part1 ]
> [ part2 ]
Continued
I can't really sort it out yet.
Perhaps painting can now, once again, accommodate a polymorphous (sexual)
simultaneity by the simple fact that the practitioners themselves -- women and
queers -- have been for a very, very long time conversant in the language of
elasticity and negotiation, resilience and compromise. I pose these linguistic
maneuvers as assets and simple desires to survive.
Now that painting is a
cadaver, thank you. Picked- clean of its heroic flesh, some people can now fix it
up, clean it up, dress it up, and make it fabulous.
The more female and queer
painting gets, the lovelier it seems to become. Gone is the thick matte pancake
make-up of tell- nothing modernism, now being replaced more often by a sheer
translucent base that reveals a skin inflected by multiple, simultaneous
tonalities.
Willful contamination and celebratory promiscuity are the parameters
and this mandates to lacer greater varying degrees are informing the polymorphous
paintings of Toba Khadori, Jutta Koether, Monica Maoli, Ellen Gallagher, Amy
Sillman, Laura Owens, Judy Bamber and Elizabeth Peyton, Amy Adler, Beatriz
Miljases, Monique Prieto. There is no built-in primer, no road map for the
critic, no compass and certainly no ETA of meaning (Estimated Time of Arrival).
Go girls: as an artist and educator, this is the first generation that I can at
44 see myself as I might have been at 24. I am exited by their work and its
proposition of liberation, through reinvention, and freedom within constraint. So
human, and so chick. The work has given me confidence: I hope they accept me in
their context. I am less interested in a discussion about how Lari's work does or
not does fit within his generation, and more interested in their response:
"Excuse me, miss. There is a particularly lovely/ugly fish that swims the western
coastal waters. It is the Californian grouper. As a fish, it privileges practice
over theory. The supposed inimitability of gender contested by its own complete
periodic transformation. Specimen at the San Francisco Aquarium, coincidentally
close in age to myself, is in its third sex change. Female to male to female
again. Such polymorphousness, possible in the oceans, is absolutely threatening
on land--- most pointedly in the land of art."
