Susan Weinreich’s Journey to Hell and Back Spawns "erotica"
L.P. Streitfeld
Courtesy of the artist, Susan Weinreich.
The ancient alchemists sought personal transformation through the injection of spirit into matter. This struggle between body and soul was externalized in the physical transmutation of lead, a poisonous substance symbolizing the human shadow, into gold, the royal treasure. Alchemists risked their livelihood, their sanity and their lives for this elusive search for spiritual transcendence.
Susan Weinreich was blowing glass, a material made from lead, during her sophomore year at the Rhode Island School of Design when she suffered a psychotic break and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Her twenty-five year-long recovery was possible only due to her process of creating art that transformed internal chaos into order as her style migrated between figuration and abstraction. Indeed, her imagery amounts to an implicitly body-centered psychological art that is as illuminating as it is disturbing.
This artist has been on a journey to an internal hell and come out the other end with some powerful insights. This past winter, Casola Gallery in Peekskill presented "erotica," 38 works on paper completed over a broad spectrum of time — from the early ‘70’s right up to the present. "The Bell Jar Series," completed before her 1974 psychotic break, and "The Midnight Series" of the early 1990’s are preliminary to a recent breakthrough in which she transmutes the gender opposites into startlingly original interpretations of the hermaphrodite, an ancient symbol for integration.
The viewer is challenged to participate on a journey that requires remaining as present and open to new possibilities as Weinreich did in preserving her surface for automatic expression. Her hooded figures and big rounded bodies are vessels of containment for the primitive power that threatens psychosis even as it drives creativity in the individual.
This is the art of transmutation where psychological growth is mirrored in the body. Breasts become handles. The penis spirals into snakelike forms. The vagina is an explosive terrain harboring forbidden forces that can send the body out of control. The task of the artist is to master this erotic power for the purposes of creation. Weinreich provides us with an entry into the process whereby the power of the feminine finds its form.
"The Bell Jar Series" was completed around the time of the publication of Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical novel about a woman’s psychotic struggle to break free of societal roles. This intense series elicits the electrified charge of psychic dislocation, the chaos of the struggle between opposites realized in the floating genital forms and dissociated body parts.
The continuation of the journey by means of the rhythm of hand to paper is "The Midnight Series" of automatic renderings. Here dual figures come back into form with pronounced orifices breathing the same negative space, male and female seamlessly united. In the recent works, figures become more cohesively intertwined. Economy of language unites with the fluidity of lines while the only distinguishing body characteristics tend to be the glandular. These unified gender connections represent the interconnectedness of life under a new paradigm.
These recent works make the act of metamorphosis accessible — with narrative existing inside as well as out. Here we are free of any complexity that would complicate the underlying meaning or divert from the primitive erotic themes of attraction and repulsion, integration and disintegration, the breaking down of old forms and building up of the new. This is the authentic underground passage of the female at the cusp of a new millennium, at a time when the erotic is being recognized as integral to feminine creative power.
This pivotal exhibition serves as prelude to the anticipated exhibition of erotic drawing at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum this spring. The time is ripe for a new dialectic regarding the erotic and the art of Susan Weinrich is a revelation to a new order in which genders are equal and a new archetype, the Hieros Gamos, or sacred marriage, replaces the struggle between the opposites. Through the dark psychological and physical hell this artist has traveled from her experimentation with lead, we arrive at a virtual gold mine. The ancient passage of the alchemist is made visible in the body of a woman through her extraordinarily unforgettable imagery.
