issue 2 2009 nureview.org
» NORTHWESTERN/ART/REVIEW outside art
from the editor
I
n this era of unprecedented visual production, the individual’s
in historical trajectories of gender and body image. In our final es-
daily confrontation with an overwhelming deluge of all kinds
say, we trace currents of Expressionism from Munch to de Kooning,
images is a sure indication that the future of art criticism must
examining how the periodic ‘destruction’ and reinvention of paint-
engage of not only art theory and history, but a plethora of other
ing revitalizes the medium with infusions from outside.
relevant disciplines, including sociology, psychology, anthropol-
In only three years, the Northwestern Art Review has become
ogy, and biology, to name just a few. Indeed, the expansion of the
a leading journal of undergraduate art criticism, providing new op-
critic’s lens to acknowledge the dauntingly broad spectrum of ‘vi-
portunities for young scholars to share in discourses on visual cul-
sual culture’ has contributed to both the increasing coherence and
ture. Simultaneously, as a student organization at Northwestern
correspondence of aesthetic theories with other disciplines, while
University, NAR is committed to bringing art to the student body
simultaneously making more evident the dissonance among them.
with lectures, museum excursions and social events. For its past
With the gradual erosion of clear distinctions between what is art
accomplishments and continued success, the Northwestern Art Re-
and what is not, it is now more important than ever to acknowl-
view is indebted to the support of the Department of Art History of
edge those artists and artworks which have defied the boundaries
Northwestern University, especially Claudia Swan, the Department
of traditional definitions of art, as well as those which still remain
Chair, and Christina Kiaer, the Director of Undergraduate Studies.
outside these constructs. In this, our second issue, the Northwest-
We are thankful for support and programming coordination pro-
ern Art Review examines images that confront the question of the
vided by the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern
outsider. In Paul Klee’s Jungfrau Im Baum, we see a nearly unprec-
University, as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
edented rejection of the classical modes of human depiction. In
For our innovative design and our online presence, we thank Chris
the haunting, sometimes horrifying photography of Ralph Eugene
Adamson and Marcy Capron of MediaCake. As editor-in-chief, I
Meatyard, lies the mystery of an amateur photographer whose oeu-
am especially grateful for the help of Sohpia Espinoza, Anna Blum-
vre bears witness to dreams and terror. In their photographs of
berg, Elizabeth Walker, Elena Aleksandrova, Allison Tawil, Ashley
FTM and MTF transvestites, Andy Warhol and Catherine Opie show
Montgomery, Caitlin Kearney, Jessica Davidson, and the NAR staff
us social outsiders with a surprising sensitivity to the complexity of
who assisted in selecting this year’s essays. Finally, NAR thanks
gender. The Kenyan-born, New York-based artist Wangechi Mutu
the many students who submitted essays and those whose writing
confronts both gender and terror in her large-scale collages, chal-
comprises this issue.
lenging oppositional dichotomies and notions of beauty embedded
Elliot J. Reichert May 2009 Evanston, IL
table of contents
1»
deconstruction of the human form and discovery of the human condition:
paul klee
by lucy b. yost
2» meatyard’s family album
by kathleen n. white
3»
an examination of mtf and ftm transvestites in the photography of catherine opie and andy warhol:
the drag difference
by nora dankner
4» wangechi mutu: beauty, terror, and physiognomic . fantasies by jessica n bell
5»
the new language of expressionism from edvard munch to willem de kooning:
drips, scratches, and strokes
by svetlana turova
DECONSTRUCTION OF THE HUMAN FORM and discovery of the human condition »
paul klee by lucy b. yost
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n discussing the art of Paul Klee, one must start with the most basic of elements: the dot. The dot represents the origin of creation and leads to the progression and development of additional forms, most notably the line. Seemingly some of the most primitive elements, both the line and dot unite to create a universe of infinite, artistic possibilities. An artist at the forefront of abstraction, Klee was no stranger to the potential of the dot and the line. He paved the way for many forward thinking artists to manipulate their compositions and explore new ways to present their subjects through the 4
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most rudimentary of forms. Most specifically, his reduction of human form provides an important stepping-stone in deconstructing the discourse surrounding the body and how it is associated with classical, European culture. Standards in rendering shift and preconceived notions of the capabilities of an individual evolve. By pushing the boundaries of the human figure and modern art to their furthest extents, Klee not only uses deconstruction and abstraction to challenge a classical past and indistinct future, but also to create a form that is arguably more in touch with a human condition than a highly illusionistic representation. As an art student in the early
twentieth century, Klee’s graphic work is prominently representative of his growing understanding of the art world. Untitled studies from 1899, depicting a female nude, reinforce the particular attention paid to maintaining the boundaries and physicalities of the human body. Klee focuses on the careful handling of value so that the woman’s flesh becomes more sensual and supple to the eye. The hatch marks on her upper thigh, following up and down her right side, stand as integral marks, offsetting the high contrast white and grey on the remainder of her form. The contour lines merge to make her body highly illusionistic, as though she could jump directly from Klee’s sketchbook
into his reality. Klee saw the body as a harmonious culmination of drawing fundamentals, breaking them down into formal elements in order to create illusionistic imagery. Though his studies were extremely naturalistic, they were almost entirely void of vitality. While the nude discussed above is beautifully rendered, she lacks fire in her eyes and soul in her breath. She stands lifeless, gazing mundanely off of the page in a comatose fashion. Klee notes the harsh reality of his thoughts towards nude drawing in his diary, remarking, “Drawing nudes began to lose some of its glamour, and other matters, problems of existence, became more important
— Paul K lee 1903
jungfrau im baum
than glory in Knirr’s studio.”1 As a maturing artist, Klee was no longer interested in gaining praise for his artistic accuracy; instead, he sought praise for his artistic interpretation. Klee’s humanistic statement poses a quintessential question: why draw from life if life is the one thing that is invariably missing from the composition? In Opinions on Creation, Klee discusses the more existential meaning of forms as they relate to both artistic composition and reality:
and focus on underlying symbols more important then what the physical eye can see. He refuted artists who copied the classics, stating, “To want to create something outside of one’s own age strikes me as suspect.”3 Maurice Denis’ essay, Subjective and Objective Deformation, enforces Klee’s convictions as he explains, “The Masters never distinguished between reality, as an element in art at least, and the interpretation of reality… One does not stylize artificially, after the We used to represent things event, a stupid copy of nature.”4 Both Denis and Klee could visible on earth which we en- joyed seeing or would have not understand why any modliked to see. Now we reveal ern artist would want to remain the reality of visible things, rooted in the past, attempting to recreate copies of art that had aland thereby express the beready been accomplished. Such lief that visible reality is art forms were already lifeless merely an isolated phenomand could not offer new verve enon latently outnumbered to present-day. Rather than foby other realities. 2 cusing on extreme idealization Klee recognizes society’s tenof figure, Klee explored new dency to focus on the most literpossibilities associated with the al form of reality: what they see human form. He maintained a before their eyes. He identifies level of respect for classical porthe need to look beyond reality 6
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trayals of humanity, but their hollow nature besieged the great mysteries involved with being a multifaceted person. Drawings created after Klee’s fervent diary entry marks his moment of great opportunity and impact. In a study done in 1902 of a shoulder and arm, Klee uses line contour and gradation, once seen in his 1899 nudes, as counterpoints to Classicism. As the arm reaches upward, careful observation is paid to how the bone moves within the socket of the shoulder or how the muscles tighten within the forearm when it is bent at the elbow. The tightness of the tendons accentuates their clenched nature, detailing the ebb and flow of muscle and veins pulsing under the thin layer of skin. While highly illusionistic, Klee’s sketches do not embody the emotion one might think would accompany such realistic renderings of human anatomy. For Klee, his anatomical studies did not seek to illustrate psycho-
logical or emotional complexities; rather, they denoted the systematic framework of drawing the human form, something Klee catalogues in his Pedagogical Sketchbook.5 Although compiled in 1923, the thoughts and theories present in the pages of this sketchbook are theories Klee certainly was contemplating in the early twentieth century. Klee begins with laying the foundation of a human frame: the bone. Bone represents the passive force, a flaccid element that provides no higher intellect to the composition. After bone, muscle is added to flesh out the figure. Muscle acts as a medial force, sustaining the passive bone. While it is not the inert object, it is still not the component that portrays a fully developed human being. The active element, which surpasses both bone and muscle in Klee’s methodology, is the element of will. Will is the main component that brings the medial and passive elements alive, breathing air into
deconstruction of the human form and discovery of the human condition:
paul klee
what would be a lifeless portrayal of human flesh. Klee’s etching of Virgin in a Tree, 1903, embodies one of Klee’s first, major explorations of combining will and abstraction in the human form. Showcasing his sour style, the composition depicts a woman cradled in the branches of an old tree with two large and intimate birds positioned on the branch above her. Her wiry limbs extend outward, one bent at the elbow to support the weight of her crooked neck while the other is cupped over a knot in the tree. The branches bow under the weight of her enormous body and the knots of the wood mimic the knotted shading of her body and the boney thrust of her hips. Positioned beneath her pelvis, a large protrusion emerges from the bark, mirroring female genitalia. The character looks outward, engaging the audience with a furrowed brow and pouting mouth. Her breasts sag, her abdomen is paunchy,
and her overall structure seems emaciated and malnourished. An imperfect portrayal of femininity, Klee uses the elements of form, shape, and line to expound the internal reading of his piece. A commentary on virginity and the negative effects of chastity, Klee uses Virgin in a Tree to satirize what happens to a woman when she protects her virginity for too long. In his own words, “The lady wants to be something special through virginity, but doesn’t cut an attractive figure.”6 Through reduction and manipulation of her form, Klee seeks a new way of discussing the more private implications of being a living, breathing human being. Sexuality is already a rather private conversation to have in an intimate setting, but Klee publishes it for the entire world to see, blurring the line between what is taboo and respectable. Instead of providing a realistic portrayal of a virgin, the body becomes yet another artis-
tic medium meant to portray a complex narrative. In order to achieve the internal reading Klee desired, a breakdown of the human figure was essential. Through abstraction Klee keyed into the most integral portions of his composition. Scott McCloud calls a theory such as this, “Amplification through simplification.”7 Amplification through simplification does not necessarily eliminate details, but rather focuses on specific ones. “By stripping down an image to its essential ‘meaning’ an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t.” In simplifying his subject, Klee strengthens the human qualities of his female character. Gesture and mark making come to the forefront as elements capable of manipulating abstracted humans into manifestations of social and emotional commentary. Klee fights to negate the formal complexities of naturalistic rendering to focus on portraying a deeper meaning, an active will, 8
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— 1899
— 1899
within his characters. Will, an inference to human emotion, positive or negative, is void from the classical depictions Klee began studying in 1899. As affirmed in The Thinking Eye, “The harmony between inside and outside is not a formal problem, but a question of psychic unity of spiritual content.’”8 Spiritual content cannot be lacking if there is an insufficient amount of realism because psychic unity is not dependent on formal qualities. Klee did not need to create an accurate portrayal of the virgin in order to convey his intentions; internal messages could be conveyed without the help of realism. Denis notes this shift away from realism when he comments, “Art is no longer only a visual sensation which we record, only a photograph, however refined it may be, of nature. No, it is a creation of our spirit of which nature is only the occasion.”9 In reducing the physical form of an individual, Klee could convey a human condition more effectively, with-
untitled sketches
out bone and muscle. All too often amongst artists the pinnacle of concentration is focused around rendering a perfect copy of the human form. There is a constant strive towards trompe l’oeil, chiaroscuro, proportional accuracy, and unity of composition. Where then, amidst all of these figural technicalities, can there be room for depicting a
deconstruction of the human form and discovery of the human condition:
paul klee
— 1902/03
greater meaning in the work? It would be impossible to relay an internal will through a composition if the primary focus were the body rather than the mind. Rather than letting the formal elements suffocate the internal message, Klee gets to the heart of the work’s strength. Unlike classical art, the internal psychology of Klee’s fig-
ures is not gathered through idealized facial features or body language. It is understood through Klee’s direct strokes and curvaceous movement over the picture plane. Due to Klee’s belief that line was an evocation of power and emotion, it is fitting to note the excitement he expressed towards its ceaseless potential: “’Progress possible in the line!’”10 The expressiveness relayed through line work symbolizes the ideals Klee used emphatically throughout his vast oeuvre. In manipulating the human form, Klee presents a new type of body, one that is more elemental and telling of what it truly means to be human. His figures are raw, uninhibited and completely indicative of the tumultuous complexities that encompass everyday lives. No longer must an individual be
represented by muscle, bone, and flesh; psychology and inner spirit do not reside within these human physicalities. Rather, they reside within the human condition, the human imagination. The reduction Klee presents expands the meaning of the figure. Instead of treating the body like a concrete object, he uses it as a medium, molding it based on the needs of his composition. The deconstruction of one human form leads to an expansion of the ideologies present behind all forms and the marriage of abstraction and reality up heave the preconceived assumptions audiences, artists, and critics alike have about bodies and their position in the art world. » nar
“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock, to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures.” – Flannery O’Connor
meatyard’s family album kathleen n. white
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f we, America, tried scraping all our human juices, our emotions and dirty thoughts down into a deep dark well that we tried not to look at, and covered it up, and left it there with it’s gaseous toxins combining and rising, our human stew, such bubbling gook, would start gurgling, rattling and soon enough the top would blow and out would pop a strange and rapturous creature: the art of the Southern Gothic. These creatures, a literary freak show, come out on stage: Tennessee Williams’ Blanche DuBois, Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit, and Faulkner’s Miss Emily. Right up there on that stage too, the Southern Gothic stage, are the works of photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard: blonde haired children with big worried eyes standing by precarious ledges; women and men and children wearing unpleasant monster masks and sitting around acting as though they’re not. It’s a peculiar sight certainly. Perhaps we, the 10
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audience, will shriek or heckle, but as is the way with freak shows, we won’t look away. We peer through fingers, yes, but still we look; we gape really. Stare long enough and the oddities blur, and beyond them a human shape begins form without face or flesh: the bones of what it is to be a human. This is what a Ralph Eugene Meatyard photograph is like; a photograph that can reveal what it is that holds us up. alph Eugene Meatyard was born in Normal, Illinois on May 15, 1925. Meatyard served in the Navy, attended Williams College and then studied philosophy at Illinois Wesleyan University. After World War II, Meatyard married his wife, Madelyn, and moved to Lexington, Kentucky where he worked as a licensed optician. In 1950, Meatyard, always the family man, purchased his first camera to take photographs of his newborn son.1 Throughout his life, Meatyard continued to work as an optician, finding time for photography on the weekends. A devoted father and husband, he often used his wife, chil-
R
dren, friends and relatives as models for his carefully staged photos. Meatyard possessed keen interest in Eastern philosophy and Zen; influences which bled heavily into his photography. These interests were sparked by a workshop he attended in Indiana led by Minor White. Meatyard died of cancer in Lexington, Kentucky in 1972, at the age of 47.2 Just prior to Meatyard’s death, he created a body of work called “The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater,” which consisted of 64 7x7 photographs. The concept of “Lucybelle” is likely derived from the simpleton girl character “Lucynell” from Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” Lucynell is obliviously given away by her mother to a maimed drifter named Tom Shiftlet. Lucynell is the embodiment of innocence and ignorance, blind to the world around her. “The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater,” likewise addresses the ability and inability to see. In this album of photos, Meatyard’s wife, Madelyn is shown as “Lucybelle” wearing a witch-like hag mask. In these portraits, Lucy-
— R alph Eugene Meatyard c. 1970
Lucybelle Crater and her successful peanut farmer friend’s soft-spoken son
lucybell crater’s family album 12
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belle poses always with one friend or relative who wears a thin, semi-transparent old man’s mask. The combination is at first very disconcerting, yet the figures manners are decidedly innocent. As with most family photo albums, the figures are shown in a simple portrait amid daily human action: sometimes embracing, other times lazing about in the yard, or chatting in the living room. In the last photo of the series, however, it is Gene Meatyard, wearing women’s clothing, who plays Lucybelle, while Madelyn wears the old man’s mask. The photo was made on the Meatyards’ 25th wedding anniversary, when Gene Meatyard was already dying from cancer. He labeled this photograph, “Lucybelle Crater and close friend Lucybelle Crater in the Grape Arbor.” The two figures, Lucybelle and her close friend Lucybelle Crater, stand between two thin trees whose leaves are growing wildly. These trees serve almost as backbones for the figures, perhaps suggesting the strength of the Meatyard family tree as his life is ending. In the photograph, we see the full bodies of the figures expect their feet, abruptly severing the figures from the stability of the earth, perhaps again suggesting mortality and transience. Gene Meatyard, dressed in the hag mask, with it gargantuan eyes and opened mouth revealing only two teeth,
meatyard’s family album stands in a simple striped and patterned shirt and gingham skirt. He faces the other “Lucybelle,” with one arm affectionately touching her chest with one hand, while the other arm wraps around her neck Madelyn wears the old man mask, a fisherman’s hat, slacks and a button-down shirt. Madelyn faces forward, stoically torward the camera, facing whatever may come. Even though the figures are masked and cross-dressed, there is an intimacy of gesture that cannot be ignored. The two figures stand like trees, arms like branches growing to touch each other. There is striking naturalness beyond the bizarreness. By denying the individual faces of the figures, by denying even their sexes, they lose their particularities. Through this loss of identity, the figures are freed from the divisions of individual face and become transcendentpotentially anyone and everyone. The viewer may superimpose himself or herself into these familiar scenes of the masked figures at will. Meatyard’s photography provides the vision of a non-judgmental Zen eye. The Zen state seeks transcendence of the self-conscious and the judgmental. As an optician Meatyard undoubtedly knew the marked similarities between the eye and vi-
sion and the camera and the photograph: the processes of inversion and reflection, the moments we capture and those moments we miss. With the masks Meatyard denies the individual and self-conscious, while the camera serves as a non-judgmental eye, free from the mental bonds of prejudice and pride. Like Aaron Siskind or Minor White who both used a disorienting closeness to force the viewers to see differently, more closely, Meatyard uses the disruptive quality of the masks to make his viewers see beyond them. In “The Light Sensitive Mirage,” Minor White explained this well saying: Through the help of the paradox, visual surfaces yield their sovereignty and exist only to be seen through- not by lenses and emulsions which are blind but by the spectator of the photograph whose mental images make access to insight and poetry.
What we see in Meatyard’s photos, both despite and because of the masks, is the intimacy of family and friends – not just one family or friend, but the overarching relationships that unite humanity. Notably, this is one of very few photographs from the series whose label does not begin and end with “Lucybelle Crater” – for instance “Lucybelle Crater and many facet-
ed friend – Lucybell Crater.” Rather the label ends, “in the grape arbor.”3 “Lucybelle” has reached an Eden of sorts, a return to the garden, a time before the rights and wrongs of sex and behavior, a time before our knowledge of our material and dying selves. In many ways, by revealing fraility of identity, Meatyard saved his own life in a way O’Connor’s Lucynell could not, in the way that Wright Morris suggests photography saves us all by arresting time. Meatyard’s images find, “not the ruin of time, nor the crowded tombs of time but the eternal present in time’s every moment.” Meatyard’s photos reached almost a Zen level of transcendence, beyond roles, beyond the cycles of life and death. In this photograph, Meatyard is his art and his art him, he is his wife and she him. The viewer imposes himself as the masked figure, while Meatyard does the same. These roles are fluid, meaningless and part of the greater existential and metaphysical questions Meatyard suggested. Meatyard wanted us to see even closer than the moments the eye cannot perceive but the photograph can, to places within those moments: to the countless links between human beings that bind the Family Album together. » nar
An Examination of MTF and FTM
transvestites in the photography of catherine opie and andy warhol »
the drag difference by nora dankner
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n the catalogue for the Guggenheim’s 1997 exhibition, Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography, curator Jennifer Blessing examines Catherine Opie’s 1991 series Being and Having, featuring thirteen images of female to male (FTM) transvestites. Seeing this series, she realizes that: Male impersonation is a much rarer sight than the opposite. Drag queens have almost become cliché . . . Why is there such a dearth of popular images of female-tomale (FTM) gender-crossing? . . . Could it be that femininity--the throwaway gender . . . is available for play, while masculinity, which symbolizes power, cannot be tampered with?1
To flesh out these questions I have chosen to focus on Catherine Opie’s series, Being and 14
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— washington unviersity in st. louis
Having (1991) and Portraits (1994) and Andy Warhol’s 1975 series, Ladies and Gentlemen. While these photographs cannot be seen as representative of MTFs and FTMs at large, they illustrate theories of Marjorie Garber, author of Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, who claims that crossdressing is a somewhat easier practice for MTFs because of the wealth of media (magazines, movies, etc.) that teach women how to “put on” femininity. This comparison also exemplifies the theory of Kate Bornstein, a MTF transsexual, in which she claims that when a man assumes a feminine identity, it is seen as play and silly through the eyes of the dominant culture. While these photographs come from different time periods, the comparison between Opie and Warhol’s work with transvestites is valuable for many reasons beyond their illustration of my theoretical framework. Catherine Opie is one of the rare contemporary artists to
photograph FTMs. Comparing these photographs to Warhol, who focused more on the frivolous performative, exaggerates the difference between his MTFs and Opie’s FTMs, as Opie focuses on a more objective and dignified representation of her subjects. Furthermore, these gender transformations can best be understood through how they change the traditional notions of sex, gender performance, and sexuality. Being and Having2 is Opie’s first series of photographs featuring female transvestites, and shows women escaping traditional notions of gender and laying claim to both masculine and feminine identities. These thirteen photographs include only the face of the sitter against a warm, yellow background. Opie framed each of these photographs with the name of the sitter’s male alter ego below. The photographs focus in closely on the sitters, who are all biologically female, but wear fake facial hair to express
being and having
— Catherine Opie 1991
their male identities. With this series, Opie intended to assert the identities of these women as lesbians outside of heterosexual norms, and to force viewers to question their stereotypes of gender and lesbians. These FTMs are not transgendered or drag kings. The visuals of masculinity with which they play are not expressions of a desired sex change or purely performative. These women play with masculinity as an expression of their sexual identities. In these photographs, the women are emulating men, however, not heterosexual ideals of men. They are instead taking their cues from the gay community.3 As Opie says, “these women are unique. They are taking cross-dressing both into the bedroom and out to public places. They are, I suppose, exhibitionists.”4 They not only place themselves completely outside of the sphere of heterosexuality, but also assert their private, sexual identities out in public. The sitters fiercely engage their gaze with the viewers’, confronting them with their “abnormal” identities. With the close-up, larger-than-life composition, one can easily see the webbing in the fake facial hair and see that the sitters are not biologically men; however, these women appear so strong in their conviction that the artifice does not ap16
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pear humorous. It instead perfectly reflects how these women wish to express their gender. They take their male identities seriously, but they are not concerned with passing or with becoming men. In her later series, Portraits, Opie similarly strives to dignify members of the queer community, but goes even further to show her sitters as people rather than simply their unusual gender identities.5 She consciously used classical portraiture composition to give them a sense of dignity. As in her earlier series, she used a rich, vibrantly colored backdrop for the photographs. Again, this technique allows the viewer to focus purely on the individual, which makes the series about “separating the subject from their world, but still representing their world through their world through their body.”6 As in Being and Having, the sitters are separated from their “scene,” and left to be exhibitionists, expressing their identities through their bodies. Unlike Being and Having, however, the sitters are not as openly defined by their alternative gender identities and do not ascribe to the same identities, but rather show a spectrum of “queerness.” They are not labeled, “Mitch: FTM transsexual” or “Justin Bond: Drag Queen.” Opie instead titled all of the works in this series with the sitter’s
name. The viewer is then left to interpret the sitters according to how they choose to represent themselves and their sexual identities through the manipulation of their bodies. As Opie states: These are not photographs of sexual practices but of costumes, markings and alterations to the body that announce the practices of sexual minorities, pictures that encode the clues to such practices within the codes of studio portraiture. These are portraits of mutable flesh, not fixed social identity. Indeed, the point is not somehow to reveal an essence embodied in flesh, but to suggest that flesh itself is used to invent identity.
As Opie says, these photographs are made in the tradition of portraiture. They sit as dignified and as calmly as “normal” people, yet they still express their “deviant” sexual behavior through their bodies; however, how the subjects appear does not serve to pigeon hole them into a category.7 arhol’s series of photographs, Ladies and Gentlemen, stand in stark contrast to Opie’s images. Before interpreting these photographs in contrast to Opie’s, it is important to consider War-
W
an examination of mtf and ftm transvestites in the photography of catherine opie and andy warhol:
the drag difference
hol’s almost completely opposite goals. As Nicholas Baume states in his essay, “About a Face,” in which he deconstructs Warhol’s approach to portraiture, “Warhol’s interest in people . . . was not a search for inner truths, but an endless fascination with the theater of living.”8 While Opie’s photographs are defined by dignified assertions of identity, Warhol’s are far more playful and reek of constructed femininity. Opie plays down labeling her sitters, while Warhol names his series in an overt reference to how his sitter performs gender, and therefore draws attention to the subject’s otherness, and perhaps the flaws in her performance. With Opie’s Portraits, gender ambiguity rules, however, Warhol’s images do not read at all as biologically female. Even with his medium Warhol uses these images to show the most frivolous aspects of culturally constructed femininity. Not only are the poses expressions of vanity, but the photographs themselves are vain. They are Polaroids: instant visual gratification. Unlike Opie’s FTMs, Warhol’s MTFs take their cues from heterosexual ideals of femininity. Warhol saw drag queens as “ambulatory archives of ideal moviestar womanhood,”9 the height of “perfected” femininity. This is especially apparent when one com-
pares Ladies and Gentlemen to Warhol’s portraits of female celebrities and socialites. For example, if one examines one of the photographs from the series, the sitter’s excessive make-up closely resembles a celebrity such as Liza Minnelli, the huge hair similar to Dolly Parton’s, the overtly feminine and suggestive pose like socialite Holly Solomon, and the series itself has a similar sense of vanity as Warhol’s photobooth portraits of socialite Judith Green. Through incorporating all of these ideals of femininity, Andy Warhol’s “lady” is clearly not biologically female. No biological woman embodies all of these stereotypes at once. The complete picture of the “ideal” woman is therefore not realistic because there is no model that perfectly captures it. When comparing MTFs with FTMs, it is extremely important to look not only at how they appear, but also at their cultural differences. First, unlike Opie’s FTMs, Warhol’s drag queens are performers in the theatrical sense. One drag queen that Warhol often worked with, Mario Montez, hated the term drag and found it embarrassing. He instead referred to drag as “going into costume.”10 This attitude stands in stark contrast to Opie’s subjects who use drag as an expres-
sion of their sexual identities. In Marjorie Garber’s Book, Vested Interests: CrossDressing and Cultural Anxiety, she examines the nature and importance of crossdressing and society’s recurring fascination with it. Here, she points out that “transvestism is not in itself a sign of underlying homosexuality” and that FTMs are much more likely to be homosexual than MTFs are.11 In relation to the photographs, we know that Opie’s FTMs are lesbians; however, we have no background on the sitter in Ladies and Gentlemen. Her dress could be purely performative, and have little to do with expression of personal identity. Returning to Opie’s photographs after examining Warhol’s, one realizes that Opie’s FTMs use very few accessories to show their masculinity. These women mostly rely on their bodies to portray themselves as masculine. Other than that, they use the powerful assertion in their gaze to appear male. In her book Garber argues that “the male-tofemale cross-dresser, whether transvestite, transsexual, or female impersonator, has a much easier access to how-to advice than the female-to-male does . . . every ‘woman’s magazine’ contains at least one article on makeup, another on hairstyling, and sev-
ladies and gentlemen 18
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— A ndy Warhol 1975
eral on the latest in fashions.”12 Even with all this help and a plethora of accessories, the FTMs end up with the more convincing performance. In the end, FTMs have to rely more on a subtractive process to perform masculinity. Returning to Jennifer Blessing’s question of why there is a seeming dearth of FTMs and whether masculinity is a symbol of power that should not be tampered with, one can see that Garber’s point and these photographs reflect her assertions. Masculinity, however, is strongly associated with power and that is exactly how Opie’s subjects express this identity. With their direct, serious, confrontational gaze, they assert masculine authority. Expanding this comparison to Catherine Opie’s
an examination of mtf and ftm transvestites in the photography of catherine opie and andy warhol:
the drag difference
portraits of MTFs, which are photographed in the same style as her FTMs, they ultimately have the same failure as Warhol’s drag queens. They are not at all convincingly female. These portraits do not have the same sense of dignity and empowerment as Opie’s photographs of FTMs. They instead seem silly, and reflect MTF transsexual Kate Bornstein’s assertion that “when a man becomes woman in this culture, it’s considered a joke; the male to female is traditionally a clown when seen through the eyes of the dominant culture.”13 This lack of seriousness differs from FTMs, who, through their expression of masculinity, enter “the sacred male territory, the inviolate land of power and privilege.”14 Even Opie’s perhaps most convincing MTF, Justin Bond, does not completely read as female in the same way that Mike and Sky immediately appear male until the viewer is told otherwise. While more subtle, Bond’s performance is again too much. Her hair and make up is a little too femme, her necktie a bit too flowy and girly. Again, due to over-performance of femininity, her projection of herself as a female is apparently
false, and because of the social construction of femininity, seems a bit silly. Ultimately the difference between FTMs and MTFs can be best understood through the different ways they manipulate and blend traditional notions of gender identity, gender performance, and sexual identity. If we first look at Warhol and Opie’s MTFs, in terms of their gender identity, they all still identify as male and are biologically male. Their gender performance, however, is female. This performance of femininity does not deviate significantly from cultural roles of heterosexual women because these MTFs attempt to perform ideal heterosexual femininity. The gender identity and performance of these MTFs does not necessarily connect, if going by Garber’s theory, to sexual identity. FTMs, in contrast, blur and connect these three categories of identity. First, one must consider Opie’s different FTMs. The transvestites in Being and Having identify as women, perform both masculinity and femininity, and tie all of these into their sexual identities as lesbians. Furthermore, their performance of masculinity challenges het-
eronormative masculinity because they use gay men as models. Opie’s other FTMs, like Mike and Sky occupy a territory that Opie refers to as “third sexing.” These are people who remain women, but take hormones to accentuate their masculine qualities, and have characteristics of both genders. They have not surgically altered their sex, but they are more concerned with a constant performance of masculinity, which is again tied to their sexual identities as lesbians, which in turn relates to their gender identities as female. In the end, while these photographs cannot be representative of all transvestites, they show that MTFs in these instances do less to challenge and mold connections between gender and sexual identity, whereas FTMs have complex and subtle relationships with and between biological gender, performance, and sexual identity. » nar
Wangechi Mutu »
Beauty, Terror, and Physiognomic Fantasies by jessica n. bell
kK
enyan-born, New Yorkbased contemporary artist Wangechi Mutu creates large-scale drawings and collages on everything from Mylar1 to medical illustration paper. They are quite terrifying, yet strikingly seductive. She creates beguiling monsters, haunting and eerily human creatures, many of which undeniably resemble female human bodies. Her obsession with the human body, or the un-human, is interesting in that, several critics and reviewers have come to the consensus that her 20
work is telling of the contemporary human condition; aesthetically, her work is often labeled as “simultaneously abject and beautiful, repulsive and attractive.”2 Such binaries used to describe Mutu’s mind-blowing machinations give light to what cultural critic Rebecca Schneider and theorist Vivian Patraka examine as the terror unleashed in the collapse of binary distinctions-or “binary terror.”3 Schneider elaborates:
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— northwestern university
The terror that accompanies
paratus of sense. The rigidity of our social binaries – male/ female, white/black, civilized/ primitive, art/porn-are sacred to our Western cultural ways of knowing, and theorists have long pointed to the necessity of interrogating such foundational distinctions to discover precisely how they bolster the social network as a whole, precisely what they uphold and what they exclude.4
What Schneider is implicating is that these dialectical categoof sense-making and self-fashries are necessary to make sense ioning is directly proportionof the world that we live in, and ate to the social safety insured sometimes even the people, and in the maintenance of such ap- bodies-if I may add, who live in the dissolution of a binary habit
it. The existence of binaries prevent us from seeking new ways of exploring knowledge, and conceptualizing the artistic and social problems with which cultural producers like Mutu intend for us to grapple. I argue not that the reception of Mutu’s work is wrong or intentionally evasive and indecisive, but that binary terror, in this case, plays a large role into the visual dynamics of Mutu’s drawings and collages, and may even connect back to Johan Caspar Lavater’s 1789 text, Essays on physiognomy, designed to promote the knowledge and love of mankind, or even Edmund Burke’s 1759 landmark text, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of
— Wangechi Mutu 2005
Adult Sexua Female l Org ans
the Sublime and the Beautiful. A reading of Lavater’s work on the science of physiognomy as well as Burke’s characterizations of our emotional and psychological responses to beautiful and sublime objects, in tandem with Mutu’s work may visualize the historical trajectory and the processes with which we continue to make sense of what we see, with what we do not see. I argue that Mutu’s bodily musings offer an explosion of sorts, of the binaries that Lavater and Burke set up, forcing the viewer to confront imagery that is constituted of the social realities in which we live, and to make sense of how we as humans place meaning and judgment onto the body subconsciously. The guiding question throughout this project is quite simple. Is it actually possible for us to consider Mutu’s drawings and collages without relying upon such descriptives as “beautiful” and “repulsive”? Or is Mutu’s artistic display of “anti-beauty,” (anti-in the sense that her work is antithetical to 22
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antiquated 19th century medical documents, has indeed created a monster. However the title of her piece, is telling in that Mutu is in some ways, performing a sexual reassignment surgery on n Adult Female Sexual Or- this new figure. In Mutu’s Adult gans, Mutu describes what Female Sexual Organs, the reresembles a face in profile. productive function of ovaries, Mutu craftily constructs the im- uteruses, cervixes, and vaginas, age with a cropped photograph have been displaced onto this of Cindy Crawford, while creat- neo-figure. To some, this iming the eyes and nose of the face age, constructed of aesthetically with a superimposed image of a pleasing images of models like pre-existing photograph a black Crawford and seductive eyes woman in profile. A cropped and large lips, has taken on a picture of enlarged wine-colored grotesque appeal. How is it that lips functions as the entire fig- Mutu can make something so ure’s lips. Beige opaque pieces horrific and disturbing, out of of packing tape hold the entire images that were once aesthetiface together in an unsettling cally pleasing to the eye? harmony. Dispersed along the This is perhaps because Muface are patches of white fur and tu’s work refers to a continuation black vellus hairs. Frankenstein- of a history of classifying what like face, is covering a sheet of things are supposed to look like. medical illustration paper which Models, in the sense of the word, contains a drawing of what is are visual guidelines of classifilabeled, “adult female sexual or- cation. Mutu converges different gans.” Mutu, utilizing everything types of models, supermodels, from photographs, to magazine scientific, anatomical models, advertisements, to fur, tape, and racialized models of organs and
Western ideals of beauty) is exactly the prescriptive necessary to liberate the human body from being categorized along racialized hierarchies of beauty?
I
body parts, within Adult Female Sexual Organs. The racial features of the black and white figure, the enlarged lips, are all collaged together, competing within the picture plane. Mutu forces the viewer to contextualize the image as one cohesive unit, and puts pressure on ascertaining sections of the piece as “pretty” and “ugly.” Yet there is a fine tension between what is seen, and what is unseen. For example, in thinking about the importance of the medical illustration paper as the medium that holds the entire collage in place, I cannot help but refer to the science of physiognomy, in which the outer body, such as “the eye, the look, the mouth, the cheeks, the surface of the forehead” in the 18th and 19th centuries, became the sole way with which “most distinct, intelligible and lively display of internal feeling…of all that constitutes the moral life.”5 Developments in science and the classification of the moral aptitude of human beings evolved in tandem with the
cancer of the uterus
wangechi mutu:
Beauty, Terror, and Physiognomic Fantasies
— Wangechi Mutu 2005
conceptualization of race in society. Given Mutu’s background in anthropology6, one cannot help but to think that a part of her artistic approach to bodies and aesthetics, would be evidencing the connections between our bodies and conceptions of knowledge based on the science moral judgment, the belief that externality informs internality. As Johan Caspar Lavater explains, “physiognomical discernment” is “the sensation and the conjectures which certain Physiognomies produce, from which we form a judgment of the moral character which they announce, of the interior of the Man whose face or portrait we examine.”7 Lavater goes on to attempt to explain how the aesthetic make-up of people can produce contradictory reactions:
similar would not have pro-
Every one experiences dif-
that it is not in the least like
ferent sensations conform-
the original.8
ably to the difference of the Physiognomies which excite them. Every figure leaves impressions, which one dis-
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duced. However various the impressions which may be made on different spectators by the same object; however contradictory the judgments formed respecting one and the same figure; there are however
certain
contours,
certain Physiognomies, certain traits-on which all Men, those expected who are absolutely definite of common sense, will pronounce the same decision, and which they will arrange the same class, just as all Men, however different in general their opinions and their judgment with respect to the resemblance of the same portrait, will unanimously agree that such a portrait is striking, or
In acknowledging that there is such a phenomenon that enables multiple viewers to experience varying degrees of aesthetic
reactions to people, or bodies, Lavater opens the door for binary terror to take place in framing Mutu’s work. Lavater makes possible varying moral or aesthetic classifications and judgments as reactions to the physical presentation of the body, mediated through painting or even in real life. Adult Female Sexual Organs leaves unresolved the viewer’s visceral responses to seemingly disparate and grotesquely sutured fragments of the human, more specifically female body. Philosopher Edmund Burke’s 1759 landmark text A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful complements Lavater’s later work on the science of physiognomy in his attempt to connect ideas about beauty and sublimity, seemingly opposing binaries, to a visual, and even sensory process. Acknowledging that moral judgments are often produced by the physical, Burke’s philosophical inquiries are useful in exploring how reactions to Mutu’s work are
in alignment with the ways in which the language of aesthetic claims inform our classifications of bodies through racialized and gendered hierarchies. In fact, throughout most of Burke’s entire essay, concepts of sublimity, terror, beauty, sweetness, smoothness, darkness, and fear inform each other in the production of a system of binaries that seek to explain the existence of those terms. For example, in Cancer of the Uterus, Mutu superimposes a furry face with blue eyes and the same wine-colored lips of Adult Female Sexual Organs onto a medical illustration of a diseased, putridly yellow organ. The composition of the figure’s face informs the condition of the uterus upon which it rests. The blue eyes are far apart, and take on a sad, melancholy spirit. In addition, the enlarged lips are down-turned, adding to the stark emotion evoked within the piece. However, Mutu conveys a rough and uneven sense of surface in her collage, a vast middle-section of black glossy,
wangechi mutu:
Beauty, Terror, and Physiognomic Fantasies
curly hair engulfs the face, held in by two slivers of white fur. Mutu’s odd concoction of racialized elements roughly distorted and connoted with effects of disease and sadness, speaks to Burke’s description of beauty, or lack thereof in feeling. He notes that “all bodies that are pleasant to the touch, are so by the slightness of the resistance they make…resistance is either to motion along the surface, or to the pressure of the parts on one another; if the former be slight, we call the body, smooth, if the latter, soft.”9 By making some parts of the collage smooth, and others rough and textured, Mutu evidences and denies Burke’s conception of beauty as it relates to feeling and resistance. Burke
claims that “to make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary,” which is befitting to Mutu’s technique of making discernable objects indiscernible, unnatural, and misshapen.10 On the other hand, “beauty,” in Burke’s opinion, “hath usually been said to consist in certain proportions of parts… demand[ing] no assistance from our reasoning.”11 Perhaps what is most applicable to Mutu’s work, is that Burke acknowledges his system of opposites and oppositions, which inevitably produce binary affects in a similar fashion. He writes:
how we come to frame her work conclude that as a beautiful as “beautiful” or “terrifying.” Are object presented to the sense, we as consumers of the images by causing a relaxation in the relying upon racializing or genbody, produces the passion of dering the disparate body parts love in the mind; so if by any within each piece in order to means the passion should first make sense of the work holistically? Or are we even continuhave its origin in the mind, a ing upon using an established relaxation of the outward oraesthetic or scientific language gans will as certainly ensue to make sense of what we see? in a degree proportioned to Mutu’s work is not dynamic and the cause.12 captivating simply because of Mutu’s stylized figurations rely the oppositional and even, binaupon a similar technique of an ry motifs attain a certain quality establishing visual opposition, of between-ness; moreover, her which in hand, force the viewer collages spark a consciousness to question the process of reof how labels like “beauty” and producing the types of aesthetic “sublimity” share a historical By the same method of reajudgments discussed, without trajectory of bodily production soning, which we have used in exploring the mechanisms she and reproduction. » nar the enquiry into the causes of employs to make us question the sublime, we may likewise
The New Language of Expressionism from edvard munch to willem de kooning »
drips, scratches, and strokes by svetlana turova
nN
orway, 1893: one of the most repeated, exploited, and recognized images in the history of Western art is born.1 The Scream by Edvard Munch (1863-1944)2 is familiar and identifiable today, yet when first exhibited the painting shocked most audiences, spurring harsh criticism from art critics and viewers alike. Munch had clearly defied traditional views of painting. More than half a century later across the Atlantic, Dutch-born Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning proclaimed, “Every so often a painter has to destroy painting. Cézanne did it and then Picasso did it again with Cubism. Then Pollock did it—he busted our idea of a picture 26
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— boston college
all to hell. Then there could be new pictures again.”3 After a closer look at the Scandinavian master’s oeuvre, it is not only tempting but highly appropriate to squeeze Munch between Cézanne and Picasso in this list of “destroyers.” De Kooning’s word choice above is provocative, indeed; while “destruction” implies violence and annihilation in most contexts, de Kooning applies it to art, designating it a harbinger of renaissance, a sort of tabula rasa for the artist, a chance to redefine the artistic vocabulary and revolutionize painting. Edvard Munch’s “proto-expressionist formal vocabulary”4 —his exploitation of line, color, and form to convey subjectivity—and his enlistment of the unconscious in the artistic process foreshadowed major twentieth-century artistic movements, such
as Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. This essay will relate Munch’s work method, technique, and themes to those of de Kooning in order to examine Munch’s broader relationship to Abstract Expressionism. Particular attention will be given to the following works by Munch: The Sick Child (1885-6), The Scream (1893), and The Kiss (1902). The Munch household was one of repressed anguish; in fact, Edvard Munch commented about his childhood, “I was born dying.”5 Both Munch’s mother and sister died of tuberculosis within a decade. Munch suffered from bouts of life-threatening bronchitis at a young age. The patriarch of the family, Dr. Christian Munch, fell into severe depression as a result of his helplessness in the face of the disease.6 These experiences would doubtless haunt Edvard Munch
the scream — Edvard Munch 1893
for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, Munch received formal education in the arts in Oslo and even obtained several grants to study in France. In Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition, Robert Rosenblum comments on Munch’s experiences abroad: “Like Van Gogh, Munch changed drastically the surface appearance of his painting by absorbing the newest artistic vocabularies that he could study during his frequent sojourns in France,” adding that, like Van Gogh, “Munch could almost always mold this foreign vocabulary to his own emotional needs.”7 Indeed, Munch became extremely receptive to experimental artistic forms and methods when in France probably because he was searching for a way to exorcise the traumatizing memories of his childhood. How did Munch relate to Expressionist ideals? In Expressionism: Art and Idea, Donald Gordon outlines the “ground rules” of Expres28
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sionism, which demand the exploitation of the physical qualities of paint to portray raw emotion rather than the external world.8
Nearly half a century earlier, Munch had articulated his artistic aspirations in the so-
called St. Cloud Manifesto: “No longer would interiors, people who only read and knit, be painted. There should rather be living people breathing and feeling, suffering and loving.”9 Instead of painting what he sees, the artist should paint what he saw in that specific moment, allowing it to be molded by his mind and soul. “It is true that a chair can be just as interesting as a man,” Munch explained, “but the chair must be seen by a man. In one way or another, he must have had an emotional reaction to it and the painter must cause the viewer to react in the same way.”10 His insistence that the audience be moved by the picture suggests that his “subjective psychological experiences” can be raised to the level of “universal statements analyzing the soul of modern man.”11 In his oeuvre, Munch aspired to express in his work the first impression or moment of an experience. One of Munch’s intellectual
the sick child
the new language of epressionism
drips, scratches, and strokes
companions, Swedish playwright August Strindberg, may have encouraged Munch to pursue this agenda more fervently. In his essay, “The New Arts, or the Role of Chance in Artistic Creation” from 1894, he wrote: Now freed from the trouble of finding the right colours, the soul of the painter enjoys the freedom to elicit shapes, and as his hand manipulates the spatula at random, still retaining nature’s model in mind without seeking to copy it, the result reveals itself as a charming combination of the conscious and the unconscious.12
The juxtaposition of the words “manipulates” and “at random” is peculiar because it foreshadows the remarkable paradox so apparent in paintings by the best known Abstract Expressionist, Jackson Pollock. The idea of “randomness” is more complicated than it seems and rather difficult to achieve. While the artist relinquishes control, allowing his conscience, not his intellect, to guide him, he still manages to “manipulate” or control the composition of the piece. The “alloverness”13 of Pollock’s larger paintings and the seemingly spontaneous curves and sinews of the poured paint, to which the mainstream audience often responds, “Anyone could do — Edvard Munch 1885-6
woman I
— Willem De Kooning 1950-52
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the new language of epressionism
drips, scratches, and strokes that!” illustrates the contradiction. Several of Munch’s paintings, among them The Madonna and The Scream, contain drips, a result of the runny, thin quality of the paint Munch employed. Heller explores this detail in his thorough discussion of The Scream: “Like the visible retention of changes in other paintings by him, these drips are intended to leave the impression that the artist created during a fit of passion, almost unconsciously, instinctively and directly without prior thought or study.”14 This idea of the passion, instinct, and the unconscious—all removed from the cerebral realm—prefigures the Surrealists, who favored the spontaneous technique of writing, drawing, and painting called “art automatique”15 and would extend into Jackson Pollock’s vocabulary only decades later.16 Nearly ten years after the death of his sister Sophie, Munch painted The Sick Child, a clear departure point for his mature works. He was continually disturbed by the memory of her suffering and would even later paint several versions of this work. Munch “discovered that my own eyelashes had contributed to the impression of the picture.—I therefore painted them as hints of shadows across the picture.”17 After painting the fig-
ures and periphery of this key work, Munch scratched and scored the surface, destroying the polished look that had characterized a “finished” work in Western art for centuries. In this sense, one can see where de Kooning got his idea of “destroying painting.” Munch’s frustration with The Sick Child and his consequent reworking of the painting through deliberate damage to the canvas recalls Willem de Kooning’s tendencies in the Woman Series. In Woman I, however, the destruction did not involve scraping the surface, but rather abstracting the figure in a tornado of agitated brushstrokes. Gordon explains that the “gestural activity of Woman I, if taken literally, records the countless hours, days, and months of rapid but wholly tiring arm and hand movements.”18 This citation brings to mind the idea of the work of art as a process rather than a finished product, exhibited in the working method and oeuvre of both Munch and de Kooning.
the event of painting. Thus, the act of painting is also an existential affirmation for the artist, blurring “every distinction between art and life.”20 The pouring of paint across a large surface in Pollock, the scumbling of the wax crayon in Gorky,21 the innumerable campaigns in de Kooning, and finally the scratching and scouring of the canvas in Munch are all labor-intensive processes through which the artist manipulates his medium to not only make his mark, but to also transmit the essentials of his unconscious at the moment of inspiration. Munch’s repertoire embodied and foresaw recurring Expressionist themes and techniques, but what did it share with the “abstract” nature of Abstract Expressionism? Munch’s use of symbols and his eclectic portrayal of figures adhered to the path towards abstraction. Nearing abstraction is yet another way to interpret de Kooning’s idea of the destruction of painting.22 Both Munch and de Kooning diminished the figmerican critic Harold Rosenberg19 ure-ground relationship in their works. They created the term “Action Painting” in achieved this effect by flattening forms, ex1952. Just as Munch subordinated ex- panding solid areas of color, and almost ternal reality to internal subjectivity in his completely eliminating modulation. They works, Rosenberg’s theory argued that the reduced the sense of illusion so the figures aesthetic product is always subordinate to are simplified and distorted, thus less life-
A
like. The works were no longer descriptive of what the artist sees, but rather a sign of their subjective vision. The Kiss of 1902 exemplifies Munch’s embrace of abstraction.23 The figures constitute a black and white blob; this form even predates Picasso’s biomorphic forms. The complete “fusion” of the faces summons the psychological melting-together and the loss of individuality of two beings engaged in an erotic act. In a different version of the same year, the grain of the wood with nails visible reinforces the flatness of the figures; moreover, its curvilinear pattern echoes the gentle wave that forms the figures. Perhaps Munch saw the rings in the wood in this particular woodcut as a symbol for infinity; he
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might have also associated the shape with the never-ending cycle of love and death that he witnessed and himself experienced throughout his childhood and adolescence. While an Abstract Expressionist, De Kooning actually felt uncomfortable with completely abandoning figuration. Even his most renowned works Attic and Excavation recall human form in their fleshy tones, limb-like linear forms, and faint references to women’s breasts and buttocks. For this reason, art critic David Sylvester observes that de Kooning’s work “reflects a total commitment to an ongoing dialectic between figuration and abstraction.”24 Despite his significant experimentation with abstraction, de Kooning himself admitted that “even
abstract shapes must have a likeness.”25 In 2001, the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Denmark and the Munch Museum in Oslo organized Echoes of the Scream, a stimulating exhibition that compared Munch to artists of the second half of the twentieth century and was, according to the curator, “very much about the question of how to liberate oneself from figurative painting without surrendering the story of man.”26 Since many Abstract Expressionists found the complete avoidance of figuration challenging and seemed to return to the figure in one way or another, it can be devised that Munch’s frequent depiction of figures does not distance him from said movement, but instead intensifies his connection to it.
the new language of epressionism
drips, scratches, and strokes
— Edvard Munch 1902
the kiss
the hands
— Edvard Munch 1893 34
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drips, scratches, and strokes
Apart from figural depiction, another interesting relationship between the two artists’ oeuvre is the environment in which the figure is placed. The landscape in The Scream, for example, is a “whirling vortex of colours and shapes.”27 The jagged, agitated brushwork that—like a vortex—envelopes Woman I without concealing or revealing her makes up the “no-environment” of many of de Kooning’s Woman paintings. In Munch’s Madonna, the vortex of swirling colors that extend at the tips of her hair and surround her immaculate body, similarly create a “sense of liquid space, a type of fluid environment.”28 The Hands by Munch also shares the no-environment, the whirlpool form, and even the color scheme of Woman I. In de Kooning, restless smears of heavy impasto replace the truncated hands reaching for the naked figure in Munch’s Hands. In all these ways, Munch and de Kooning can be united across the century-old history of Expressionism. Such a connection fortunately allows the art historian to discover yet even more relationships among Munch and other modern artists. In particular, Arshile
Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Francis Bacon share many formal and thematic aspects with Edvard Munch. One of the recurring ideas in the work of all these artists is unmistakably the role of the unconscious and the enlistment of chance in artistic creation. Certainly the duality of a work of art as both process and product reveals the importance of the self to these artists and hints at the many philosophers and theorists whose writings paralleled and perhaps inspired these creative minds and talented hands.29 Lastly, one cannot ignore the overlapping sensations and moods evoked by these works. Fear, hopelessness, isolation, even revelation and irony, constitute the universal emotions that these works help us clarify for ourselves. In 1953, Austrian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka, inevitably influenced by Munch, wrote the following words: Edvard Munch, too, has turned to ashes; but as long as he lived he wore no blindfold. He kept his eyes wide open, his gaze reached into our time of transition, into our most intimate self where fear lodg-
es in our hearts…. He knew that he had breathed a new spirit into the language of pictograms which is older than all spoken or written language.”30
Kokoschka’s reference to a blindfold stresses the indifference and impersonality of the modern society scarred by the horrors of war. Munch “wore no blindfold” because he was not intimidated by the inner world. Through hundreds of pages of writing, Munch constantly reflected on his moods, often provoked by the emotive Norwegian landscape, and channeled his fear and anxiety into countless paintings and prints. Kokoschka’s view of Munch as the creator of a new artistic language, echoed by the many art critics who have dubbed Munch the “Father of Expressionism,” appropriately parallels de Kooning’s comment on the destruction of painting that served as the departure point for this fascinating discussion. » nar
notes 1» PAUL KLEE 1. Paul Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898-1918, ed. Felix Klee, (California: University of California Press, 1964) 23. 2. Paul Klee, “Opinions on Creation,” in Paul Klee, ed. Margaret Miller, 3rd ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946) 12. 3. Klee, The Diaries, 69. 4. Maurice Denis, “Subjective and Objective Deformation,” in Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book By Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkley University: California Press, 1968) 105-107. 5. Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook, trans. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., 1953) 26-30.
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6. Klee, The Diaries, 144. 7. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics the Invisible Art (New York: HarperPerennial, 2003) 30. 8. Paul Klee, The Thinking Eye, ed. Jurg Spiller, trans. Heinz Norden, vol. 1 (London: Lund Humphries, 1961) 35-37. 9. Denis, Subjective and Objective, 105-107. 10. Klee, The Diaries, 260.
2» MEATYARD’S FAMILY ALBUM 1-3. Jonathan Rhem, The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater and Other Figurative Photographs (Distributed Art Publishers, New York, 2002)
3» THE DRAG DIFFERENCE 1. Jennifer Blessing, et al, Rrose is a rrose is a rrose : gender
performance in photography. (New York, N.Y. : Guggenheim Museum, 1997) 107. 2. The title, Being and Having, refers to the Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic assertion that while men have the phallus, women are the phallus. Here, Opie shows these women as both being and having phallus; their gender identities escape the binary and encompass both femininity and masculinity. 3. All of these women, as Opie asserts, are “identifying as fags and reconstructing their top and bottom roles in terms of the gay male daddy/boy script.” These are not women who wish “to be men or pass as men all the time. They just want to borrow male fantasies and play with them.” (Qtd. in Anna Marie Smith, “The Feminine Gaze,” The Advocate 19 november 1991: 83.) 4. Qtd. in Smith, 82. 5. For this series, Opie wanted to create a “body of work that was about being really out” and show these people as “incred-
ibly noble.” (Qtd. in Guggenheim Museum Online Exhibition September-January 2008 <http://www.guggenheim.org/ new-york/exhibitions/on-viewnow/cathy-opie-american-photographer>.) 6. Qtd. in Guggenheim 7. Qtd, in Harmony Hammond, Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (New York: Rizzoli, 2000) 152. 8. Nicholas Baume, “About a Face,” Andy Warhol Portraits (Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1999) 91. 9. Qtd, in Baume, 95. 10. Qtd. in Baume, 119. 11. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York, Routledge, 1992) 131-132. 12. Garber, 48. 13. Qtd. in Barbara DeGenevieve, “Letting us Look: Scandalous genders or Blur Baby Blur,” Camerawork vol. 21
(1994): 47.
United Kingdom.
14. Qtd, in DeGenevieve, 47.
7. Lavater, London, 1789-98, 93. 8. Lavater, 94.
4» BEAUTY, TERROR, AND PHYSIOGNOMIC FANTASIES 1. Mylar is a thick, durable film made of polyester, often used in photo or laser copying. 2. Jordan Kantor, “Wangechi Mutu,” Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing, ed. Emma Dexter, London: Phaidon Press, 2005, 214. 3. Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, New York: Routledge, 1997, 13. 4. Schneider, 13. 5. Johann Caspar Lavater, Essays on physiognomy, designed to promote the knowledge and love of mankind, London, 1789-98, 16. 6. Mutu was trained in Anthropology at the United World College of the Atlantic in Wales,
9. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Oxford University Press: London, 2008, 110. 10. Burke, 54. 11. Burke, 84.
upon his death in 1944. Kenneth Clark, “Edvard Munch”, in Edvard Munch: 1863-1944 (Great Britain: Arts Council, 1974), 13. 3. Qtd in Donald E. Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 198. 4. Reinhold Heller, Edvard Munch: The Scream (New York: The Viking Press, 1972), 43.
12. Burke, 136.
5. Heller, “Munch, Edvard”, Grove Art Online.
5» DRIPS, SCRATCHES, AND STROKES
6. Also a Christian fundamentalist, Munch’s father attributed all this illness as a form of punishment from God.
1. Artists Rights Society. “Most Frequently Requested Artists,” Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, http://www.arsny. com/requested.html (accessed December 16, 2007). 2. Edvard Munch bestowed 1,000 paintings, 15,400 etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts, 4,500 watercolors and drawings, and six sculptures to his hometown of Oslo, Norway
7. Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1975), 104. 8. As dictated in 1937 by one of the first American Expressionist groups, The Ten, Expressionism was: 1. The attempt to reduce the interpretation of nature or life in general to the rawest emotional elements. 2. A com-
plete and utter dependence on pigment as an expressive agency rather than an imitative or descriptive one. 3. An intensity of vision which tries to catch the throb of life, necessarily doing violence to external facts to lay bare internal facts. Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea, 195. 9. Edvard Munch: 1863-1944, 12. 10. Heller, 23. 11. Heller, 39. 12. August Strindberg, “The New Arts, or the Role of Chance in Artistic Creation” (1894) in Selected Essays by August Strindberg, ed. and trans. Michael Robinson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 103. 13. “Alloverness” refers to the fact that the viewer’s eye travels all over the painting without settling on any single focal point, a term coined by art critic Clement Greenberg. 14. Heller, 52.
notes cont.
tion Painters included Pollock, Gorky, and de Kooning.
15. Strindberg, “Role of Chance in Artistic Creation,” 106.
20. Ken Carpenter, “Rosenberg, Harold”, Grove Art Online, December 7, 2007, http://www. groveart.com.
16. While it is intriguing to associate the drips on Munch’s canvases with those of Pollock’s, one must take care to distinguish the working methods of the two artists. While Munch propped the canvas or board vertically so the thin paint ran down it as he worked (it was not necessarily splattered), Pollock placed the canvas on the floor and enlisted gravity to create his poured paintings. 17. Edvard Munch, “The Genesis of the Life Frieze,” 1929 in R. Rosenblum et al., Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1978), 147. 18. Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea, 203-4. 19. Rosenberg’s favorite Ac38
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21. Lisa Mintz Messinger, Abstract Expressionism and Other Modern Works: The Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, ed. Gary Tinterow, Lisa Mintz Messinger, and Nan Rosenthal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 55. 22. Abstraction can be thought of as destruction because Western art, unlike Islamic art, which has a strong tradition of geometric and floral motifs, has for centuries been so invested in figural representation. 23. Interestingly enough, Strindberg described the picture with misogynistic overtones, “The fusion of two beings, the smaller of which, shaped like a carp, seems on the point of de-
vouring the larger as is the habit of vermin, microbes, vampires, or women.” Qtd. in Clark, Edvard Munch: 1863-1944, 7. 24. David Sylvester, “Flesh was the reason” in Willem de Kooning: Paintings, ed. Marla Prather (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 29. 25. Prather, Willem de Kooning: Paintings, 93. 26. Holger Reenberg, “Echoes of the Scream”, in Echoes of the Scream, ed. Christian Gether and Holger Reenberg (Denmark: ARKEN Modern Museum of Art, 2001), 36. 27. Christian Gether, “The Bridge to the 20th Century” in Echoes of the Scream, 16. 28. Heller, 53. 29. Søren Kierkegaard and Claude Lévi-Strauss, among others, come to mind. 30. Oskar Kokoschka, “Edvard Munch’s Expressionism,” College Art Journal 13, no.1 (1953): 17, http://www.jstor.org.
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