Sylvia Sleigh was so ahead of the curve as a painter that some people are just now catching up.  This current exhibition includes sixteen of Sleigh’s portraits from the 1960s and ‘70s and features, among other notables, an amazingly young Arnold Glimcher (founder of Pace Gallery).  As vibrant today as they were when they still gave off the pungent smell of oil some forty years ago, they are a potent reminder of everything wonderful about her work.  Apparent, too, are the unnerving aspects that make these works as uncomfortable for our eyes today as they were for viewers decades earlier.

Sleigh was often misunderstood at the time these works were made, and even though much of the conventional thinking of that time has been thoroughly rejected, misunderstandings persist.   And it must be said that the polite, petite, and ever so British Sleigh broke conventions left and right.  To start with, she divorced her first husband and then married a man ten years her junior in 1954.  She saw herself as a professional at a time when women were rarely seen as such.  She was a representational painter when the intellectual movement favored abstraction.  She was interested in painting celebrities, albeit from the New York art world. She painted nudes.  Worse, she was a woman who frequently painted male nudes – something our culture still finds extremely difficult to accept.  Worse still, unlike the deliciously nasty portraits of Alice Neel or the hermetically sealed nudes of Philip Pearlstein, Sleigh’s figures, whether clothed or nude, are nearly without exception sweetly erotic.

If this were not enough, Sleigh took a proto-feminist approach to spatial representation that was, and sometimes still is, confused with a naïve technique.  Take for example Chelsea Garden (1971) in the current exhibition.  Typically of the artist’s work, the location is her Brownstone on 20th Street (a few blocks from I-20.)  It features a young couple in the foreground and a middle age couple in the backspace. The young man and woman were close friends of the artist, and the couple in the back is actually Sleigh and her husband Lawrence Alloway.  While there is an acknowledgement of traditional perspective in the form of the garden fence on right side, overall there is extremely compressed, flat space.  Moreover, the figure-ground relationship is handled evenly throughout, with plants, hair, skin, clothes, even bricks and fire escapes all given equal weight.  The paint itself is applied in such thin layers that the weave of the canvas support is often visible.

All of this can mislead the viewer expecting a traditional representational painting with the false impression that Sleigh is not in control.  Even though the artist frequently quotes the history of painting in her works, her aesthetic goals lay elsewhere.  In Chelsea Garden a key to Sleigh’s actual pictorial intent can be found along the top edge of the painting, where the blue and white rectangles of the otherwise unseen awning in the very close foreground are interwoven with the rectangular windows of the building in the furthest back space.  This is a highly calculated strategy designed to evoke fabric arts in general and quilting specifically.  Fabric creations were, after all, considered traditional woman’s work and not an art but craft.  Part of the feminist art movement was to recognize that craft need not be the sole venue for women, and, conversely, that crafts could be an equal art form (see, as only one example, the quilts of Gee’s Bend).  It is part of Sleigh’s genius that she created a successful synthesis of these ideas in her work.

Countless contemporary artists as diverse as John Currin, Kehinde Wiley, and certainly Elizabeth Peyton owe something to Sleigh’s vision, whether or not they realize it.  At 93 years old, Sleigh – who is still painting – may have little interest as to what others think about the import of her contributions.  But for the rest of us, especially museum acquisition committees, it is time to catch up with this pivotal artist.

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on view through January 9, 2010. Now in her nineties, British-born painter Sylvia Sleigh is enjoying a revival of attention with her quirky realism and astute sense of the personality and the sexual energy of her times. She was included recently in the show, Ingres and the Moderns, at the National Gallery in Ottawa as well asWack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, the nationally toured exhibition originating at LA Moca. Her portrait, above, of the illustrious, award-winning translator from the German, French, Yiddish and Russian Joachim Neugroschel (whose work is also well-regarded in art circles) combines the piercing verisimilitude of Christian Schad with a distinctly un-Neue Sachlichkeit tenderness.

This was an artcritical PIC in November 2009

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SYLVIA SLEIGH
I-20 until May 10 (557 West 23rd Street between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212 645 1100)

PHILIP PEARLSTEIN
Betty Cuningham until April 28 (541 West 25 Street, between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 242 2772)

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, April 5, 2007 under the title “The Realist World”

The more seemingly straightforward realism is, the more it is prone to complications.

Beyond the artworld — whether in schoolrooms, prisons, amateur art classes, psychiatric wards — depiction of the human form is the primary impulse of people who feel the urge to make art.  But it is a persistent strand, as well, of the artistic vanguard even in a century marked by expressionism, abstraction, and recurring claims that mimesis is obsolete.

While the desire to render people in a way that is immediate, universal and impactful has something primitive about it, revival of historically available styles entails sophistication—technically, if you are going to pull it off without looking anachronistic, and conceptually, if in fact mannerism is part of your intent.  Often, significant contemporary realism is pulled by  these competing forces—a naïve belief that you can capture reality and astute awareness of the relativity of style.

This is a good moment to think about realism because of three significant shows by veterans of a 1960s revivial in New York of perceptual realism, along with many young artists (Philip Akkerman at BravinLee Programs, for instance, or Delia Brown at D’Amelio Terras) exploiting realism as much for the frisson of transgression this involves as for the energy it generates within their work.

The key figures of a 1960s new realism that consciously sought to extend rather than simply challenge or bypass the achievements of Abstract Expressionism were Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein and Alfred Leslie. Mr. Katz is the subject of a museum loan exhibition that examines his early work of the 1950s (at the Park Avenue Bank) and Mr. Pearlstein has a show of new work that extends the line of inquiry he established in the 1960s.  Mr. Leslie, meanwhile, is also the subject of a historical show, spanning the years 1964-90.  Sylvia Sleigh’s exhibition is a reassesment of an artist now in her nineties that focuses on her work of the 1970s.  Ms. Sleigh is the widow of the critic Lawrence Alloway who was a persuasive early advocate of Mr. Katz.

Mr. Leslie had enjoyed early success as an abstract painter, first working gesturally in a robust style akin to Willem de Kooning and then moving into rough, drippy collage-based paintings that while close to Robert Motherwell also had a kinship with Robert Rauschenberg with whom he shared a four-man museum exhibition in Sweden in 1962.  Then in 1964-5 he underwent a radical change of heart with a series of full frontal portraits, including a self portrait, on canvases nine foot tall by six foot wide, rendered with precisionist finesse.

In a catalogue essay, David Elliott argues against reading these works as a rebuttal of modernism.  Firstly, he suggests, the New York School was more than abstract painting—it included poets, musicians and experimenters in other domains with whom Mr. Leslie’s realism was consonant.  Secondly, the artist had personal roots, predating his abstract painting, in Brechtian theater, to which these stark, “in your face,” isolated yet socially specific figures related.  In parallel with his painting career, Mr. Leslie was an experimental film director, working with Jack Kerouac and Robert Frank on a significant underground movie, “Pull My Daisy,” (1959).   And lastly, from a formal perspective, the paintings adopted strategies from Abstract Expressionism, namely materiality, directness and scale.

The show includes Mr. Leslie’s earliest surviving realist figure paintings of the 1960s, dynamic, group figure compositions of the mid-1970s, and large-scale nude drawings of 1989 and 1990.  The early works include his 1966-67 self-portrait, on loan from the Whitney, which shows the artist with bared chest and glum expression dazed and mournful following the sudden death of his friend and film collaborator the poet Frank O’Hara, and the destruction of his work and archives in a studio fire that had claimed the lives of 12 fire fighters.  In the early 1970s Mr. Leslie began the series of modern-day history paintings charting the poet’s death, “The Killing Cycle,” his best known, and arguably most bizarre, realist works—which are not included here.

Not that the works on show lack in oddity.  Mr. Leslie’s style is extraordinarily diverse.  At times he veers towards photographic realism, as in the Whitney piece.  The use of grisaille relates more to black and white cinema and photography than it does to old master technique, although it has that pedigree.  “Linda B. Cross” (1967) employs harsh lighting in which the face is spotlit, the mammoth lower body – closer to the artist’s sightline and rendered in grotesquely literal scale – plunged into an almost drastic chiarascuro.  “Judy Tenebaum Early in Pregnancy” (1966-67) has a contrastively symbolist feel: the head is fully work and in color, while the body is more ethereal and generalized, in a chalky miasma.  “Jane Elford” (1967-68) opts for expressivity, with clenched fists, a hint of twist in the torso, a slightly Northern Renaissance grotesqueness in the leer of drooping facial features.  The later group figure compositions, like “Birthday for Ethel Moore,” bring various baroque masters to mind, including Carravaggio and de la Tour.

This diversity gives conceptual edge to Mr. Leslie’s realism, which would exhaust his interest by the early 1990s when archiving and restoring his early films became his main activity.  In the portraits it is as if he is testing, in each work, the limits of different genres—this gives the work a unique intellectual energy, and with it an alienating severity and stiffness.  Unloveable works, they demand to be noticed.

Despite her marriage to a critic, Ms. Sleigh’s realism is less concerned with its own stylistic implications.  At least on first impression they seem blessed by an unaffected naivite.   Her work mixes a sunny disposition, the kind of awkwardness that arises from avoiding single-point perspective and other “academic” tropes embraced by Mr. Leslie, and the slightly nutty ambition of primitivism to capture each petal, blade, body hair. “Annunciation” (1975) has a handome youth sporting an Afro, open denim shirt and denim shorts of a paler hue that evokes the various personal liberation movements of the day and bathes them in a religious light.   An “outsider” sensibility contrasts charmingly with evidently insider subjects, as in “Lawrence and Betty Parsons at Horton’s Point,” (1963) depicting her husband and the well-known art dealer.

Her bucolic scenes of nudes in the open air recall the self-consciously anachronistic later works of André Derain while Henri Rousseau could be quoted in one of the her figures: “Reclining Nude: Paul Rosano” (1977).  In fact, her penchant for seating nudes in the classic modernist pieces that obviously furnished her home, from Paul Rosano again, in a Jacobson chair from 1971 through to “Max Warsh Seated Nude” (2006), the one contemporary work, in an Eames lounge chair, makes a justified historical case for naïve realism as literally and metaphorically embraced by vintage modernism.

The critical fortunes of Messrs. Pearlstein and Katz have inevitably been intertwined since Irving Sandler jointly identified them with what he termed the new perceptual realism.  If you see their works at the same time you quickly realize, where Mr. Katz uses perception to build a painting, Mr. Pearlstein paints in order to use perception.  He is optically obsessed, with no love to spare for paint itself.  At times it seems that the “paint originals” might be jettisoned once they have been photographed—the only value of the paint was to realize the image.

This is not to say for a moment, however, that Mr. Pearlstein is photorealist.  He revels in distortions that only become apparent to an eye trained obsessively on the highly suggestive shapes of limbs in space and the shadows they create, with patterns and objects chosen to test the gaze and tease the picture surface.

The new body of work includes many old favorites among its motife: toys, furniture, models, and kinds of relationship whose reality is exclusively bound to the studio “set up”.  These include translucent plastics calculated to accentuate the distortion of spread limbs and carpet patterns in “Two Models with Balloon Chair and Neon Mickey Mouse” (2007), and ornate objects like a model sailboat or a giant model butterfly, the choreography of whose details mimic the light and shade intricacy of musculature.  In “Model with HMV Dog and Renaissance Bambino” the plays of flesh against wood, of antique porcelain against modern porcelain, are elaborate texural challenges.

In terms of the opposition of a naïve belief in capturing everything and a mannerist delight in the extremities of style, Mr. Pearlstein has it both ways: He is a mannerist when he arranges his set up and positions his canvas, a primitive thereafter.

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“Spencer Tunick: Public Works 2001-2004” through June 19 at I-20 Gallery, 529 W 20th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212-645-1100).

“Hilary Harkness” though June 26 at Mary Boone (541 W 24 Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212-752-2929).

Now that the doyen of feminist performance photography has taken to masquerading as tacky, pathetic circus performers it seems a good time to come clean with a double confession: I have never found clowns or Cindy Sherman remotely entertaining.

Make no mistake about the gravity of these failings: Within polite art-world company not to “get” Ms. Sherman is tantamount to not having a brain, rather as despising the grinning goons who interrupt the jugglers and the lion tamers is to admit to not having a soul.

Clowns are a natural synthesis of Ms. Sherman’s familiar preoccuptions. Her meteoric ascent in the early 1980s came with fictional “film stills” in which she posed in artfully contrived stereotypical scenarios as the ubiquitous dumb blonds of B-movies. Rather ingeniously, this established intentional vacuity as her emotional affect of choice, a less is more aesthetic that allowed nonchalence to be classed as “subtle” and clichéd gestures as “subversive.”

In the 1990s, Ms. Sherman absented herself from the picture to pursue still-lifes that tested the taste endurance of viewers with lurid assemblages of detritus and vomit. Sex toys and sexually-posed prosthetic limbs became a favored motif to complement her pukey palette, and then gender warfare broke out between battered and besmirched Ken and Barbie dolls.

More recently, the performance artist returned lense-side to star in a series of stereotype-castings, as assorted middle-aged losers, personifying Hollywood wannabees and sexually past-it housewives. In her latest, clown incarnation, sick color, sad gesture, slick technique, nonchalance, and nihilism are brought together in a pantheon of the pathetic. Her large format tableaux fill two floors at Metro Pictures, where the artist has shown from the outset of her career: elaborately costumed, affectless behind grimly determined smiley masks, with artful, computer-manipulated backdrops, she is truly the sagging bore she seems to want to be.

The impression I had, trying my utmost to be moved or intrigued by these images, is of meeting the wealthy aunt of Ronald McDonald. Each is as corporate and ubiquitous as the other, and the product they push about as nourishing.

Spencer Tunick is an action painter in the tradition of Jackson Pollock, only instead of dribbling paint on canvas with bravura speed and in all-over configurations, he uses naked people as his medium and city streets as his support.

The photographer puts out the word for volunteers who in burgeoning force agree to strip and arrange themselves in ways that vary from random gestalts to serial patterns. Sometimes his naked collaborators are an inchoate crowd, other times a disciplined regiment.

Mr. Tunick, who has been persuing this line for several years, has become something of an institution. Like Christo, whose career also proceeded from, essentially, a single antic (wrapping up edifices in his case), he has seen his motif progress from a spontaneous, somewhat anarchic gesture into something officially sanctioned across the globe. Once, speed was of the essence: participants had to get into their birthday suits, adopt the requested pose, and dress again before the bemused cops arrived. Now, artist and models can take their time; the events, carefully scheduled by contemporary art centers from Melbourne to Basel to Sao Paolo, are increasingly a focus of civic pride.

In art-historical terms, it is as if Mr Tunick is passing from an art informel phase to hard-edge abstraction. The earlier poses had an existential angst and tragi-comic urgency to them; nowadays, precision and formality are of the essence, the ever-dirigible mass arranged in artfully slick, tidy swathes of skin. The effect of the new orderliness ranges from absurdist humor, as in “London 5 (Selfridges),” (2003), where massed ranks ascend department store escalators, to touching, almost poetic decoration, as in “Melbourne 3,” (2001), where the figures on a river bank are like swaying reeds.

Some works in this new show at I-20, his first in New York since 1998, recall the earlier scatter pieces, like the melodramatic interior group portrait of HIV-positive New Yorkers in a diner. In “Finland 2 (Helsinki Art Museum),” (2002), the affectless, nonchalent expression of the sprawling, crouching figures is powerfully ambiguous, recalling his earlier work. The effect is precariously poised between humor and horror, with conflicting associations of free love and catastrophe, bacchanal and Buchenwald.

Hilary Harkness is a deliciously perverse absurdist in paint who brings together the unemotional nastiness of Ms. Sherman and the crowd addiction of Mr. Tunick. The somewhat precious display of just three smallish pictures at Mary Boone’s Chelsea barn, Ms. Harkness’s first show with this dealer, is a perfect complement to the masquerades and mass actions explored in these other exhibitions.

Ms. Harkness’s all-female S/M orgies and girl’s own adventures at sea are a chilly marriage of medievalism and the comic strip. In “Matterhorn,” (2003-04) for instance, Hieronymous Bosch and Lucas Cranach team up with Quentin Tarantino, Henry Darger, Balthus and his oddball occultist brother Pierre Klossowski, gay illustrator Tom of Finland, and vintage bandes-dessinées pornographer Eric Stanton. In what reads like a sliced-open doll’s house, she offers cross-sectional, compartmentalized views of an army of skinny young women kitted out in black with sexy boots, hotpants, bikinis, and military caps who in each room torture, abuse, molest, and mortally dispatch sartorially and anatomically similar fellows. In fact, as no discerible emotion is displayed on the perfunctory faces or standarized bodies of any of the participants, it is not too easy to say what criterion, fate, or preference determines whether you are a perpetrator or a victim, although the majority of the latter are wearing white socks, which might signify something. No one registers much by way of pleasure or pain on their cute, dumb faces.

In painterly terms, Ms. Harkness favors a flat, nerdish, swiftly dispatched naïvete, in harmony, some might argue, with her moral maturity. What does actually make these sick, silly pictures interesting beyond the shlock-horror inventiveness of her abuse fantasies, and her nostalgic eye for period charm, is a compellingly crafted ratio of detail to whole, a weird sense of decorative balance and all-overness. Mind you, once you allow so formalist a take of scenes of rape and pillage, the artist’s warped values are obviously working.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, June 10, 2004

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“Stalker 3” is a 53 minute video that documents the destruction of a Russian tank convoy by lightly armed Chechen partisans. Two photographs of an attractive Russian woman flank the projection on either side. The wall on which the images flicker is pierced by what could be taken as the barrel of a tank cannon. Elsewhere in the gallery, a few objects-rabbit skins and paper brushed with black oil-allude tenuously to a symbolic narrative the artist chose not to develop or identify further in visual terms (the installation does include a gallery statement criticizing multinational corporations). It is important to his project that what we are seeing is a military dispatch in video form (edited, with additional sound, by Bugaev and fellow artist Dimitry Gelfand) the Chechens intended to support their claim for an Al Qaeda bounty calculated on the basis of a body count.

This display of amateur war footage provoked an NPR reporter to ask, is it art? At first, my reaction to the report was one of annoyance. Why would one feel compelled to ask such a question, I thought, and, for that matter, why answer? After decades of avant garde (and avant avant garde) art practice, asking if this or that piece in a gallery is a work of art seems analogous to asking who is buried in Grant’s tomb. What is displayed in an art gallery? Art.

But what has been decided by such an answer? Imagine if “Stalker 3” were shown inside a church, or if it were screened in a mosque in Grozny, if any mosques remain standing in Grozny (in either case, would the question be, is it spiritual?). Or imagine another scenario: amateur footage-taken from an Al Qaeda camp in Afganistan, perhaps– of the World Trade Center attack screened in a Chelsea gallery, with accompanying props (a shard from the towers piercing the video projection). Although such a scenario is conceivable it is probably not a coincidence that this has yet to be realized. Examples of photojournalism and amateur images of the 9/11 attack have been exhibited, but the kind of project “Stalker 3” represents is something else entirely.

Here, the appropriation, rather than the making, is at issue. That is, the circumstances of the making of this video matter, within a broader cultural context (beyond the battlefield, beyond the purview of Russian and Chechen military forces) only in relation to the circumstances in which the video is shown. The video could be used, for example, in a documentary piece on the war; this would hardly be unusual. “Stalker 3” presents itself as something other than that. By displaying the video in a gallery, as part of an installation, Bugaev raises the question whether the footage can, like any other found object, be transformed into an artifact by virtue of his appropriation of it. What he does not appear to have considered (or taken into account sufficiently) is how the larger social context can efface this question, absorb the footage into preoccupations external to the process of art making, and appropriate the project in turn.

While the Chechen fighters were firing over and over at I-20 Gallery, the relatives of those lost in the World Trade Towers were appealing for dignified treatment of the body fragments interred in the debris shipped to Fresh Kills. The public was reviewing architectural plans for new buildings at the World Trade Center site. There was talk of kissing towers and memorialized footprints of vanished buildings, of gardens set by the water, and of height in relation to terror. Listening to the radio, I could not get out of my mind the image-largely of my own imagining–of people sifting through the dust and scrap of a landfill for bits of bone, strands of hair, or scraps of clothing. It happens that some research I did not long ago involved reading passages on resurrection, particularly in the Old Testament (“Many of those that sleep in the dust of the earth will awake…” Daniel 12:1). The relatives of the World Trade Center dead were speaking from the same texts, though in the terms of forensic medicine.

Sergei Bugaev’s academic exercise in cynicism or faux cynicism stood in contrast to the spontaneous demand by the public and commercial interests (with, inevitably, some degree of calculation on their part) for a spiritual or mythic structure for the aftermath of 9/11. It would almost appear that there is an inverse relationship between the social distress associated with images (photographs, news footage, amateur video, and so forth) and the availability of those images to conceptual manipulation (the projects of a visual avant garde). Again, the appropriation of images (photojournalism, news footage, and the like) is at issue here, rather than the production of original instances of provocation or what is taken as provocation (images by Mapplethorpe or Offili that stirred attempts at censorship). The World Trade Center images have not yet been assimilated into an iconic repertoire (which would include images of Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire, of children mutilated in napalm bombings, or students crying out in dismay and horror at Kent State, all images quickly absorbed in cultural discourse) within art world, as opposed to journalistic or documentary, practice. Simply put, they hurt too much for us, or those of us not immersed in Russian issues, to process in anything like the way we process the images of Russian soldiers dying in distant Chechenya. The allusion in the title, “Stalker3,” to a science fiction movie set, to quote the gallery statement, in an “anomalous zone, a place where extraterrestrials visit the earth, and danger lies in wait” aptly describes the remove of the mythic material Bugaev employs.

This is not to say that”Stalker 3″ lacks spiritual pathos, but this pathos emerges in surprising ways. In the confines of a gallery, the vacuous immediacy of the film corresponds to the categorical emptiness of death, its refusal to hold meaning (the afterlife is something else) except in negative terms; death as such is not an experience, and the person who has died is not a person but a name or placeholder for that person, and so forth). The video displays the mechanics of death with the most minimal organizing narrative (the piece ends with a funeral and dirge), confronting us the translation of an experiential world, a life (or, lives), to inert matter. By lifting “Stalker 3” out of the political and cultural circumstances of its production and placing it in a Chelsea gallery, Bugaev reduces content to an exacting and pertinent near-nothingness. The soldiers in his film, caught in the documentary tedium of their annihilation as it is played and replayed, signify loss-the loss of their lives, or to put it simply, their deaths–and little else. It is worth considering whether this confrontation with the starkness and simplicity of death is facilitated or distorted by the cognitive dissonance of the medium itself: the noise, the switch from black and white to color, the varying film quality. I suspect that the former is true. In any case, the experience is disturbing and worthwhile, whatever one feels about the art-related issues of the installation.

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