Political issues relating to gender, sexuality and social control of an individual’s body have been central to many important younger artists, especially women, during recent years. The Arthur Roger Gallery will open its 1993-1994 season on October 5th with a “Regarding Masculinity” exhibition of fourteen major artists who are in the forefront nationally in the artistic movement exploring gender, sexuality and the body. This unprecedented exhibit will include work by Lutz Bacher, Judy Bamber, Lesley Dill, Ava Gerber, Jane Hammond, Deborah Kass, Monica Majoli, Marlene McCarthy, Marilyn Minter, Catherine Opie, Rona Pondick, Kiki Smith, Sue Williams and Millie Wilson. The work of these artists, which is immersed in current theories of sexual politics, identity, and gender, does not simply embrace a stance which is facilely critical of the nation’s troubled sexual conscience. Rather from a framework anchored in critical theory the artists in widely varied but provocative ways provide expanded challenging notions on issues related to gender and identity.
THE ARTISTS
Berkeley artist LUTZ BACHER’S intentionally irritating yet hilarious installation consists of a video loop mercilessly repeating a short fragment from the William Kennedy Smith rape trial. The video is disturbingly effective as Smith endlessly repeats a pathetic mantra that seems to question the very existence of his physical endowments. Male power – and a political dynasty – erodes on TV. “My Penis” was included in a recent major exhibit on rape at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
The small scale watercolors on paper from the “I Love You to Death” series of JUDIE BAMBER use a familiar iconography of feminine images in a new context of dominance and exploitation. Working with images that informed her personal sexual experience Bamber addresses how women allow themselves to be defined by men.
LESLEY DILL in an extended body of work has been literally incorporating into her work the words of Emily Dickinson. Dill shares in her art the lifelong subject of the poet: the exploration of a classic ambivalence – the particular pain of craving a public voice for an experience of impenetrable isolation. In her major piece in this exhibition Dill has embroidered Dickenson’s words on “A Man’s Suit” constructed out of hair, a popular signifier of sexual orientation in our culture and used in this work as a tenuous armor cloaking vulnerability.
AVA GERBER, whose recent work focuses on the body, embraces the new feminist esthetic and is an advocate of “sex-positive” feminism. But in the installation in the rear gallery Gerber’s sculptures recognize with irony and humor that the angry woman artist is quickly becoming the first real art cliche of the nineties. The work is textless and the body appears in no real form thus allowing for the discomfort of ambiguity to coexist with the anxieties of childhood abuse, misogyny and crushed ambition.
JANE HAMMOND’S untitled painting has a mystery and openness about its meaning. There is an assumption for the viewer that the two figures are facing a male intruder since in our culture women don’t attack women – rather men attack women. The figures are literally “Regarding Masculinity.” Their “weapon” is an instrument of domesticity and sustenance and their gesture, the implied swing, casts the viewer into the intruder’s role.
DEBORAH KASS is a leading figure in the New York art world and at the center of those artists considering gender. Her work is created unabashedly from a feminist critique viewpoint and deconstructs images from popular or fine art culture. “Making Men” is part of one of Kass’ most important series of paintings and is a great parody on David Salle and his degrading depiction of women as well as Robert Motherwell’s dripping masculine forms. The series treats the ways men invent strategies to be intimately together, especially in the arena of sports.
In her series “Jewish Jackies” and “My Elvis” located in the center gallery of the exhibition Deborah Kass uses issues of gender and ethnicity to radically transform Andy Warhol’s 1960’s “originals” into the context and consciousness of the 1990’s in order to deliver an explicit cultural critique. Kass’ choice of Barbara Streisand in place of Warhol’s celebrities invests her portraits with a content that is overtly personal and political.
Kass is a self avowed Streisand fan; she admires Streisand’s power as a performer and as a force in Hollywood. Streisand serves as an inspiration and role model for Kass’ own ambitions to articulate an aggressive female voice in the male-dominated realm of painting. Kass’ canvases imitate Warhol’s portraits but she makes the paintings her own by her assertion of a Jewish woman’s viewpoint. There is a switch from the male gaze to the female and from a stance of detachment to one of passionate commitment. The “My Elvis” paintings portray not a gun wielding cowboy but rather Streisand as Yentl from her film about a Jewish girl who dresses up as a boy so she can study the Talmud. While Warhol’s choice of Elvis mirrors the social reality of power embodied in the white, straight male hero, Kass’ “Elvis” turns that assumption around by making her hero an ethnic female who breaks the mold of gender stereotypes.
MONICA MAJOLI’S paintings are executed in a rich palette that is both enigmatic and erotic. The intimate compositions haunt the viewer with their explicit overtures and references to women in the primary role of pleasure giver. The work is narrative but depends upon the voyeuristic nature of the viewer to unravel the subtleties and nuances of forbidden obsessions.
Ambiguity also permeates the taunts of MARLENE MCCARTY which are writ large in curlicue biker-decal script. In her painting, the gender and sexual orientation of the person being spoken to is purposefully ambiguous but the work is undeniably about sexual power. McCarty was trained in modernist graphic design in Germany and now parodies that style. Her work is part of the language based art that has characterized much of New York art since the 1960’s and which considers objects as extensions of thoughts and uses words to shift the aesthetic experience from the purely retinal into the consciously internal.
MARILYN MINTER’S signature style is a hybrid of Pop Art and the codes of Abstract Expressionism. Minter’s perfected sign painting technique is evident in the pieces in the exhibition. Her work draws heavily on the media’s worship of beauty and the pursuit of beauty and the fashion and make-up industry’s preoccupation with making women desirable.
CATHERINE OPIE, a Los Angeles photographer, is presently carrying out an ongoing series of photos of gays and lesbians involved in body manipulation through transgendering as in “Mike and Sky” or through piercing and tattooing. The technically remarkable photographs are compelling in their exploration of sexual identity.
The images and materials RONA PONDICK uses are highly suggestive and evocative. They can be simultaneously abstract and very specific. Male and female duality is concealed in each object which may be regarded as metaphor and as such arouses as many associations as there are viewers. Although the artist evokes an amalgamation of such contradicting thoughts and perceptions as joy and pain, birth and death, sex and fear, and pleasure and cruelty, the organic materials that are used strengthen the overriding sense of the ephemeral that dominates the work as for Pondick it does life itself.
KIKI SMITH, who was also in the 1993 Whitney Biennial, focuses attention on a woman’s social and political condition. Her work is steeped in feminist issues and takes bodily fluids out of their context and with unnerving power forces us to question the assumptions we bring to male/female interaction.
SUE WILLIAMS’ painting is raunchy, rude and raw in an effort to expose the humiliation and cruelty many women suffer daily. Her work reveals a probing, scathing wit. Williams was also included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial exhibit and recently in a national art publication the art critic Dan Cameron singled Sue Williams out as “the most compelling young painter currently working in New York.”
MILLIE WILSON is a Los Angeles based conceptual artist whose self professed goal is to “invade high Modernism with a queer discourse.” The artist creates intricately conceptualized, cleanly-constructed, spare works which are intended as irreverent references to Minimalist art. A preoccupation of the artist who is the director of the program in Art at the California Institute of the Arts is to continue to explore the social messages that work to construct the images of the lesbian in contemporary culture.