JOHN CURRIN review by David
Rimanelli
What is normalcy love? Mom
and dad’s? Teen sweethearts? God? Your Identification with certain characters
from the soaps? From Art History 101? Is It the way you feel about your
favorite under- wear? This earlyish midcareer retrospective of painters by John
Currin provides ample material for the elaboration of these questions;
authorities ranging from
The exhibition opens with
the middle-aged-woman partings that first earned Currin a particular notoriety
in the early ‘90s. No discussion of these works should omit Kim Levin’s
admonishment regarding their debut at Andrea Rosen Gallery to the readers of
the Village Voice, “Boycott this show.” Currin poses his subjects against stark
blank backgrounds, which he has described as suggestive of Brice Marden’s
monochromatic fields—late modernist high culture or, in the artist’s words, “constipated
masculinity.” The expressions and stances of the figures range from the
neutral-as-weird to caricature and the grotesque, like poor Ms. Omni, 1993, a tortuously zigzagged
road map of plastic surgeries and knowing attitudes. Bea Arthur Naked, 1991, remains the most sensational of these
pictures, and the best. The artist depicts the star of Maude, that ‘70s sitcom
about an upper- middle-class do-gooder, women’s libber, and suburban wit-not
Arthur’s later incarnation In The Golden Girls Naked, Arthur nevertheless
remains composed and dignified, her smile and slightly peaked eyebrows conveying
a sense of irony, even amusement. The portrait is too psychological for the
everyday anti- feminist caricature. And Currin’s technique, stiff but more than
adequate, dry but not fussy, betokens too much effort for the sake of mere
snide laughter.
Painted in the rapidly
expanding ‘90s con- text of well-meaning art (the kind that Maude herself might
collect were she part of the scene?), Bea
Arthur Naked draws together multiple threads: the “incorrect”
representation of women; the campy Pop aura of television sitcoms, perhaps a
hangover from the 80s (think “ Infotainment” and all those other group shows
about a generation raised by the unwholesome light of the tube); and a
commitment to figurative painting in the face of politicized art practices, the
ever escalating fortunes of photography, and scatter and/or abject art. Perhaps
Currin indulged in the last tendency somewhat, given his debased or pathetic
subject matter and an impoverished or superannuated technique that savors more
of the thrift-shop aesthetic than of the Old Masters.
Currin might welcome the
idea that the women-in-bed partings that followed in 1993 are allegories of the
beholder after the manner of Michael Fried’s analyses. Apropos of the “girl in bed’s
he has said, “She’s just a completely passive Isolated watcher or spectator….it’s
an allegory of what you do when you look at the painting.” Subsequent Currin
females become ever more pneumatic, with strong emphasis on the breasts. (“Reny
Fleur,” aka Matthew Licht, celebrated Currin’s mammary madness in Juggs magazine.) Alongside this sickish
thematic evolves Currin’s increasingly pronounced dabbing in the art-historical
warehouse. But the eagerly approved notion that he is reviving Old Master
techniques is a red herring. Yes, his technique becomes much more fluid and
even flashy; the
Again, Currin forces the “wrongness”
of the subject matter, even as he combines it with a brushier, let’s-have-fun-with-paint
technique. Or he “has fun with’’ allegory in The Wizard, 1994, a coarse picture of a shrunken, clownlike
man with fat red lips, his mascara-smeared eyes closed in rapture as he
palpates a young lady’s fleshy bosom. The wizard wears black gloves that
presumably come from the fetish-gear shop next to the clown-outfit boutique on
Currin’s pervy version of
Recently, this straight
white male painter has turned to gay men as subjects, as in Homemade Pasta
1999, his image of same-sex domesticity. Is he baiting the gays now? Compare
the older guy in profile to the twink boyfriend-with his horrifying lunette
smile--as they tease out the lamp, spermatozoan white pasta. Had Currin
confined himself to normal love, eschewing fraught sexual politics and weird
physiognomic and anatomical renderings, keeping himself unsullied by perversion,
his painters would presumably be inconsequential. (This show includes perhaps
one Image of normal love, Currin’s portrait of his wife, Rachel Feinstein
wearing a fur and huge sunglasses- although the Jackie O shades already tip the
Image toward camp.) The “liberation” of painting is accomplished because of the
licentiousness of content. This makes Currin’s work exemplary: Dead painting
lives on because of the unhealthy-politically incorrect, historically
inappropriate passions of its practitioners. (As perversions go, what’s more
extreme than necrophilia?) After all, Currin first garnered the spotlight when
the tiresome “death” question was extremely present in art criticism and
practice, and he seldom misses an opportunity to underscore his contentious,
bravura response to that context. But nowadays, the matter is glossed over or
simply Ignored, suggested that Currin’s MCA survey charts his passage from mad
bad boy to epicurean of oddity, sort of a post-postmodern Balthus—a comfortable
position, no doubt, but one that even now prompts the question, Is that all he
really wants?