Deborah Kass, left to proper, “Making Men 4” (1992) and “Puff Piece” (1992)
Deborah Kass created the Artwork Historical past Work out of frustration at not seeing herself within the halls of museums whilst she fell in love with the work of the artists themselves. That contradictory dynamic of attraction and repulsion is what provides these work their energy, as her biting critiques are tempered by her humor, and her formalist sensibility marries disparate elements to create searing assaults on the historical past of exclusion.
There’s a curious picture of a headless, chestless, and armless Lucy van Pelt from the favored Peanuts caricature that Kass reproduces à la Warhol on two of the dozen work in her present exhibition, The Artwork Historical past Work 1989–1992 at Salon 94 gallery. Rendered as a easy white line on a black floor, the erasure makes the usually recognizable cartoon determine virtually indecipherable, reworking it into one thing unfamiliar whereas pushing us to query the foundations of what we expect we all know.
Works by Kass, left to proper, “Before and Happily Ever After” (1991), “Nature Morte” (1990), and “Untitled (First World, Third World)” (1990)
“Puff Piece” (1991) pairs a black-and-white, Pollockesque splash with Superwoman or Supergirl (I’m undecided which) who blows a stream of air on the semen-like splurt. The entire collection performs with David Salle’s well-known postmodernist portray collection from the Eighties during which he juxtaposed photographs that we usually don’t affiliate with each other. In doing so, Kass collides the stylistic calling playing cards of outstanding male artists with a brand new, extra sexualized studying that turns splashes of paint into cum pictures. She instills the portray with a extra frank and illuminating sensibility, not like Salle’s shadowy power, that just about at all times finally ends up feeling like we simply walked into the latter’s remedy appointment.
Maybe it’s as a result of Salle’s collection is much less influential at present than it was within the ’80s, and his inventive declare that that means is usually as much as the viewer to outline seems like simply one other repackaging for {the marketplace}, however Kass seems much less excited by that advertising recreation. As a substitute, she’s targeted on the facility of the techniques that problem us and may take away our company within the act of viewing.
Deborah Kass, “How Do I Look” (1991)
In “Untitled (First World, Third World)” (1990), the artist strikes on the Chilly Struggle language of the interval, which positioned the liberal democracies of the West in opposition to what we’d name the International South at present. By combining a traditional Cubist composition with an African panorama, Kass hints at Picasso’s influences that propelled his personal experimentation with house. In the identical means, Disney, as represented by the Dumbo franchise, is transported to the African savannah — a symbolic act of return? — versus Florida, the place the big-eared fella’s story usually takes place. Whereas the African heritage of the Cubist work is extra obscured, the position of the beloved cartoon elephant, adorned with full circus make-up, in what might seem like a extra historically appropriate panorama appears absurd — by no means thoughts that Dumbo is an Asian elephant with amorphous African elephant options, together with large ears and being virtually hairless. African affect has migrated in lots of instructions, leaving the oblique progeny of that continent in a conceptual limbo on the African plains. The paths of affect stay invisible, however intuitively we see them. The depopulation of an African panorama flattens the place right into a silhouetted sundown scene in distinction to the spatial improvements of Cubism — each of which mine Africa for various functions.
Kass’s work is most pointed when she focuses on lesbian or queer id. Two of a number of the most well-known photographs of lesbians in Fashionable artwork are mixed with a extra fluid, all-over summary model in “How Do I Look” (1991), together with Jasper Johns’s “The Critic Sees” (1961), during which Johns swaps a critic’s bespectacled eyes with mouths. The coital French girls are drawn atop rosy swirls, as a critical Gertrude Stein appears out from her Picasso-painted portrait. Every thing is rendered in excessive distinction, and the austere public persona of the Jewish-American mental dominates the extra delicate portrayal of same-sex love. Whereas Stein was brazenly lesbian at a time when prohibitions in opposition to being out existed, Johns has at all times been extra coy about his personal sexuality, even a long time after Stein’s loss of life. It additionally brings up the query: After we stroll by means of a museum, can we even acknowledge queerness? This portrait of lesbian ardour was painted by a straight man, but it’s the most identifiably LGBTQ+ picture for the customer. “Are we actually looking?” Kass asks, or, like Johns’s slam in opposition to critics, are we unable to see whereas we proceed to talk?
Deborah Kass, “Subject Matters” (1989–90)
Warhol, Pollock, Lichtenstein, Motherwell, Salle, Picasso, Johns, Courbet, and Walt Disney all obtain their share of punches within the enviornment with Kass as she tears aside the pretentiousness of fashion and branding, whereas serving to us concentrate on the unseen. But, there’s a deep sense of longing within the work, one which hints on the energy dynamics of erasure.
In “Subject Matters” (1990), a letter “I” from an illuminated manuscript is central to the composition as a declaration of selfhood, although it additionally evokes Robert Morris’s famend “I-Box” (1962) sculpture, the place the capital I opens to disclose a nude Morris smiling on the viewer with a self-satisfied grin. The letter is flanked by the identical semé of headless Lucy’s, and on the opposite facet by Johns’s bespeckled critic, however this time stacked atop a pile of eyeglasses paying homage to the haunting {photograph} from Auschwitz that she floods with the raking gentle present in Rembrandt’s “Three Crosses” (1653). The connection between personhood and authorship is clear. Who’s allowed to declare “I” brazenly and publicly? Who’s allowed to obfuscate their identities in visible play whereas by no means rendering themselves susceptible to dismissal or assaults?
That is the primary time {that a} almost full sweep of the Artwork Historical past Work is on view (minus one which presently hangs within the Dallas Museum of Artwork and one other, a companion to “Emissions Control,” that couldn’t be added due to house limitations). Maybe it’s human to wish to belong, however Kass makes us really feel like that urge would possibly come at another person’s expense. Is the artist a liberator or a performer dancing atop the labor, concepts, our bodies, or histories of people that could also be denied the chance to bask within the highlight. I think the discomfort within the works is why they proceed to resonate at present, full with their jocular humor, as we discover no place to cover within the starkness of their message — they poke us into contemplating the in jokes that pack artwork historical past, and opening ourselves as much as the query of whether or not we’re contained in the temple of artwork ourselves and who we could also be excluding on this revered house.
Deborah Kass, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (1991)
Deborah Kass: The Artwork Historical past Work 1989-1992 continues at Salon 94 (3 East 89th Road, Higher East Aspect, Manhattan) by means of March 29. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
