November 8 to December 15, 2018
Babie Brood:  West 19th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New Paintings: 34 East 69th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, davidzwirner.com

A treasure trove of provocations, David Zwirner’s twinexhibitions of  Lisa Yuskavage consolidate her leadership in new figuration. At 19th Street the gallery hosts 91 of her oils in a survey spanning three decades. These small works are mostly problematized depictions of women executed with a virtuosic handling of color, body language, and composition. But a dramatic departure occurs at Zwirner’s 69th Street townhouse where eight large new works include some with an uncommonly tender sense of romantic intimacy.

Yuskavage frequently invokes the idea of Freudian transference, declaring that everyone will simply see a reflection of their own needs when viewing her art. With that in mind I declare that I see her sexualized females as representing an alchemical process by which she transforms vitriolic critique into creative power. This idea can help make sense of her abrasive portrayals of women. It is also based on her own stories.

The complex female figures first appeared in 1991 when it struck her that the spirit of a painting is like a faultfinding idea of a woman’s allure. A painting can’t help but draw validation from its looks. Yuskavage conceived of a series of female forms as metaphors for painting itself and then, in her own words, she was “mean to them”.

This story, as told, is useful for deciphering her depictions of women. Yet a question lingers: why was it necessary to be ‘mean to them’? I wonder if she was acting out a darkly comic version of the life of an artist. Was she performing both roles: that of the creator birthing the hopeful character of a painting and that of the critic turning it into something pathetic? If so, that ritual could allow her to see her life from the outside, giving her a psychological advantage. It could help her transcend her many scathing reviews, turning what could be a leaden drag into the gold of future subject matter.

Her symbolic process is most evident in her early works. In Hamass, (1996) what might have started as a derrière in colorful fishnets ends up as an unhappy protuberance of candied pig meat. In Split, (1997) soft porn tropes are twisted into a new awfulness: light, color, costume, and pose are all shifted off key. As in many of her images the face calls into question the cult of youth as it is warped into an indecency of infantilization. Later works in her “Pie Face” series play out humiliation in a direct process.Creamy white paint is slapped on the figure’s face in Chrissy (2008) in an act of the work itself being pied. Yuskavage employs a stunning variety of means to makes her figures wrong. Subtleties of body language convey exhibitionism or too much self-regard.  More than a feminist critique, it becomes an examination of all kinds of pathos in sexual presentation.

This survey also makes clear her obsession with formal questions of painting. Significantly, she keeps a Philip Guston quote in her studio: “The figuration must be understood as another element layered over and working against the abstraction.”  Considering this, it is vital that her females first sprang from her imagination so that she can alter them at will. Her sense of color is also far from literal. As a way of conveying contemporaneity she uses only recently invented hues. Theorists from the mystically inclined Johannes Itten to the textile designer Laura Ashley steer her palette. Her devotion to chroma calls her to tame fickle modern dyes, such as the phthalos, by pre-mixing and tubing up desired shades (now counting 700). This yields assertive fields and subtle variations of vivid hue.

Over the years Yuskavage has added to her visual vocabulary: interiors, landscapes, males, and babushkas now occupy her mythic realm. But none get the rough treatment of her sexualized women. Apparently, they don’t share the dubious honor of being a metaphor for painting itself.

Uptown, her tilt towards gentler allegory culminates in Home, (2018) a square composition centered on the clasped hands of a youthful couple exuding id and innocence in their nakedness. They stand within a gray domestic space as rainbow-hued light spills forth from the room beyond. One can fail to see that the girl lacks a thigh, the boy his feet. When I asked the artist about this she replied, “You can do anything you want in a painting.”

Transference strikes again. I am left to wonder if anyone else will see these characters as ghosts, and as a deep rebuttal to sexual aggression? I can only say that for me they have become the memories of youthful physical union that forever echo through the aging of a happy couple.

The post Transference: Two Exhibitions of Lisa Yuskavage at David Zwirner appeared first on artcritical.

Since “Pacific Standard Time,” the comprehensive survey of art in Southern California from 1945 to 1980, organized in 2011 at multiple venues, documentation of artists from that innovative and experimental period has been on reset. The early 1970s, in particular, were a watershed, as young artists emerging in the wake of the game-changing 1963 Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum, turned to conceptual and performative practices the boundaries between them blurred. Some, like Ed Ruscha, extended the notion of object making into specific sites of investigation, the surreal nature of Southern California itself chief among them.

Raul Guerrero was born in 1945 in Brawley, California, and is currently living and working in San Diego. He was an active part of the groundbreaking scene of the early 1970s, and has continued in the decades since to contextualize the hybrid culture of Southern California.

In his second solo show in New York City, and his first at Ortuzar Projects, we’re introduced to over 20 years of Guerrero’s ongoing trajectory, from 1971 through 1993. That he began his career at a unique moment in Southern California isn’t lost on Guerrero—this is the time of Chris Burden’s most notorious performances, the 1972 Womanhouse of Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, and the work of David Hammons, Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari (his first teacher) and Doug Wheeler. Al Ruppersberg, Jack Goldstein, Vija Celmins, William Leavitt, and James Welling were all Guerrero’s peers.

In conversation, Guerrero often uses the phrase, “by coincidence,” usually in appreciation of the fortuitous events that marked his journey and aesthetic.

“Since I was a child, every summer my family and I would travel north and work as migrant workers,” he says. “All the accoutrements we’d need for the summer, the pots and pans, everything, were loaded into the back of my father’s flatbed truck. As we’d go over the 101 Freeway, from the back of the truck I’d gaze out at the Capitol Building, and think, ‘Wow, this is Hollywood.’  We’d stop and cook our meals right by the side of the road, and join the encampments by the Merced River, and suddenly there’d be so many other people, Anglos, Oakies, African Americans, gypsies, Mexicans, and Mexicans from Texas. My aspiring family eventually became middle class, and at 16, I’m lying under a vineyard, wondering, what I’m going to do with my life? I hitchhike down to Mexico City and 4 years later I’m in Chouinard Art Institute. On the first day of class, I found myself sitting next to Jack Goldstein. Can you imagine? He looked just like Paul McCartney, and we became close friends.”

At the Chouinard, which later became part of CalArts, Guerrero understood Duchamp’s work instantly and found it liberating, the essential foundation of his aesthetic philosophy. Not only was he drawn to the concept of the assisted readymade, but also to the subliminal power of a single, iconic object or image. This, for Guerrero, resonated with another influence—Carl Jung’s theories of archetype and the collective unconscious.       

Among the 46 pieces in the exhibition, the earliest are Guerrero’s Moroccan watercolors from 1971, shown here for the first time. These come with the intriguing backstory that sparked their creation. At the suggestion of his friend and mentor Ed Kienholz, Guerrero sold all his belongings and headed to Europe. “By coincidence” (again) he managed to meet everyone right away: sitting next to Francis Bacon at dinner in London, he meets Lee Miller, (Man Ray’s model and muse), and meets his idol, Richard Hamilton, and this is just the first week. He ventures down to Morocco, and soon was living on a few dollars a day in El Ksar Seghir, a small village outside of Tangier. The series of watercolors are intimately sized, as they were created to be postcards for his girlfriend. He shares the dazzling ambiance in beautifully patterned, detailed, and hallucinogenic pieces in which teapots, tiles and other domestic objects with their exotic symbols and arabesques vibrate in talismanic bands of energy—reverberations from the local hashish.

After that summer, Guerrero returned to LA blazing. In just a few years he made significant bodies of work in photography, sculpture, performance, installation, and video. Each of these directions could have fuelled a lifetime of work. Guerrero is a gifted and emotional photographer, as evidenced by his California Sur Photographs from 1972. (He cites the Mexican movies of Luis Bunuel as a childhood passion.) These photos were his personal documentation of a two week road trip through Baja with artist friends. The compositions are effortless. Throughout his photographs, Guerrero’s utilization of light is mysterious, otherworldly, and exquisitely tender, as in the ethereal portrait, for example, of his elderly grandmother, who seems to hover between the tangible and spiritual realms.

Another standout in his multifaceted career is the assisted readymade: Rotating Yaqui Mask(1974) is a seminal, declarative work. Guerrero describes this piece as a formal exploration of, and direct response to, Duchamp’s “Rotating Glass Disc,” but the personal choice of the Yaqui mask can be unsettling. For me, the psychic energy released from the mechanized spinning of this ritual object multiplies seismically in a fearsome way, the context feeling both taboo and dangerously displaced. Similarly, in his movie “Primitive Act” of 1974, Guerrero is squatting and naked among rocks and shrubs, reenacting the primitive discovery of fire.

Seeking a more subjective, and pliable medium, since the 1980s Guerrero has focused on oil painting. Among those on view are four selections from his Oaxaca series from 1984 plus La Mujer of the Puerto from 1993. The Oaxaca series was done on location and, like the Moroccan watercolors, he entrenches himself in the history and culture of this particular place. Guerrero treats stylistic representation like a local language and adapts a flat colonialist style relevant to his theme. Like many of the painters he admires —Walter Robinson, Neil Jenney, Lisa Yuskavage and Alida Cervantes — Guerrero opens the door to Kitsch and pulp desire. As if he is writing a detective novel, heembeds layers and clues in his post-conceptual approach.

Much of Guerrero’s process involves honing his attention and allowing his emotional responses to connect him not only to his own history but to that of the culture at large.He interprets his painting Vista de Bonampak (1984) for me:  “I want to capture not only what represents the place for me, but also a critique of the culture, so after visiting the archeological ruins of  Bonampak, once a Mayan city near Chiapas, Mexico, I imagined a jaguar, coveted within Mayan culture for ferocity and strength, stumbling on the scene of the murals, depicting men dressed as jaguar knights, in jaguar skins, capturing enemies for sacrificial purposes who are also dressed in jaguar skins.  Although I might question who is the most vicious creature in the jungle, I also want to make paintings that are interesting and beautiful.

“There’s a lot that can be said about the brutality of the system, especially with our current president, but I prefer images that don’t delve into it overtly.”

After 40 years of structured study of North America, Guerrero has a new theory:  “Because we’re living on a continent that was occupied by indigenous people through millennia, and their voice has been suppressed, their culture, especially in the artworld, is changing things subliminally by gaining a voice though artists, one way or another. It’s a philosophical and cultural virus that’s spreading. For example, John Baldessari grew up in National City, like I did, ten miles from the border. Now, here’s a major artist, he goes to Mexico and is exposed to all this stuff that you see coming out of Mexico that’s really interesting, but in fact it’s all indigenous culture.

“If you dig tacos, you’re being affected by an indigenous culture. You’re consuming part of that philosophical virus. It’s full of indigenous material: tortilla, beans, corn, the way it’s prepared—it changes the way you see your reality. What that reality is I’m not sure, but somehow that essence, that philosophy, is expressing itself nonetheless into the culture unbeknownst to us.

“In this encounter between culture and things,” he says, “your sense of reality is shifted. Artists like Baldessari, who’s making art about culture on a large scale, has had his view shifted, and then he turned all these other guys on at CalArts. Bizarre, right?”

Guerrera is planning a trip to the Amazon sometime later this year.

The post A Multifaceted Career: Raul Guerrero talks with Mary Jones appeared first on artcritical.

April 23 to June 13, 2015
533 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 727 2070

The paintings and pastels in Lisa Yuskavage’s fourth gallery show at David Zwirner continue to problematize the gendered gaze. The figures in these new works are the least exaggerated and abstracted of all Yuskavage’s girls. In fact, they look uncomfortably close to the Penthouse models the artist has referenced for the past 25 years. This shift towards the source further complicates the artist’s ambiguously feminist oeuvre.

The most notable change in this new series is the addition of male figures. Like much of Yuskavage’s past paintings, the men appear both bold and unsure. Dude looks like Jesus (2014), Mardi Gras Dude (2014) and God of Hippies (2014) all feature three-quarter portraits of men standing exposed, delicate and self-conscious. In The Neighbors, a man lays supine at a woman’s feet, gazing up at her with Rubens-esque flushed cheeks, pacified by his blond-afroed queen, who smiles menacingly at the viewer. A fence enclosing the couple, along with the title, suggests an opportunity to peek inside the domestic — a lawless, private realm frequently explored by women artists. Yuskavage’s paintings often aggressively invite voyeurism. This act of self-referential display calls attention to the eroticizing of the gaze, which in turn questions its practice and conflates the object and the subject.

The painter may or may not consider her work to operate within the context of feminism, but it has been a contentious issue since she first began exhibiting. Questions about whether and how her work is sexist, feminist, neither, or something else entirely, arose in response to her shows during the 80s and 90s, though, the discourse of feminism has changed since then under the pressures of Judith Butler’s interrogations, the development of queer theory and the advent of post-colonialism. Recent publications that champion contradiction and/or complacency as a political strategy such as Johanna Fateman’s essay in the March 2015 issue of Artforum, entitled “Women on the Verge”; Roxane Gay’s 2014 essay collection, Bad Feminist; and Kate Zambreno’s novel Green Girl (2014), provide more context for Yuskavage’s work. As Gay puts it, building on Butler, “Women are sometimes trapped by how they are expected to perform their gender.”[1] Many of Yuskavage’s early figures seem trapped in their squishy, redolent bodies and befuddled by their own allurement. This relationship between women, media representations of women and subsequent body neuroses made her early work compelling, possibly because the work did not claim to offer an oversimplified solution to complex issues of self-representation.

Sari (2015) and In the Park (2014) depict the hyper-sexualized ingénues that have incited allegations of sexism in response to Yuskavage’s work over the years. However, placed among paintings like The Neighbors or the aforementioned dudes and gods, where the men are just as helpless, the performance of the feminine becomes more complex. More curiously still, less apologetic, and even thriving, ebullient figures make an appearance in this series. For example, in Around the House (2015), a small painting by comparison to most of the canvases in the show, a nude figure poses on a kitchen counter, backlit by a landscape of luminous rainbow, an optical device that demonstrates Yuskavage’s skill as queen colorist throughout the series. The figure sits unchallenged atop the counter — wild in her element, the domestic. Here Yuskavage’s private psychosexual girl world seems cured of past disconsolate body anxiety, even if only temporarily. As a woman, I find solace in all of these expressions of self-discovery: self-critical despair, salvation through self-indulgence, and unapologetic absolutism over anyone who wants in, or by contrast, complacent surrender. After all, are these not contradictory musings of self-examination the result of a life on display?

The puffy-eyed girl posed on the counter in Around the House gazes back at the viewer, stylized but conspicuously Yuskavage, or some imagined version of herself. Self-portraiture as a means of self-expression has a long tradition with women painters. Artists such as Maria Lassnig, Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo and Joan Semmel all depicted themselves in an effort to complicate simplified versions of the feminine experience popular during their careers. Some used their own bodies to go up against the enduring tradition of the painted female nude in an attempt to depict something closer to a woman’s actual lived experience. All of these artists, Yuskavage included, chronologized a lifelong interest in the wildness of the self within gendered lines, as a respite, a revisionary exhibit for the exhibited.

As an elaboration of the artist’s previous reflections on tropes of the feminine, this recent exhibition culminates in her most curious and revealing body of work yet. The new work depicts scenes of Yuskavage’s girls liberated within spaces that once hunted them, namely the domestic, a realm long since negatively associated with the feminine. By blurring the subjective and objective dimensions of her figures, Yuskavage’s professed apolitical paintings remain ambiguous. Other painters who focus on performances of femininity such as Heidi Hahn, Genieve Figgis, Allison Schulnik and Ella Kruglyanskaya come to mind. All of these artists, albeit some more deliberately than others, take on the problem of continuing the feminist project: how to revise it within the changing discourse of gender.

[1] Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (Harper Collins: New York, 2014), 72.

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David Carrier, Martha Schwendener and Linda Yablonsky joined David Cohen to review Fred Tomaselli at James Cohan, Sarah Moris at Lever House, Cory Arcangel at Team, and Lisa Yuskavage at David Zwirner and Zwirner and Wirth.

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Kara Walker: Drawings, at Brent Sikkema, through July 25
530 W 22nd Street- 212-929-2262

Kara Walker and Lisa Yuskavage are showing right on the same block (West 22nd Street). Are they a chip off the same block, too? They both take postmodern intention-bending to new extremes, pitting authenticity and expression against style and posture. And for both, ambiguity is stock in trade: kitsch and craft collide in art that sets out to dazzle and unsettle.

Kara Walker is best known for her costume-drama silhouettes. Installations of Beardleyesque cut-out figures at first seem like joyous circus parades but on closer inspection are revealed to depict appaling acts of “blaxploitation.” Hieronymous Bosch meets “Gone with the Wind” in fiercely political, erotically fantastic meditations on the legacy of slavery. A profound subject is brought to a slick surface.

In terms of ideology, it’s hard to tell where her first allegiance lies: with Frantz Fanon or the Marquis de Sade. You’d think such imagery was cooked in a bubbling cauldron of rage. Her poetry, crudely (if artfully) typed on reference cards, bears vivid witness to depths of indignation. But, far from resulting in a radical call to arms, Ms. Walker’s art deposits maker and viewer alike in a limbo of moral bewilderment.

Ms. Walker doesn’t merely depict victimage; she embodies it, in the way her methods are always and pointedly labor intensive. The dexterous, exquisite cut-outs, especially, seem to require calm, patient, loving skill. Ambiguity, in other words, is as present in the fabrication as the product. The artist is alienated labor and wants us to know it.

In harmony with her cool skill, her sexual imagery – for all the grabbing and penetrating that goes on – entails little in the way of passion, for givers or receivers alike. (Again, Sade is a useful point of reference, for in “le divin marquis” sexual extremity is measured in numbers and times, not degrees or intensities.) A favored motif, drawn from medieval art, is that of Aristotle and his mistress, with the venerable philosopher ridden like a horse.

Ms. Walker’s graphic mark-making, in contrast to the silhouettes, can be rich in affect. In this show of works on paper of various sizes, including smaller cut-outs, at Brent Sikkema, there is considerable variety of line and texture. She has taken up a kind of smudged brass-rubbing technique, for instance, that recalls Larry Rivers. Her mannerist figuration brings to mind Paul Wunderlich and Pierre Klossowski. Recent forebears aside, some of her most scatalogical and psychologically involved drawings seem genuinely Goyaesque. A monstrously disengaged head, for instance, is endowed with a priapic nose which penetrates a passing naked “negress” (her caricature justifies the word) who nonchalantly holds on to her bucket of soapy suds.

The most acute ambiguity in Ms. Walker has to do with the free and easy manner with which she traverses the line between racist stereotype and an attitude of “black is beautiful,” as in a giant, voluptuously worked-up, graphite “Afro.” It is as if she is lost in iconography the way artists talk about being lost in form. But the deliberately unresolved tension of style and content in her work, an endless loop between what could equally be artworld posture and true feeling, ultimately denies any possibility of catharsis. Greek tragedy may have had its origin in the Dionysian orgy, but at the end of the day, Sade ain’t Sophocles.

***

From tragedy to farce: Lisa Yuskavage’s absurdly big-busted, saucy postcard girlies are sisters under the skin of Yale classmate John Currin’s monstrous muses. The art world, it seems, will never tire of would-be alchemists extracting from the base matter of low culture a clever-clever fools’ gold.

What”s most depressing about the meteoric success of Ms. Yuskavage, however, is that champions and detractors alike have taken on trust her “masterful technique”, whereas actually all she boasts is the kind of nerdish facility high school students admire among their peers. A critic sharply upbraiding her for her content could compare her lurid luminosity to Georges de la Tour – of all artists! If an old master can be defined as the deceased author of painting with life in it, then Ms. Yuskavage, very much with us, is the opposite on both counts.

But we surely know where this critical malaise comes from. The ironic revival of painting – conceptual art had deemed the medium passé – presupposes that “technique” is something separate from an engagement with form, as if the laying down of brushstrokes is to a picture what production values are to a pop record.

The recent paintings, on view at Marianne Boesky, suggest that even on her own intellectually lethargic terms, Ms. Yuskavage is running out of steam. Since exchanging her old source material, vintage copies of Penthouse, for a live model (an old high school chum) a vacuous softcore humanism has crept into her work. But it is too little, too late. Her bead bikinis in “Couch” (2003), are blessed with a vague hint of Wayne Thiebaud, but elsewhere her dry-brush flowers are dead on arrival. In “Groom” (2003), there is a hint of painterly interest in the billowing pink clouds and in the skin against the servant’s purple bodice, but nothing where you’d expect it, the drapery folds or the mistress’s breasts. In truth, Ms. Yuskavage doesn’t have the stakes for any kind of high wager with ambiguity. Her technique is flimsy, and her imagery is boring. Neither her paint nor the flesh it purports to depict is remotely sexy.

This article first appeared in The New York Sun, June 19, 2003

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