“Out West and Back East: New Work from Los Angeles and New York” at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.
Boys will be girls and girls will be boys: though it purports to be a survey of new art from Los Angeles and New York, “the most vital cultural capitals of the country,” what this depressing show is really about is the contemporary repression of sexual polarity, and what it surveys are the means, both subtle and crude, that artists currently employ to deny their gender and avoid offending the feminism institutionalized in museums and the academy.
Of the permissible ways of being a male artist, it turns out that all involve an excruciating effort to be disarming. It would appear that when putting together this exhibition, what Thomas Rhoads, the museum’s executive director, looked for in the work of the seven male artists he included was clear evidence of preemptive self-emasculation. In the case of Jason McKechnie and Christian Schumann, denial of masculinity takes the form of a willed regression to the pre-genital phase. Cloying, infantile, polymorphous, their paintings in this context serve as disclosures of the political safety to be found in the superficially perverse and transgressive. Much the same could be said of Daniel Wiener, whose sewn, organismic sculptures strike me as endlessly elaborated representations of flaccidity, except that his method has a definite rigor and there is no denying either his inventiveness or his gifts as a colorist. Chris Finley’s plastic houseware assemblages represent yet another species of infantilism and one which, like Wiener’s, is gender-perverse in its very choice of materials.
In the work of Doug Aitken, Matthew Antezzo and Adam Ross, the disowning of gender takes on the guise of a wholesale disowning of the ego. Aitken constructs a video “autobiography” by quoting TV movies of the era when he was a child (the early seventies) and so presents himself as a willless composite of pop cultural influences. Antezzo plays the same game by transforming into paintings black and white shots culled from the Castelli-Sonnabend archives and Artforum that document performance and installation art from the sixties and seventies. The irony of encountering Ross’s paintings in this context is that in the past I have praised them precisely for their egolesss quality and, in allowing them to be used as raw material for John Souza’s painfully silly installation, Ross has arguably taken his ego-lessness to its logical extreme. But perhaps there is a distinction (and one of which I need to be more cognizant in the future) between striving to be unselfconscious and actively violating or denying one’s self.
The curatorial agenda in “Out West and Back East” required that, like their male counterparts, but more overtly, the women artists display a contempt for the conventional attributes of their sex. And so: in her video piece, Phyllis Baldino uses power tools while wearing a cocktail dress and high heels; a scantily dressed Cheryl Donegan, strutting around in biker boots, uses her butt to imprint four-leaf clovers on pieces of paper in a video entitled Kiss My Royal Irish; and Catherine Opie is represented by photographs of “lesbian women whose identity as women defies conventional notions of gender.”
Less obvious in their intention, and therefore more intriguing, are the hybrid, pseudo-surrealist objects of Lauren Lesko and the multilayered paintings of Amy Sillman. Still, Lesko could benefit from ditching her feminist baggage. The surrealist object, if it is successful, owes its magic to its concretization of utterly irrational desires, a great many of which a feminist cannot openly entertain. About Mira Schor’s “body as text” paintings, on the other hand, the only thing to be said is that the title of one series, “Area of Denial,” provides a perfect description of feminist theory and its investment in the notion that gender is a construction, an idea that can sink roots only in a culture in which nature has become utterly foreign. The paintings of Lisa Yuskavage, which fixate on a loathing of voluptuousness, can be read as an unwitting revelation of what feminism is a rationalization of.
The quality that allegedly characterizes the work in this show is “a strong sense of individual vision.” With some exceptions, however, it is the absence of vision, and the overwhelming presence of the requirements of political correctness, that are remarkable.
Published: Artweek, March 10, 1994
Plastic Regime 