Naomi Fisher, "Light of Coral Reef Slapping My Cheetah Face", 2009, 49 1/8" x 60", c-print

Romantic art in the 18^th century conveyed a certain sense of exultation. It pictured untamed landscapes, strong emotions, youth and visions of escape from the drudgeries of an increasingly material and mechanical culture.  Haute Romantics, a show of 13 young, mostly downtown New York artists sponsored by Art Fag City editor Paddy Johnson, attempts to capture the current incarnation of that spirit.  What it does, mostly, is filter the subject through a lens of other less-exalted isms: narcissism, voyeurism, consumerism and careerism.  Laced with strains of witty conceptualism, this photo-heavy show, which also includes painting, sculpture and video, doesn’t take its premise too literally, although sex and death do figure in.  Alternately introspective and exhibitionist, it seems, more than anything, to want to have fun – or at least pretend to be doing so.

Fashion is a pervasive, if not dominant influence.  Katherine Bernhardt’s four Swatch paintings –large canvases that occupy an entire wall – don’t criticize or analyze; they simply translate the visual language of magazine advertising into loopy, acrylic-and-spray painted works that feel like pop-graffiti product pitches. Naomi Fisher employs a punk/grunge/B-movie aesthetic in large-scale, glossy photos that conjure a universe of tropical zombie sex kittens – a haunted effect that is echoed in her mixed-media paintings.  These combine the schematic style of fashion illustration with abstract, gestural brushstrokes, creating a Munch-like angst that rubs up hard against the faux innocence conveyed by the works’ illustrational aspects.  Sarah Venderbeek’s black-and-white photo collages recall Man Ray’s fashion plates of the ‘20s and ‘30s.  They’re gorgeous and technically brilliant, but in the end, impossible to disassociate from what Ray did with photograms, multiple images, solarization, and the placement of models in statuesque poses with otherworldly lighting.

Sarah VenderBeek, "Untitled", 2007, 14" x 11", c-print

Five short videos directed by Lena Dunham, The Delusional Downtown Divas, zoom in on the antics and obsessions of a group of trust fund brats trying to claw their way to the top. These segments mimic reality TV, but are, in fact, scripted to make the characters seem both plausible (“I can’t be honest with you unless I’m lying.”) and ridiculous (“I think fashion should be incredibly painful – like the choker I’m wearing.”).  This conceit, which at first seems silly, pins its subject to the wall by showing how both characteristics co-exist shamelessly.  Whether agonizing over accessories, scheming to crash members-only events or sucking up to each other (or to dealers who are themselves engaged in a parody of Tino Sehgal), the divas in Divas skewer the downtown milieu the way Tama Janowitz did a generation ago in Slaves of New York.  Their parade of romantic and career longings overflows with sturm and drang, but it elicits no sympathy.

Like the characters in Divas, K8 Hardy (a self-described “video artist, stylist and queer activist” who recently launched a clothing line) demonstrates that she, too, will do whatever it takes to win our affections.  Show extreme close-ups of women in menstrual blood-stained panties.  Pose a model splay-legged, with an apple in her mouth.  Feign sex with a camera tripod.  Hardy does this (and a whole lot more) in the pages of four large-format photo books, each of which is littered with semi-coherent pieces of text that masquerade as diary entries.  Youth and fecklessness may be qualities of Romanticism; but like a lot of fashion photography, this is just soft porn.

Asher Penn’s Kate Moss Rorschach Series — nine 8×10-inch black and white photos of the actress overlaid with lipstick-red Rorschach blots – is an exercise in serial re-framing that identifies, amplifies and focuses desire.  Some pictures hone in on Ms. Moss’ face. Others show only portions of her body.  Taken as a group, they function as keyholes to the psyche, and are as revelatory as they are manipulative.

Paul Gabrielli, "Alex Imagining his Own Body", 2009, 14" x 27" 13", looped video, mixed-media; Maximillian Schubert, "Untitled (tire with fruit)", 2010, paraffin and soy way, oil paint

 Paul Gabrielli’s work leans toward nihilism.  In his video loop, Alex Imagining his Own Body, a man’s tightly cropped face stares blankly at the camera and appears trapped inside the monitor.  This unaffected visage does what Andy Warhol’s 8-hour snooze-a-thon, Sleep, once did: it turns us into listless voyeurs.  More compelling are his two wall-mounted installations: Untitled (Handrail) and Untitled (Scale), both of which render each object unusable; the first by blocking the handrail with an artificial tree limb, the second by cordoning off the scale with a length of string.  They’re cold, clever and effective, but have no apparent relationship to the subject.

Closer to the mark are two documentary-style photos from Peter Sutherland that capture decisive moments. Look Me Directly in the Eye shows a herd of deer caught in the headlights of a car, a sea of disembodied, glowing eyes.  Dog Says Take a Vacation presents a tense stand-off between a man and an angry dog separated by a chain-link fence.  For this artist, man and nature are clearly not on speaking terms.

Asher Penn, "Kate Moss Rorschach (Series #1-3)", 2008, 8 1/2" x 11", paint on laserprint

Several artists do address historic notions of Romanticism directly. Maximillian Schubert casts two sculptures in wax that when lit as candles self destruct.  One is a car tire littered with fruit rinds; the other consists of cinderblocks. Cast realistically, they recall the abject character of Robert Rauschenberg’s combines as well as the spontaneous altars that sprung up all over Manhattan after 9/11.  As objects whose form and potential value decline with each passing second, they are the ultimate memento mori.

Kristen Jensen and Cian McConn approach the subject with a series of conceptual self-portraits in which they pose, variously, as corpses in Battery Park (with the Statute of Liberty in the background), in a cemetery saluting a monumental gravestone, and staring, like Narcissus, into pond.  Sebastian Mlynarski provides the show’s purest take on Romanticism with photos of pink-tinged forest scenes, the most evocative of which have the ghost of a nymph emerging from a pond, as if in a visitation dream, and another showing what could be a landslide or an explosion in a similar setting – a picture that is intended to mirror the type of reverence for nature once elicited by a legion of painters, ranging from J.M.W. Turner in Europe to the stateside Hudson River School painters.

With its conflicting allegiances –to both bling and to sturm and drang — Haute Romantics seems to want to walk in both worlds; but it does so haltingly, like a woman negotiating cobblestones in high heels.

–DAVID M. ROTH

Haute Romantics @ Verge Gallery through March 20, 2010.

"Cover" image: Katherine Bernhardt, installation view (l to r): Waipitu, Pinstripe, Pink Flamingo, Flack; all acrylic and spray paint on canvas.

"Good Enough to Eat (2)", 1971, watercolor, gouache, and graphite on board, 20.75 x 25 inches

Art that engages with the politics of gendered subjectivity frequently references the body.  As Margaret Harrison understands fully, there are reasons for the prevalence of this thematic emphasis.  First, the body, we are conditioned to believe, is the place where sexual and gendered subjectivity reside.  In the late 1960s, the representation of female bodies in a range of media and genres achieved prominence in art produced by feminist activists.  Women launching careers in the arts at this time adopted a range of positions vis-à-vis the representation of gendered subjectivity.  Harmony Hammond, Howardena Pindell, Lynda Benglis, and Louise Fishman, among others, embraced abstraction in part because of its resistance to body-centered essentialism.  At the same time, performance artists such as Hannah Wilke, Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono, Eleanor Antin, and VALIE EXPORT variously dramatized the status of the female body as a site of subjugation.  Judy Chicago, with her collectively produced monument The Dinner Party (1974-79), and Tee A. Corinne, with The Cunt Coloring Book (1975), also deployed essentialism strategically, mobilizing  in-your-face vaginal forms to both provoke and counteract phobic patterns of response to the female body and its parts.  Path-breaking feminist artists from Barbara Kruger to Nicole Eisenman focused on the ways that visual culture mediates gendered power relations.  Harrison’s early work played similarly with the gender codes of popular culture and the sexual politics of consumerism.

"Heroes (1): What’s That Long Red Limp Wrinkly Thing You’re Putting On", 2009, water color, colored pencil, and graphite on board, 24 x 19 inches

In 1970 she participated in the formation of the London Women’s Liberation Art Group. The next year, the London police shut down Harrison’s first solo show the day after it opened at Motif Editions Gallery due to the controversial character of works with titles such as Ejaculor.  This swift act of suppression turned Harrison’s gallery debut into an inadvertent performance piece, demonstrating the brutality of the value system critiqued by these censored works: pin-ups pushed to the extremes of their objectifying logic and gender-bending perversions of comic-book heroism.  The works were stored away and not exhibited again for decades. Key works–Captain America, for one–were lost.

Harrison subsequently switched her representational tactics. Still thinking through how the gender system polices its interests and imposes its constraints visually, she began to explore subtler ways to engage viewers–by using mixed-media collage and the representation of emblematic objects, for instance.  Her 2004 show at Intersection for the Arts, Beautiful Ugly Violence, featured a series of exemplary still life paintings focused on small household objects and appliances: a pair of scissors, an electric tea pot, a telephone, a set of kitchen knives. These fixtures of domestic life, pictured from awkward angles at uncomfortably close removes, take on disturbing qualities generally cloaked in typical portrayals of domestic bliss.  The outsized scale of the paintings contributes to an effect of disorientation.  The only still life that appears overtly violent, a handgun resting on the folds of a satin bed sheet, is rendered oddly banal within the context of this series, just as the violence of innocuous household objects is proportionately heightened by the presence of this weapon.

"Captain America (2)", 1997, watercolor and graphite on paper, 26 x 18.25 inches

Never abandoning her feminist commitments, Harrison has, since the 1970s, continuously explored the politics of domesticity, addressing issues that range from domestic labor to sex trafficking to genital mutilation and domestic abuse. Her work tracks the relationship of gender oppression in the domestic arena to global economic and political systems. Bodies Are Back, at San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts, features some of the paintings and drawings for which Harrison achieved notoriety in 1971. These include a re-creation of her lost piece Captain America.  This portrays the American comic book icon in dominatrix drag, with projectile breasts, black stockings, and stiletto heels. The show juxtaposes vintage pieces (and reproductions of vintage pieces) along with new works created expressly for this occasion. As the title of the show discloses, the artist again adopts the human figure as the site of sexual subjection and consumption.  Many of these works are rendered in watercolor, a medium long associated with women and amateurs.  The new works, in dialog with the originals, open additional registers of visual culture to feminist critique, using high-art icons.  Harrison confronts pop heroes from Dolly Parton to Batman with canonical works of art—Diego Velázquez’s Infanta, Edouard Manet’s Olympia, Willem de Kooning’s Woman, and Allen Jones’ Table—in which the objectified/commodified female body plays a starring role.

Has Harrison’s early work retained its power to disturb?  Pieces from the 1970s such as Good Enough to Eat, and Mrs. Softie, where bustier-clad seductresses serve as sandwich meat or ice-cream toppings, seem almost quaint in today’s media-jaded and putatively “post-feminist” era.

"Mrs. Softie No. 2", 1970, watercolor and graphite on paper, 30 x 22.5 inches

Incursions into the high-art arena by artists from the Guerilla Girls, with their billboard critiques of Met acquisition policies, to Yasumasa Morimura, with his queer re-performances of masterworks, such as Velázquez Infanta and Manet’s Olympia (both also cited by Harrison), locate Harrison’s most recent works within a long history of critical interventions into visual art canons.

While the show might leave some habitués of feminist art with a sense of déjà-trop-vu, the work has important lessons to impart to a new generation of viewers. Intersection for the Arts should be applauded not only for supporting a historically important feminist artist, but also for seizing this opportunity to create an innovative forum of intergenerational dialog.  In anticipation of Harrison’s show, Intersection partnered with LYRIC (Lavender Youth Recreation & Information Center) to host a series of workshops focused on gender-based oppression and modes of print-culture activism.  Framed in this way, The Bodies Are Back, in addition to its visual pleasures and piquant wit, transmits historical wisdom about gender oppression and its mechanisms while demonstrating the stamina of the feminist art resistance.

–TIRZA TRUE LATIMER

Margaret Harrison: The Bodies are Back @ Intersection for the Arts, through March 27, 2010.

Tirza True Latimer is Chair of Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts.

“Cover” image: Allen Jones & The P.T.A. (Dolly Parton/Allen Jones “Table” sculpture), 2010, watercolor, and graphite on paper, 11 x 15 inches.

Dave Trautrimas, "Storm Crown Mechanism", archival digital print, 30 x 40 inches

Industrial artifacts are ostensibly products of rationality (remember the modernist mantra “form follows function”?) yet they’re also windblown by the imperatives of fashion and design. Two artists who accept this world of manufactured readymades, yet move beyond the polemics of a century ago to transform them into esthetic objects, are Torontonian David Trautrimas and Oaklander Kristina Lewis, who prove, in a joint show, Article X, that there is life after simulacra.  Article X, which has nothing do to any constitutionally protected right, might be interpreted as an artist’s declaration of freedom; or perhaps it refers to sci-fi horror movies, like X: The Creeping Unknown, X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes or X-Men.

The objects in Article X, according to a gallery news release, “are removed from their usual contexts and placed in zones of ambiguity, absurdity, and anxiety.” What the show really feels like is a fantasy from the 1950s.  Trautrimas makes prints of imaginary defense installations, digitally assembled from fragments of vintage consumerist goods.  Lewis gives us dissected spike-heeled shoes, based on those painfully glamorous, fetishistic foot bindings adopted by American women of the Mad Men era whose “bombshell” nose cones echoed across a spectrum of products: cars, jets and push-up bras.

Dave Trautrimas, "Micro Re-Instigator", archival digital print, 30 x 40 inches

Trautrimas grew up as the Cold War was ending, but whose NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) facilities, like the Royal Canadian Air Force’s North Bay base, the command centers for early warning and response to a Russian missile attack, endure in landscape and memory. His new series of nine images, Spyfrost, focuses on the link between capitalism’s postwar materialist culture of good ‘n’ plenty and the Military-Industrial Complex that developed in parallel and were the subject two films about nuclear apocalypse, the tragic Fail Safe and the comic Dr. Strangelove.

Trautrimas collects the appliances of yesteryear from garage sales, bargain stores, and the Internet; he disassembles the pieces, photographs them, and laboriously assembles monumental, monstrous and sometimes comic industrial buildings, which he embellishes with images of cars, trees and landscapes that he has collected on bike rides. The images, with their hints of Red-Scare era fridges, freezers, waffle irons, electric razors, coffee pots, vacuum cleaners, and the like, are rich in suggestiveness.  They conjure Oldenburg’s cheerfully absurd pop monuments of clothespins, toilet floats, and lipstick, as well as cinematic visions of advanced technology (2001 and Close Encounters) and the dystopias (Metropolis, Blade Runner, and Star Wars, the latter of which was neatly parodied in Ernie Fosselius’ short film, Hardware Wars, with its flying toasters!)

Dave Trautrimas, "The Brilliant Device", archival digital print, 20 x 30 inches

The Brilliant Device presents a wintry northern landscape dominated by what appears an igloo made from corroded metal, topped by a pair of gigantic brass periscopes, fashioned from parts of a floor polisher. The Radiant Proliferator, a kind of mechanical sun that seems to be giving a Nazi salute, is made from components that Trautrimas purchased at a Toronto lighting-supply store.  Storm Crown Mechanism depicts a pair of colossal metal-disked structures, suggesting H.G Wells’ Martian heat-ray tripods, but are really made from refrigerator parts purchased off Craigslitst.  Mnemonic Doppelganger was made from—what else?—parts of old movie cameras. While the sociopolitical aspect of this body of work is fascinating, and its mad-scientist method is entertaining and hilarious, these looming, intimidating mechanisms possess an undeniable visual authority.  They’re as powerful and seductive as the ideology du jour (remember the Global War on Terror?), which, perhaps, they symbolize, colossi for a technological age run amok.

Kristina Lewis, "It Leaves a Shining Wake", zippers, thread, cotton piping, dimensions variable

Kristina Lewis continues her exuberant and inventive exploration of commercially available materials.  In the past she has torn apart and reconstructed clothing, packaging tape, and umbrellas, and some of that work is on view here.  It Leaves a Shining Wake, probably named after a cryptozoological sighting, resembles a marine reptile made of interlaced zippers and frayed or raveled tape.  Boundary and Air Duct with their three-inch cardboard tape rolls surrounded by coils of tape, suggest microscopic cells; while the umbrella ribs of Spinner, stripped of fabric, become aggregated: a schematic origami crane chained to a heavy-looking pyramid of black nylon.  Lewis also displays three sculptures (Revolt, A Neutral Charge, Ground Surge) based on electrical conduit boxes whose askew “live” wires read like explosions of frozen pyrotechnics.

The new body of work on display consists of ten spike-heeled women’s shoes, flayed and splayed like weird birds or insects from, say, Pan’s Labyrinth.  Common Chafe resembles an inverted, decapitated frog or chicken.  The heels become drumsticks; the black leather uppers, a duplicate set of webbed feet, and the perforated insoles plucked skin.  Lawn Dig suggests a mournful-faced insect either praying or shrugging.  Black Ache resembles an amphibian or reptile skull or mask that has begun to develop small wings.

Kristina Lewis, (L to R): "Common Chafe", used high-heeled footwear, epoxy putty, acrylic, adhesive, 10 x  5x 11 inches; "Lawn Dig", used high-heeled footwear, epoxy putty, acrylic, adhesive, 11 x 7 x 4 inches 

Culture is now the new nature in hybrid, multimedia postmodernism.  Based on Trautrimas and Lewis’ imaginative use of industrial artifacts, however, the withdrawal of the natural world from so much contemporary art, like shrinking glaciers, seems almost imperceptible.  What they seem to be saying is that human artifacts, for better or worse, are a part of nature, too.

–DEWITT CHENG

David Trautrimas & Kristina Lewis @ Johansson Projects, through March 20, 2010.

“Cover” image:  David Trautrimas: Storm Crown Mechanism, Archival digital print
30 x 40 inches.

“The Secretary of State”, 2005, oil on canvas, 18” x 24 ¼ inches

Belgian painter Luc Tuymans has breathed new energy into painting by pretending to drain the life out of it.  His paintings, which are short on information, long on implication, parade their emptiness.  But they also pack a punch.  Like a postmodern Marlow, Tuymans plies the river of civilization’s discontents.  He’s armed with a paintbrush, but not much hope for humanity.

Tuymans, whose retrospective opened last week at SF MOMA, is a history painter.  His paintings of the Holocaust, Flemish nationalism, Belgian colonialism and post-9/11 America are based on photography, television, cinema, and to a lesser extent, on art history.  But unlike the artist to which he is most often compared – Gerhard Richter — Tuymans filters his synthesis of art history through his experience making movies.  In the 1980s he quit painting for five years and made experimental films that allowed him to find a meaningful way back into his chosen medium.  He did this by looking closely at his films’ components parts, reveling in individual frames and barely recognizable artifacts.

“Gas Chamber”, 1986, oil on canvas, 24 x 32 inches

That investigation deeply influenced all of his subsequent work, particularly his series about perception, At Random.  He has also worked with a Polaroid camera to document his surroundings, relying on the gel of the developing image to inspire paintings that read like murky pools inhabited by ghosts.  Equally influential are the photographs he takes of magazines and television images, which he often re-photographs to give himself a working model of how media images remain in memory.

If you feel an icy remove while looking at Tuymans’ paintings, it’s because the subjects themselves are often wrenched out of context.  Tuymans’ specialty is the incoherent fragment — a closely cropped image rendered in pale and sometimes putrid color, made indecipherable through a diminished or total absence of almost all of the elements that define a picture.

“Himmler”, 1998, oil on canvas, 53 x 40 1/8 inches

“This device,” writes co-curator Helen Molesworth, “lends a sick, chemically saturated quality to the palette.”  His omission of gloss from his oils further flattens his spatially starved paintings.  The result is a confusing, yet oddly compelling mix of painterly clumsiness and pictorial elegance.

Thus, we enter Tuymans’ works through their titles and wall texts, and because those documents often reference horrific events, it is impossible not to look.  Once you do you’re caught in a visual-linguistic crossfire — between titles that jolt and paintings that speak in a whisper, and sometimes not even that.  (“My paintings are silent,” the artist told a museum lecture audience.) Crudely affixed to their supports and painted quickly and casually, his pictures appear — even when richly hued — to be monochromatic, as if dipped in fog.  They are ostensibly representational; yet most of the “facts” — people, buildings, furnishings, and landscapes – are abstract and out-of-focus, like “a videotape paused on a primitive VCR,” Peter Schjeldahl wrote in a New Yorker review of the show after its U.S. tour began last fall at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus.  The banal results of this willful obfuscation might lead you to conclude that Tuymans’ paintings are inconsequential.  But they are not.  Like malicious computer worms, his pictures, once lodged, have a way of invading your brain.

“Peter”, 1994, oil on canvas, 21 ½ x 29 ½ inches

His most controversial and easily most difficult painting, Gas Chamber, is unrecognizable as such.  It’s a room with a drain in the center, its fake showerheads represented by inchoate marks.  The horror of it doesn’t lie in what actually happened; it’s that such horrors can be depicted so plainly.  The Architect, a picture of Albert Speer on skis, is even more anonymous; the face is obliterated, blinded to the havoc wreaked by its owner and, by extension, the Nazi war machine.  Similarly, in Reparations, two montages – one of eyes, one of limbs – it’s a wall text that informs us that they are derived from photographs of medical experiments.  To look is to assume, in a detached sense, the position of Josef Mengele: that atrocities qualify as medical research.

“Mwana Kitodo”, 2000, oil on canvas, 81 ¾ x 35 3/8 inches

Our New Quarters is a crude painting of an actual Nazi-era postcard that had those words superimposed on a picture of the Theresienstadt death camp.  It was given to prisoners to send home.  This re-presented document, likening a concentration camp to a family vacation, sums up as well as anything the sadistic pathology of genocide.  

Some observers, including Schjeldahl, have alleged that his choice of subject matter is a ploy to get people to look at his paintings.  That may be true in some measure; but it’s no shtick.  His family divided over the war: his father’s brothers, one of whom Tuymans is named after, fought with the Nazis and were disowned by the artist’s paternal grandmother after they fled the German army.   His wife’s family fought in the resistance and hid Jews. When things got tense around the Tuymans household, the past reared its ugly head. 

In person, Tuymans, 51, is a passionate, animated, voluble and physically imposing man.  When he speaks about the abuse of power, whether perpetrated by nations, religious authorities, individuals or corporations, he does so with a visceral antipathy. These emotions translate to canvas in several ways.  Faces of the vilest men are obscured by heavy shadows (Himmler); blotted out entirely (The Architect); or partially erased, as with Mwana Kitodo, a riveting portrait of the Belgian king of Congo whose nickname means “beautiful white boy.”  Elsewhere, Condoleezza Rice (The Secretary of State) and Klansman Joseph Milteer (The Heritage VI) are depicted chillingly, in a painterly, near-photorealistic manner; while the kitchen of a serial killer (Peter), from a forensic photograph, mimes the gestures, spatial sense and lighting of Cezanne.  

“Our New Quarters”, 1986, 31 ½ x 47 ¼ inches

“In the enigmatic reworking of this banal domestic scene,” writes historian Lanka Tattersall of Peter, “Tuymans ominously undercuts the distinction between generic everyday life and the disquiet of a crime scene.”

That disconnect, between appearance and reality, is, I believe, the true center of Tuymans’ oeuvre.  Whether sneering at bourgeoisie social conventions or savaging institutional powers that feed on human suffering, Tuymans is all about exposing horrors that carefully crafted appearances are designed to bury. 

Tuymans may be a difficult painter to like.  But he is even more difficult to ignore. 

–DAVID M. ROTH

 Luc Tuymans @ SFMOMA through May 2, 2010.