrows. In one of these manifestations, Dorothy’s head transmogrifies into a skull of harrowing beauty, another into a brick itself. In “Death Army Dorothy” (2008), she stands amidst a bombed-out city at the head of a possy of 10 gold-skinned robots, redolent of the James Bond movie “Goldfinger.” Each of the robots has a white skull for a head, a pretty blue bow in the its “hair,” and Renaissance armor on its left shoulder. In “Partisan Dorothy” (2007-08), she has become a terrorist with a bloodcurdling gaze, wielding a submachine gun.

Ms. Mellor’s handling of paint is often at its most subtle and tender when her politicizing is at its most blatant and brutal. “Giant Dorothy” (2007-08) has Dorothy kneeling before a soap-bubble globe containing her longed-for Kansas homestead, floating above a blasted heath. But in a gesture that cripples the innocence of the image, she has spouted an erect penis (in the same blue gingham of her dress) that penetrates the bubble. Her face duplicates as it turns its gaze from the house to the ground, a beautifully handled passage. Around her head is a halo of burning white slogans of militant, anti-religious, anarchic character, burning bright against the dark, ominous sky, that read, “Destroy the Abrahamic Moralist Trilogy of Terror. We will establish a new state. Kill Breeders, Steal Babies.”

Ms. Mellor’s celebrity portraits are at once more extreme and more ambiguous than her Dorothy murals — despite the rape and pillage the latter entail. You are never quite sure what the criteria might be to enter her pantheon, which consists both of personalities toward whom one imagines she is politically antipathetic (Condoleezza Rice, Margaret Thatcher, Shimon Peres, Mother Theresa, and even Cherie Blair come in for rough treatment) and icons that “Friends of Dorothy” usually reserve affection for, Barbra Streisand, Billie Holliday, Audrey Hepburn, and Madonna. Madonna, in fetish gear and with smoke coming out of her ears, has gaping wounds about her body, a recurring trope in Ms. Mellor’s portraits that perhaps reflects the artist’s past as an S-and-M cabaret performer. Even feminist theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous come in for some gentle mockery.

Nicole Kidman, who has been the subject of infatuated portraits by Ms. Mellor in the past, has in this series sprouted a beard. There are abstract rays of color that intersect at the point of her left eye. Her legendary alabaster skin is afflicted by the pox. When in the past Ms. Kidman was depicted by Ms. Mellor as Judith clutching the bleeding head of Tom Cruise-as-Holofernes, the symbolism was not difficult to decode. The bearded lady, though, could mean anything — and is arguably richer for the ambiguity.

Ms. Mellor manages simultaneously to recall the ferocious politics of Sue Coe and the fey infatuations of Elizabeth Peyton. She seems intent on debunking the whole culture of celebrity while at the same time working through her individual feelings, which run an emotional gamut, toward these individuals. They are given a life in paint with which to counter the disturbingly conflicted meanings projected upon them, whether by the media or by Ms. Mellor herself.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, June 26, 2008 under the heading “The Erotic, the Political and the Personal”

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