Manifesta, the European biennial of contemporary art, is held in Western European cities — most recently in Genk, Belgium. This tenth edition, hosted by St. Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum, was housed in the Winter Palace and New Hermitage, the two main buildings of that institution and, across the enormous Palace Square, the city’s main plaza, in the newly renovated General Staff Building. The Hermitage, an encyclopedic museum celebrating its 250^th anniversary, is devoted to world art, going up to Post-Impressionism and the paintings by Henri Matisse; another collection of Russian art is in the State Russia Museum. Because visas are expensive, Russia is not readily accessible to many Americans and West Europeans, so the primary intended audience was Russian. There were a great many foreign tourists in St. Petersburg when I visited in late July, but relatively few of them focused on Manifesta.

Some of the artists responded to specifically to contemporary issues in Russian society. Alexandra Sukhareva, who is Russian, presented photographs from World War II archives. There is a video of a Russian dance class by Klara Lidén and a video of young dancers by Rineke Dijkstra. Boris Mikhailov presented photographs of a protesters’ camp in Kiev. The late Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, a gay artist who had been beaten up in the streets, was represented with Tragic Love (1993), a series of photographs of the artist dressed as Marilyn Monroe. Some foreign artists also offered Russian themes. Yasumasa Morimura made photographs based on drawings of the Hermitage when its art was removed during World War II. Marlene Dumas showed portraits of famous gay men including three Russians — Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Sergei Diaghilev and Rudolf Nureyev. Thomas Hirschhorn, whose Abschlag (2014) was designed for “Manifesta 10,” showed a gigantic collapsed building in which works by the revolutionary Russian Constructivists are installed. Erik van Lieshout presented the story of the Hermitage cats, longtime residents of the museum; they perished during the siege, but today are back in the museum basement, controlling invading rodents. And Francis Alÿs, whose boyhood dream was to travel from his native Belgium to the other side of the Iron Curtain, crashed a Russian Lada, a now-obsolete model of car into a tree inside the courtyard of the Winter Palace.

Facing controversy about Russian anti-LGBT laws and, also, about the country’s action in the Crimea, in interviews Manifesta’s curator Kasper König, who described Russia as “a repressive and authoritarian country,” articulated frankly the difficulties he faced. So far as I could see (I was not able to attend the performances or public performances, which were held outside the central exhibition site), much of the art, including most of the art by non-Russians was the kind displayed at such exhibitions in America. Certainly this is true of Olivier Mosset’s large, handsome monochromes; Ann Veronica Janssens’s very beautiful installations of floating liquids; and Vladim Fishkin’s A Speedy Day (2003), which compresses the twenty-four-hour light cycle into two-and-a-half hours, an effect especially evocative in far-North St. Petersburg, where the summer days are so long. The same can be said of Joseph Beuys’s Wirtschaftswerte (“Economic Values,” 1980), a commentary on food shortages in East German stores; Bruce Nauman’s Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage, 2001); Susan Philipsz’s piano recording inspired by James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which was played on the main staircase of the New Hermitage. Lara Favaretto’s installation of concrete blocks in the gallery for ancient Greek sculpture; Tatzu Nishi’s temporary wooden living room built around a chandelier in the Winter Palace, creating a home with the museum; and a painting from 1966 by Gerhard Richter made similarly affecting use of the site.

As the Hermitage’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, rightly notes in the catalogue, “Displaying contemporary art alongside the classics is a common occurrence.” The logic of this procedure deserves discussion. In the gallery of the Hermitage devoted to Nicolas Poussin you can see the relationship between his early Joshua’s Victory Over the Amalekites (1625-26); Moses Striking Water from the Rock (1649), painted more than 20 years later; and his Rest on the Flight to Egypt (1655-57), a marvelous example of his late style. Normally we thus find visually connected works in one gallery. When, however, the physically contiguous works are historically distant, imagination is then called upon to identify connections. This is true when Louise Bourgeois’s silver sculpture The Institute (2002) is installed alongside an etching by Piranesi and when Katharina Fritsch’s sculpture Frau mit Hund (“Woman with Dog,” 2004), which alludes to the life of Russia’s historical high society, is displayed in the former emperor’s private quarters. In a challenging variation on this familiar procedure, Maria Lassnig, Dumas and Nicole Eisenman occupied the two rooms of the Winter Palace usually dedicated to Matisse. (His paintings were removed to the General Staff Building.) They too deal with the female body and its sexuality, and so temporarily giving them his privileged place in the Hermitage counted as a political gesture.

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Can sharing a bit of gossip cost you $8 million?  It might if you are high-powered art dealer and gallery owner David Zwirner.

It all started when Miami collector Craig Robins resold a painting, Reinhardt’s Daughter, (1994) by Margaret Dumas through David Zwirner’s Chelsea gallery in 2004.  Zwirner apparently told the South African artist about the sale, and she forbid him to sell any of her paintings to Robins.  Dumas currently has a solo exhibition of major works at David Zwirner, and when Robins wanted three of them, he was denied.

Robin’s lawsuit, filed on March 29, in Manhattan federal court, is asking for $3 million in compensatory damages, plus $5 million in punitive damages for the breach of confidentiality in the sale of the painting.

Accusations are flying—Zwirner told Dumas about the sale in order to curry favor to become her exclusive dealer, Dumas has “blacklisted” Robins from purchasing any primary market works, Zwirner made promises to Robins to sell him any works that didn’t sell to museums.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out.  Multi-million dollar back-biting and name-calling in the art world is nothing new, but this takes he-said, she-said to a whole new level. 04/01/10

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Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton
October 8, 2008 to January 11, 2009
The New Museum
235 Bowery, between Stanton and Rivington streets, New York City, 212 219 1222

As existentialist injunctions go, “Measure your own grave” and “Live forever” could be said to represent polar opposites, literally of heaven and earth.  And yet, the painters to whom these phrases serve as titles for their museum surveys, respectively at the Modern and the New, are anything but opposed.  It is not as if, for instance, Elizabeth Peyton has the exclusive on ethereality, Marlene Dumas on groundedness.  Indeed, Peyton and Dumas, though of  different ages and with markedly contrastive personal histories, could be construed as soul sisters.

In the manner of that Greek legend where different maidens lined up to inspire separate body parts for the statue of a goddess, these two artists could almost be enlisted to collaborate on a portrait of the postmodern (not to mention post-feminist) condition, one that in painterly touch and depictive attitude alike is torn between intimacy and remoteness, memory and visceral presence.  And this collaboration would take place without a major compromise on either’s part in terms of modus operandi, touch, or – even, really – philosophy.

Both paint thin in a way that is no mere matter of personal handwriting: thinness equates to a state of alienation towards, or skepticism about, the expressive capacity of paint.  There is a kind of laid back alla prima in both bodies of work: a sense of watery, muted color soaking into the support, in Dumas’s case, as if images resulted as much from accidental spillage as gestural intention.  In Peyton, perfunctory but unurgent delivery ensures an effect that is lively and slight: her painterly smear ensures at least low octane empathy while surfaces feel mildly distressed.

They are both soulful and emotionally invested in what they choose to paint but are in no hurry to “master” their subjects or materials.  Indeed, their touch ensures a sense of humbleness towards the act of depiction.  Words that work equally for both women are fey expressionism.

In stylistic genealogy, a strking common progenitor is Edvard Munch: consider Peyton’s September (Ben) (2001) and Dumas’s The Visitor (1995) for a lyrical angst that looks back to Munch.

And this shared ancestor aside, Dumas and Peyton are both self-enslaved to the photograph as source and avatar of their imagery.  Recently, Peyton has begun (or returned) to working from life, the implications of which are yet to unfold; but hitherto a tension between emotional investment and physical separation worked itself out in relation to her dependence on mediated images, and a yearning for visceral connection across a temporal divide, a desire to know the unknown. In Dumas, the insistence on working from found, mediated images with the sense of remove that that engenders seems like an act of political defiance rather than a personal style choice.

Body and Soul
In the divisions of labor regarding that collaboration I envisaged, there is no question that Dumas should be assigned the body.  Her figuration is marvelously gutsy.   Bodies sit solidly on the canvas or paper even when there is a thin, washy effect, and pivot the composition, even when there is knowing naïveté in the draftsmanship.  She puts light on limbs delectably, even in images of torture and exploitation.  And sex really matters to her.  This comes across not just in the many paintings that deal with the sex industry but also in other body images, even those of infants or corpses.  She is a supremely erotic artist—paint, politics and the body are all aligned to arouse.

Peyton, by the same token, should be left the face—although Dumas is no slouch in that department. Arguably the pinnacle of Dumas’s superbly installed MoMA show is the chapel-like anteroom housing Black Drawings (1991-92), 111 drawings and one work on slate of approximately nine-by-seven inches each.  These initially slight, schematic, generic faces in their gridded ranks reveal sensitive individuality.  With exceptions, Dumas’s faces are anonymous individuals extracted from the body politic – as likely chosen for some social slight or economic marginalization that they represent as for their personal look. Peyton’s faces, on the other hand, are iconic individuals—celebrities, culture heros, personal friends—who are saints in a private religion of nostalgia, doomed youth, and exalted bohemia.

Ironically, where Dumas personalizes the anonymous, Peyton standardizes the individual.  There is an unmistakable Peyton stamp to any face that narrows the eyes, heightens the lips, feminizes the cheekbones and hardens the jaw into a generic type.  In this sense she is like a Byzantine icon painter who, in her devotion to the individual, connects to a universal.

Dumas and Peyton are united in their limitations as well as their strengths—and, arguably, in their capacity to ensure that their limitations are strengths.  Dumas’s photo-dependency gives her imagery political edge.  Denial of sensory depth almost punishes viewers for yearning for it, reminding them of the urgencies of injustice and exploitation that this art – and their consciences – should be addressing.  Her chromophobia is that of Guernica, a direct reference to the black and white of news reportage (a residual association that survives in a color TV age, somehow signaling “news” to all generations.)

Peyton’s style wallows in its own patheticism, as if cloying, ephemeral, illustration techniques are symptoms of self-pity.  Such knowingly retarded means sit perfectly with the basically adolescent emotion she taps, which is that of star-struck infatuation.  The miracle in Peyton is that, despite such one-dimensionality of form and content alike, she is able to pull off both an iconic magnetism in individual works and a sense of an integral personal world across the corpus of her oeuvre.

Ancien Régime
The striking contrast between these two shows lies not with the artists so much as their curators.  Having once tried to borrow a Dumas painting for a group exhibition, and having seen a disappointing show of her work at (it just so happens) the New Museum, at its old, Broadway location some years ago, I can vouch for the fact that she can be an uneven painter.  You wouldn’t know that from Cornelia Butler’s spritely selection and meticulously paced installation.  Peyton, on the other hand, has been let down by Laura Hoptman’s visually tasteless and thematically thoughtless hang.  We get no sense of development in her work, despite a vaguely chronological hang, nor of shape in her constellation of infatuees.  Peyton’s reputation rests, in part, on the ability of a single small picture on a large museum wall to galvanize attention.  Live forever, an object lesson in more being less, is a potentially lethal overdose for this youngish artist’s reputation.

But curatorial problems can hardly account for the negative vibes her show has elicited, if not in the printed record then at least in verbal responses I have been monitoring from people I trust.  There has been a curious, consistent argument that aligns Peyton to the wrong politics. One artist felt that Mary Heilmann and Peyton represented an aesthetic choice as stark – and related to – the political choice facing the nation, while a week after the election another painter opined that Peyton seemed to her so ancien régime, as if Obama will free us of celebrity worship and style recyling. This seemed harsh when Peyton had rushed out a portrait of Michelle and Sasha Obama at the Democratic Convention, a picture inserted in the show after it had opened, even if apposite in relation to, say, Picnic (M.A.) after Sofia Copploa’s Marie Antoinette, not to mention countless doting portraits by Peyton of Princess (as the Queen then was) Elizabeth and other wistful Windsors.

But there seems to be a strange insistence on the part of otherwise savvy commentators to see Peyton’s personalism and knowing slightness of style as inherent (moral) limitations rather than to appreciate the integrity of her compact between content and style – the strength, in other words, of her flimsiness. Conversely, there is an assumption that the humanism and political engagement in Dumas, with its somber hues and agitprop urgency, makes her work correspondingly more serious.  I admire Dumas, and can certainly sense that her politics gives her work gravitas where Peyton’s patheticism lends hers levity.  But gravitas isn’t substance per se, nor is levity lack of it.  Or, put another way, Gericault may be a more important artist than Puvis, but it isn’t because the former paints corpses and the latter nymphs.

Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in association with MoMA, and was on view in LA June 22 to September 22, 2008. The exhibition catalogue, published by Moca and Distributed Art Publishers, Inc, contains texts by Butler, Dumas, Lisa Gabrielle Mark, Matthew Monahan and Richard Shiff.

Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton will travel to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; and the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht. The exhibition catalogue, published by Phaidon, has texts by Laura Hoptman, Iwona Bazwick, and John Giorno.

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Marlene Dumas at Zwirner & Wirth until April 23 (32 E. 69th Street, between Madison and Park Avenues, 212-517-8677)

MAKING MOVIES IN THE BEDROOM

In March 2002 Eric Fischl was let loose in Mies van der Rohe’s Ester’s Haus in Krefeld, Germany. After decorating the 1928 villa, which belongs to the city’s art museum in contemporary style, he had a pair of actors play out domestic scenarios that he photographed. From the thousands of shots that ensued Mr. Fischl culled a book, “The Krefeld Project,” (2002) and used others as his source material for two painting exhibitions, the second of which is at Mary Boone.

This turn to directing, albeit to produce still rather than moving images, conforms to the cinematic impulse of Mr. Fischl’s generation: Artist-moviemakers among his peers include Robert Longo, David Salle, Cindy Sherman, and of course Julian Schnabel. Mr. Fischl crept behind the camera later than these 1980s artists, amongst whom he was always the most Old Masterly, committed in earnest to traditional practices and technique. But it could be argued that he was also the most cinematic, all along.

Mr. Fischl’s images implied narrative in a linear, temporal way. When a boy steals from the pocketbook of a mother, sprawled in drunken revelry on her bed, a story lies behind and consequences ahead. Such images worked to the extent that they could orchestrate past, present and future. Indeed, it was this storytelling capacity as much as the slippery paintwork and suburban sexuality that confirmed Mr. Fischl’s credentials as a “Bad” artist.

The six new “Bedroom Scenes” from 2004 at Mary Boone imply rather than impose narrative, leaving the viewer to determine a sequence of events — to decide, even, if they represent a single scenario. They might, after all, be scenes from a marriage. (They can claim Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode engravings, 1745, and Degas’s “The Interior,” 1869, as forebears alike.) How happy, or otherwise, are relations between this couple is up for grabs, though the titles are more directed than the images themselves.

The protagonists are a portly though sturdy man of middle age and an althletic, somewhat masculine and slightly younger woman; their domestic situation implies that they are people of substance. We catch them in various states of dress and undress, communication and distance. When dolled up in evening dress they could be on their way in from or out to a social gathering. He is not the kind of painter who ensures that you know which.

Generally, their intercourse seems fraught, connections frayed. One canvas, subtitled “The Earth Rolls Over You,” depicts sex, but we sense a fumbling moment of non-penetration. In another, “After the Tantrum, Unholy News,” with a broken vase and other props strewn around as witness, the woman, kneeling, points up to the seated man in a Renaissance pose, while he nonchalantly sniffs his sock (though he could be dabbing a cut or wiping away a tear — it isn’t clear.)

The figures are realized, in other words, in languages out of sorts within a single picture. She is classically composed, all rhetoric and gesture, while he is arbitrarily caught, the way a camera slices into a moment to give us an ambiguous transitional smudge. It is as if these disparate painterly strategies signify marital incompatibility.

In the early paintings with which he secured his reputation, Mr. Fischl can be said to have “art directed” within the medium itself. He has confirmed in interview what seems to be the case from the paintings themselves, that scenarios worked themselves out upon the canvas. Now that he works from his own stage managed photographs and has separated out the processes of image-formation and facture, the paintings are increasingly, and inevitably, slick, polished, cold machines.

That could just be what he is after. The photographic source is compelling for an artist intent on those terrible twins of modern realism, alienation and instantaneity. But the ambiguities that arise are surface ambiguities that have to do with the dislocation of different modes of representation (celluloid and paint) rather than psychological ones. They have more to do with lack of clarity than double entendre.

Certainly the one has the potential to be a metaphor for the other. The problem for Mr. Fischl is that ambiguity becomes a mere device that can be dropped in at will — like “painterliness” itself, warmed up just where you expect it, for streaks of light on muscley flesh. In the Old Master tradition he wants to tap, ambiguity in all its richness arose from observational crises. For them, awkwardness was a sign of vitality.  For Mr. Fischl, ambiguity on demand is a symptom of enervatednes.  But then, as a true realist chronicler of bourgeois ennui, this might be his point.

***

Like Mr. Fischl, Marlene Dumas knows how to make herself at home in other people’s bedrooms. Born in 1953, this South-African artist who has made her career in Holland, is five years younger than Mr. Fischl.  A selection of her raunchy, winsome work dating back to the mid-1980s at Zwirner & Wirth makes a fine case for her as a contemporary master of louche nostalgia. She depicts bodies with an angst-free urgency at once perfunctory and precise, bolshy and endearing. She recalls moderns like Münch and the less known but quite marvelous Nordic expressionist, Helene Schjerfbeck, as well as more contemporary figures like Beuys (his watercolors) and Ms. Dumas’ junior, the Belgian Luc Tuymans.

Her nonchalant yet gestural style — at once washed out and voluptuous,— actually resembles Mr. Fischl’s work in the late 1980s when, working out of Emil Nolde, he turned to monotype printmaking. The slick, squidgy eroticism of those sequential images, arguably his most likeable if intellectually his least ambitious works, coupled with their “blaxploitation,” and knowingly subversive appropriation of primitivism made him a kind of painterly cousin to Ms. Dumas.

Her work has an altogether more innocent rapport with both racial and representational otherness than his. In images like “Couples” (1994) — a frieze of the same voluptuous redhead embracing her black lover — the private desire and social stance aren’t too difficult to decode. In a funny way, the old-fashionedness of her expressionist style and liberal sentiment alike gives her work a period edge not unakin to her fellow South African, William Kentridge, another master of the wistful collision of the personal and the political.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, March 10, 2005

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