September 9 to November 6, 2016
396 Johnson Avenue (at Morgan Avenue)
Brooklyn, 718 456 0396

There is, of course, something exciting about corpses. The fascination is often puerile in the contemporary world, centering on death’s foreignness, emphasizing gore and horror, rather than, like, the ontology of permanent lifelessness. Probably a lot of people in developed nations encounter (human) death most in mediated depictions, as in violent video games, movies, TV, and the arts, such as, famously, Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War (1810–20), John Singer Sargent’s Gassed (1918–19), or the Chapman brothers’ Hell (1999). Calvin Marcus’s exhibition of new paintings at Clearing Gallery, “Were Good Men,” his third solo show there, employs similar imagery, with nonchalance.

Marcus is 28 years old, working in Los Angeles, and the show suffers from some of the problems that appear common to young painters hailing from that city: here are 39 repetitious paintings; each 101 1/2 by 79 inches and called either Dead Soldier or Grass (all 2016); blandly and proudly derivative, especially of Expressionist and Abstract Expressionist imagery; and hung way too close. On uniformly ochre backgrounds, smears of green grass blades loll in flat clusters and fields. On some lay the mangled carcasses of decorated soldiers, each in a casually rendered uniform. Their tongues fall from gaping mouths. Their skin is mottled and discolored; blood seeps from bullet wounds, crushed skulls, peeling flesh.

Marcus has something of Michael Krebber’s wan touch and Sue Williams’s garish caricature. The dead’s rendering is nearly goofy: their decrepit stillness, open eyes, approach something like black comedy. Under the show’s somber title, honoring the dignity of fallen men who’ve worked to kill, their grimaces can be spooky.

Curiously, the paintings suggest, but subordinate, the realities of war and violence. The wounds are cartoonish. The caricatures are called men, but boys typically form the bulk of military personnel, and, increasingly, drones. The paintings represent conflict generally, without particular political or social ideas. Even if Marcus grimly needles platitudes about soldiers and sacrifice, the imagery nonetheless upholds the mythology of grown men dressed brilliantly, fighting bravely, and dying valiantly in combat — a display of masculinity rather than a dead kid whose body is ornamented by 60–100 pounds of gadgetry. One might wonder why most of the canvases are abstract gashes of green oil stick, or why multiple panels are not combined into a few mural-sized artworks. They’re very quiet images, both visually and ethically.

In February 2015, the death squad ISIS released a video that mimics and exceeds images of war that we encounter in all kinds of media (both fiction and non-). It shows the execution of a 26-year-old Jordanian pilot, Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh, whose plane crashed in Syria. The video employs sophisticated production and a high-concept narrative structure, asserting that Jordan is a US-puppeted religious apostate, and therefore the pilot must be righteously murdered. Al-Kaseasbeh gives a coerced statement and is taken to buildings allegedly bombed by Jordanian pilots like himself. Intercut footage shows local first responders pulling civilians from a similarly demolished building. At the ruins, al-Kaseasbeh is put in a cage and burned to death, extinguished by a backhoe dumping the building’s rubble on his char. The video closes with a computer-animated dossier of further targets comprising a hit list of Royal Jordanian Air Force pilots.

Apart from its artfully staged and layered signifiers, the ISIS video shows actual war, in extremis. Unlike a lot of famous Western depictions, such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Slaughterhouse Five (1969), The Things They Carried (1990), which portray battle as a dignified, contemplative and tragic space, with men dying for causes that are both noble and questionable, the ISIS video shows, abysmally, what war is, aside from rules of conduct and myths of heroism. It is blood and death in search of political and economic advantage. Although some are very gruesome, few of Marcus’s cartoonish figures ever have the horror of a figure being perceptible as an actual dead person.

It’s worth noting, however, that there may be some benefit to depicting war distantly and mythologically. During the current election, Americans have been bombarded with messages that our military must be “stronger” against enemies, including vows to murder families, to use torture for the purpose of causing horror, to indiscriminately bomb civilians, to expand authoritarian controls on travel and constitutional rights, celebrations of extrajudicial executions, and other incitements to cruelty. More than assuming America in the role of global policeman, they show America claiming the executioner’s mantle. It may be hypocritical or unrealistic, but declaring an interest in fantasies like restraint and justice in war, or, in this case, who wages war and how, provides us with an ethical line against which we can judge — probably condemn — the implementation of power, can hold it accountable. Paintings of dead men might raise the question: Why then are wars fought by indigent kids and robots on behalf of elders? Why are good men dead men? Why are soldiers’ sacrifices repaid with banalities and substandard medical care?

It is vital, though, that such a fantasy be held against the truth, for comparison, to retain the hypocritical gap in order to maintain the taboo against violence. The multivalent clusterfuck called the War on Terror was heralded with a spectacle so viscerally grim that it has become a presiding trope for American viewers. The image has not been supplanted, in part, because of the refusal (and sometimes inability) on the part of the government and media to show exactly what the war consists of: through the practice of embedding journalists; the Pentagon’s ban on photographs of military coffins; few outlets show what it looks like in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan; a recent statute in the Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual gives latitude to the military to treat journalists as “unprivileged belligerents,” a class similar to spies; and various media having legitimate concerns about showing snuff videos, like that of al-Kaseasbeh’s murder. The contrast between the fantasy of war’s glory and the reality of its indignity is, perhaps, necessary, but their gulf is filled with a river of gore.

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January 16 to February 22, 2014

303 Gallery
507 West 24th Street
New York, (212) 255-1121

In Eileen Myles’s autobiographical essay, “Everyday Barf,” the poet writes, “I don’t mind today, but the everyday makes me barf.” For contemporary New York feminist artists like Eileen Myles and Sue Williams, daily life after 9/11 can seem particularly revolting, and, on a bad day, impossible to stomach. Nevertheless, Williams’s new paintings (all made in 2013), now on view at 303 Gallery, felicitously work alongside the hate that breeds disgust and contempt. In her own satirical style, Williams speaks back to the revulsion prompted by the incendiary political climate that followed September 11. The explicit political critique embedded in the work’s content and titles revisits some of the material mined in her 2010 show, curated by Nate Lowman, Al-Quaeda is the CIA, and her contribution to the 1993 Whitney Biennial, an all-too convincing pornographic puddle of vomit titled The Sweet and Pungent Smell of Success. In the abstract paintings of WTC, WWIII, Couch Size, the push-purge impulse is no less present, as Williams addresses fears of flying debris, dizzying nausea, and the urgent, unexpected libidinal sparks that occupy post-9/11 life.

The most dazzling painting of the six large color-saturated canvasses, Philip Zelikow, Historian (titled after the executive director of the 9/11 commission) expands upon Williams’s career long preoccupation with violence, astonishment, and flight. The painting, a cascading flood of variegating intensities, moves from varying shades of sea-foam, spring, and blue-greens; as these colors gush from some invisible sphincter across the canvas, they precipitate what one critic referred to as “Pepto-Bismal pinks.” The painting also calls to mind Mary Heilmann’s Pink Trance (2010). Unlike Williams’s Philip Zelikow, Heilmann’s Pink Trance  embraces the sleepy slow-motion drag of a drug like Dramamine whereas Williams’s pink tones carry an inflammatory charge designed to arouse and excite; in Philip Zelikow, these erratic pinks verge on magenta, and seem especially explosive as they jump alongside contrasting shades of electric teal and popping peony yellow.

Philip Zelikow revels in the fact that fascination can be an anchor, a way of connecting to political history, or the alienating televisual spectacle of those two flaming icons, the Twin Towers. These paintings animate through abstraction the aura of wartime tumult as they dramatize the violent collisions between the personal and the political. How does anyone internalize a historical event on the global scale of 9/11? Williams’s paintings inhabit this zone of lingering stupefaction as she revisits the World Trade Center and the disorienting swarms of historical precarity which surround it. Departing from her previous and more condensed, comic abstractions, her new paintings have dropped the sharp contours that separate shape from action, intent from effect. Trauma renders rage and distress by refusing to distinguish between them. In Retire in Fla., smoke from a firework, or an explosion dissolves the edges of emotions. There’s a recognizable heart at the matter of such queer emanations, but the roiling matter that moves out of the frame is fugitive, and evades capture. Recalling September 11 in the presence of these works, one may immediately remember that the event and its aftermath was a mess, to put it lightly. To consider the catastrophe in hindsight as WWIII, as the title of the show suggests, is not a hyperbole, for the circumstances and the stakes were real, but, at the time, abstract. Who was it even happening to? New Yorkers, or the United States? Ten plus years later, Williams’s new works reflect the anticipation of impending war while transposing it into the present moment, without sentimentality or patriotism.

Amid the melting streams of candy-colored arcs, there lies an intuitive and hard-won set of tensions exhibited in every canvas, most quizzically reflected in Otis. The bending buildings in the background scattered among dildonic shapes in the foreground coalesce in a frenzied landscape where dimensions, as in Wackyland, give way to jet streams of frothy colors whose chafing in turn produces even stranger monuments. Otis, presumably the teal moose in the middle, opens his eyes wide, but not necessarily as if he were taking it all in; his gaze suggests the quagmire of just being, especially when you’ve lost track of your emergency exits, and you can’t find the bathroom.

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