If ever the timing of a show was pitch perfect with the circumstances of its venue, it is David Diao: TMI.  This at once ironic and plaintive show, delving into the cruel vagaries of the art market, is the set-striking event at Postmasters, drawing a close to their fifteen years tenancy at 459 West 19th Street—because their rent is being doubled.

The last day of show and space alike is Saturday, April 27.

TMI is an artist’s considered revenge on the perceived slights of the system.  Diao has made paintings that document the derisory results of an embarrassing dumping of his work in an inappropriate auction house.  One image, for instance, consists of the fateful auction catalog pages, replete with circled,  hand-written under-selling hammer prices.  In another painting he fantasizes a result in the opposite direction, inflating his actual auction record even more dramatically than their landlords did his gallerists’ rent.  High up on a ledge are duplicates in miniature of the devalued works,  for sale at a “correct,” (IE non-market) price in a gesture of what the Chinese call “chutzpah.”  But he doesn’t stop with auction injustice.  Other paintings adapt the graphics of a MoMA Picasso retrospective for an announcement of a fictional retrospective for himself at the same institution.  Another drops one of his own pictures into a painted rendering of a photograph of the old trustees’ dining room to memorialize the moment when curator John Elderfield presented the work to the board for consideration, only for it to be declined.

A master of “conceptual abstraction,” Diao is no stranger to the theme of indignant loss.  His previous, 2009 outing at Postmasters, titled “I lived there until I was 6…,” delved into family history.  His grandfather had been a well-off official in Sichuan before the revolution when their estate – tennis court and all – was confiscated by the communists.  Diao ingeniously melded architectural plans and state and party emblems into a faux-Suprematist iconography that both told an old tale and affirmed his current artistic values.  But this new body of work has a very different spirit as the focus shifts from family to career, and the foe from party state to art world.

Self-pity, of course, is a familiar theme among artists, but le peintre maudit usually gravitates towards an appropriately romantic style: something fey or expressionist, perhaps.  The jarring peculiarity here is between Diao’s intellectually aloof-seeming, coolly meticulous painting craft, on the one hand, and his only half-self-mocking sense of ruffled entitlement, on the other.  The MoMA announcement, for instance: is it saying that he was due a retrospective there? Is it goading institution and viewer alike to take action or to expect one some day?  Diao may well be forging a novel hybrid aesthetic with this show: Hard-Edge Patheticism.

While other Chelsea galleries, including the old Peter Blum and Sean Kelly spaces, are giving way to condos and boutiques in the High Line-propelled anti-art boom, the fine space that Magdalena Sawon and Tamas Banovich built in Chelsea will actually not be lost to art: it will soon serve as a new home for Leo Koenig Gallery. Postmasters, meanwhile, are retracing their steps downtown as they are set to reopen in Tribeca.  Not the worst place, as it happens, to experience downward mobility.

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Johanna Burton, Sarah Valdez, and John Zinsser joined David Cohen to review Alex Bag at the Whitney, David Diao at Postmasters, Mona Hatoum at Alexander and Bonin, Amy Sillman at Sikkema Jenkins.

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During the January 2009 Review Panel’s discussion of Peter Doig’s recent exhibition, the estimable Ken Johnson of the New York Times denied that a painting of lasting significance could be made with ping-pong as its subject matter. The critic may be correct, but if the contest in question were tennis, one could cite David Diao’s current show at Postmasters as compelling evidence to the contrary.

In truth, the show, titled “I Lived There Until I Was 6…” is only glancingly “about” tennis, though the motif of a tennis court seen in plan recurs in 10 of its three dozen canvases. (Many others are keyed to variations on the colors of grass and clay.) The sport looms large in the artist’s memory for reasons that slowly dawn on the viewer and echo through this lovely, haunting collection of recent work.

For decades, Diao has injected deeply personal, even confessional content onto the placid surfaces and into the untroubled spaces of Modernism by way of a formal vocabulary grounded in the conventions of presentation graphics: diagrams, plans, text. In the early 1990s, for instance, he made paintings charting the relative size of his various New York studios, and of his annual sales figures. The new work retains its erstwhile formal elegance and restraint, but rueful humor is replaced by a seething emotional undertow stemming from the artist’s inherited memories of his family’s displacement and fragmentation at the hands of the Chinese government.

A small painting just inside the gallery entrance clues  the viewer in to the back story. In silver vinyl lettering on a dense green ground, it reads:

Da Hen Li House

I lived there until I was 6. When I returned to
Chengdu 30 years later, it had just been
demolished. There are no photographs. The only
certain scale to rub up against my memories was
the tennis court. I have since uncovered ciphers
of its having been.

The next few paintings provide spatial orientation. They are based on a series of increasingly specific maps that locate the tennis court in the context of the family’s property, neighborhood, city, province, and nation. The chronological sweep of events of both personal and historical significance is accounted for in the largest work in the show, the 13-foot-long Timeline. In 1949, as Mao’s forces prevailed over the Kuomintang, the family mansion was seized and converted to Communist Party offices. The family was separated; Diao eventually made his way to New York. Timeline limns those and other markers such as the Cultural Revolution and Tianamen Square, as well as the death of the artist’s parents and the demolition, in 1979, of the Da Hen Li House.

Then there’s that tennis court leitmotif. In Wild Swans it underlies a quote from Jung Chang’s eponymous 1991 saga of life before, during and after Mao in which the author refers to the office of the Sichaun Daily, which was among those housed in the commandeered Da Hen Li house. Red Star Over Tennis Court depicts the star-studded crimson banner of the People’s Republic obscuring the center line and one forecourt. The painting’s chromatic opposition has plenty of visual snap, but the niceties of formalist abstraction dissolve under the weight of history and the confluence of the personal and the political, public and private, industrial and agrarian.

Above a seemingly straightforward painting of the dimensions of a tennis court, calledStandard Measurement, hangs a small canvas called Balls in which a pair of yellow circles is suspended in the center of an orange-ochre field. Given Diao’s penchant for tweaking the master narrative of 20th-century painting, it is perhaps not too fanciful to consider this work in the light of Jasper John’s Painting With Two Balls, widely interpreted as mocking the macho swagger of mid-century gestural abstraction. Diao’s retooling of the pun is a tacit admission that his upper-middle-class family’s ostentatious enjoyment of the Western, bourgeois pasttime might have seemed a brazen display of counterrevolutionary chutzpah.

In a twist of fate, the artist’s father died while playing tennis, in New York in 1990. The event is dispassionately commemorated in a small 2007 tennis court painting.

The show’s understated tone, its precisely measured sense of bewilderment and outrage, is in marked contrast to Jim Dine’s recent, diarrhetic exhibition at Pace on 25th Street. Dine’s unfettered, inchoate, apparently autobiographical blatherings formed a dense torrent from which the visitor emerged feeling embarrassed and demoralized, as if blanketed with a thick coating of partially digested ideas. The difference between the two shows is like buckshot versus a sniper’s bead.

In this rebus-like exhibition, a painting’s content is absorbed in part from surrounding works. Hanging above Timeline are two small canvases bearing traditional Chinese characters. At around 1935 is a small canvas called To Construct, which indicates the order in which eight strokes of the calligrapher’s brush form that verb. Marking 1979 is Demolish, crudely wiped on a stark white canvas twenty inches square. It is easy to imagine it emblazoned on the side of a building earmarked for razing.

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When stripes had first arrived in Europe, on the garments of a Carmelite order from the Holy Land, a great disturbance ensued because, according to Pastoreau, the medieval eye was accustomed to seeing strictly by a succession of figure-ground relationships, the ground had to be clearly established by the eye before what was in front of it was comprehended. The striped pattern disturbed this order, slicing up the conventional figure-ground relationship that the medieval eye adhered to as perceptual habit. Stripes, in this context, were the visual equivalent of “speaking in tongues.” As The Devil’s Cloth recounts, it appears that in the 13th and 14th centuries the wearing of stripes was a frightening transgression: the 19th chapter of Leviticus states that “one shall not wear a garment made of two” and in old French, “barre” did not simply mean stripe but illegitimacy. The stripe was full of perjorative associations, and signified a doubler, an insincere person. In feudal times, anyone not to be trusted – village idiots, prostitutes, disloyal knights, tricksters, jugglers and clowns – might be dressed or depicted in stripes.

The second signification of the Macdonald’s stripe comes later, when stripes became associated with hygiene. Pastoreau states unequivocally that from “feudal times to the second industrial revolution” the only next-to-the-skin cloth that was acceptable to western sensibility was white or undyed. Thus sheets, chemises, underwear etc. only became patterned or striped in the last hundred years and then very gradually, mostly with a pastel color, a kind of purified hue, with the association of animal dye drained from it. The lining of the Macdonalds fries cardboard container therefore quite unsurprisingly connotes good, clean fun, or, on a Freudian level, eating those crisp fries will involve an odd approximation of rooting around in Ronald Macdonald’s boxer shorts.

In “The Devil’s Cloth”, Pastoureau does wonder why Freud and his followers never noticed that “Our striped pajamas, our striped sheets, our striped matresses, aren’t they grills, cages?” But as a medievalist with a specialization in heraldry, it is full of more grounded observations, such as the metynomic quality of stripes: how a chevron on a railroad crossing, for instance, can stand for a whole barred gate or how a pedestrian crossing in Germany is called a “Zebrastreifen”. (Africans, incidentally, see the zebra as having white stripes on a black body and Europeans see it as having black stripes on a white body.)

The stripe seems an underused motif in contemporary art. Pastoureau, who is French, rightly references Daniel Buren, who has made a career of using the stripe in its socio-historic manner as a kind of public visual disruptor. In picture-making proper the pre-eminent figure is Sean Scully, who, in an old interview in Arts magazine, exclaimed, (echoing the Macdonalds’ slogan “Billions and Billions Served”): “I must have painted a million stripes”. He then goes on to compare his striped paintings with Cézanne. In fact, the paintings that Scully is most known for resemble large-scale fragments of the the striped awnings and fabrics in Matisse’s paintings from his Nice series. Scully, though he has written about Matisse, points to sources outside of a fine art context, as when he recently exhibited his photographs of the painted striped facades of dwellings in marginalized, pre-industrial countries, which ties the stripe into Pasterou’s idea of it as a barrier, a gate that protects and filters out evil spirits.

The painter David Diao executed a series of paintings in 1986 called Little Suprematist Prisons which began,he says, because he felt “imprisoned by geometry”. Diao executed 25 versions of Robert Motherwell’s painting, “Little Spanish Prison”. These works, which appeared a few years after Scully’s, might also be interpreted as a rebuke to Scully’s work, it’s debt to Motherwells painting and Scully’s overall romance with abstract expressionism. In this sense, Diao’s hard-edged versions counter the heroic, rough-hewn stripe of Scully’s paintings with the positivism of Stella and his roots in Russian Suprematism.

Cary Smith, another artist with a long history as a painter of stripes, sees the painted stripe as possessing the same “matter-of-fact, powerfully beautiful magic” that is present in Cezanne’s work. “It’s the most rigorous thing I can do”, Smith continues “but that only pertains to vertical stripes of the same thickness, stripes which vary in size in a painting are mannered and not interesting. Also, horizontal stripes are at rest, which differs from the tension of the verticle. The world today is a tense place for very good reasons, and the only way I have found to replicate the obsessive energy of the modern world is in painting and repainting vertical stripes of the same thickness.” In the last line of The Devil’s Cloth Pastoureau states that “Too many stripes can drive you mad”. Cary Smith’s work suggests that painting them, perhaps, can keep you sane.

The Devil’s Cloth: A History of Stripes and Striped Fabric
by Michel Pastoureau, Translated by Jody Gladding, Columbia University Press, New York 2001

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