Debra Drexler: Resuscitating Gauguin
Molly Kleiman
Debra Drexler, Lost in Paris, oil on canvas, 72 x 95 in. Image courtesy of the artist.
Every artist struggles with the specters of the Great Artists and Writers and Other Masters whose epithets we capitalize. Skilled artists can ape the styles of their favorites, but only for a select few does appropriation become reinvention. Debra Drexler has confronted her "anxiety of influence" with clever literalism, studious particularity and playful invention. She figuratively and fictionally reincarnates Gauguin in "Gauguin’s Zombie," an installation she has been developing for over four years. "Gauguin’s Zombie" is impossible to categorize. Drexler has linked each artifact–fictional and extant; paintings, faxes, posters, journals and ads–into a fantastical narrative. Drexler crumbles the distinction between fiction and reality.
Drexler credits Judy Watson in particular for sparking her four-year development of Gauguin’s fictional resurrection. Watson, an aboriginal artist from Australia exhibited "Our Skin in Your Collections, Our Bones in Your Collections," in which she explored the curious phenomenon of Australian curators displaying the remains of aboriginal people beside artworks. A Hawaii resident, Drexler is familiar with stereotypes of paradise and the ways in which "people graft the stereotypes onto a place." Hawaii is an American fantasyland (honeymoons! white sand beaches! hula dances! sculpted men in grass skirts!?). Drexler appropriates and inverts this practice in her parodic reimagining of display, colonialism and Gauguin.
Drexler resuscitates Gauguin only as far as zombie-hood, dresses his sallow, yellowed body in Nike shirts and red baseball caps, and leads him to wander the post-modern Parisian streets.
Her story begins in the basement of the National Ethnographic Museum, where curators are preparing for the "blockbuster exhibit: ‘Fathers of Modern Art’" by procuring the Fathers’ paintings and the Fathers’ cadavers. Gauguin awakens. His first act: to grope for the female museum worker. Drexler explains, his "body holds some trace of instinctive memory."
We follow detail by curious detail, as Drexler unfolds this narrative. We trace Gauguin’s reawakening through various forms of representation. Some explore Gauguin’s journey: large format, lush paintings (that appear as stills from the tale); an illustrated diary written by the revived Gauguin (entitled "Neo Neo," or "foul smelling," as opposed to Gauguin’s actual journal, "Noa Noa," or "fragrant"); a life-size reconstruction of Gauguin’s thatched painted studio/hut (complete with leafy exterior, oily palette, easel, book of Gauguin’s masterpieces, and Vaimato water bottle). Drexler also tracks others’ responses to Gauguin’s resurrection: she prints email correspondence between Museum personnel ("this is a family oriented museum and I will not have our audience frightened away from our biggest exhibit by zombie stories") and flyers from protestors ("RETURN THE DEAD TO THEIR NATIVE COUNTRIES").
Drexler haunts Gauguin’s zombie with his own specters. Gauguin’s fascination with death was "a Western fantasy of what death looks like," Drexler explains. She points to a dark figure, lurking in the corner of one of her paintings, Gauguin’s Spirit of the Walking Dead. Look closer, and you can detect this spirit lurking near Gauguin (now also a member of the walking dead) in several of Drexler’s works.
The installation, an exercise in post-colonial appropriations and feminist inversions, is playful and subversive. She explores themes obliquely and cleverly, forcing no brittle lessons about the conflicts of post-colonial, no stubborn treatise on the poisonous male gaze. She doesn’t need to: Drexler, 21st century female artist, holds the power to depict the great Father of Modern Art and notorious womanizer, Gauguin, with rotting skin and removable penis.
