Andy Warhol. This is the twenty-first century.
Andy Warhol / Tracey Emin / Adolph Gottlieb
by Harriet Zinnes
Andy WarholHarriet Zinnes
This is the twenty-first century. This is not the age of impressionism, post-impression, or minimalism. Surrealism is still here as is realism of whatever variety, but modernism is over. Perhaps postmodernism is still here or trying to hide itself or to go forward without fallout. (And of course all these art critical terms are a bore and probably have little practical substance.) Though life is as usual a precarious peace on the very edge of a monstrous, unbalanced world, there are still things in this global world that do not change. There is still the market, and the artist who knows it as well as Andy Warhol was able to use it with efficiency and success through what Donald Kuspit has called "aesthetic management."
In the show under review, however, "Piss & Sex: Paintings and Drawings," at Gagosian Gallery (980 Madison Avenue, New York City through November 2nd) shows Warhol’s early paintings and drawingsson one subject matter: sex. The paintings are called "oxidation" because, simply, they are made from piss. (Using the word in a review seems to take it out of the street and the quotidian vulgar and into critical theory.) The material apparently does not allow for much variety. The colors that are imposed are similar in almost all the canvases as are the forms. In other words, the paintings become boring and ineffective; their only claim to interest is their unusual material.
The drawings are all of penises in various individual states. Again, though the shapes change and shift in places on the paper, there is just repetition. Whatever excitement there is in sex is not visible in the drawings. But what is clear is that Andy Warhol could draw. He could paint. He knew what he wanted to do with his art and did it effectively, efficiently and with daring. There is nothing slipshod in the works of this show. Always visible is "aesthetic management." o
Tracey Emin
This is certainly a season for cunts and dicks. Porn? Probably, but there they are their simulacra in an art gallery. Look look look. Repetition can be boring, even in sexual representation. Tracey Emin, in addition to being prurient (or is she merely exhibiting, ah, a carefree ordinary twenty-first century sexuality), has something to say about feminism, though it may be more narcissism than feminism, and about being a woman, and about being repulsed and angry and forlorn at the traditional shenanigans of the male. So why not get a pussy (a cat, please) of her own and draw it. Oh well, go see the show! And drawings with, naturally, stitches (the female code–though she insists it’s not because stitching relates to the woman but because she is good at it). But stitches and drawings are not enough in the new exhibition, the second, at Lehmann Maupin (540 West 26 Street through October 19th). There is a wide variety of media, film, and–in addition to the embroidery and drawing, neon–sculptural installation. Like a Jenny Holzer or Louise Bourgeois, she uses the word; therefore, below, above and during the scant visual effects there is language, as in the title of the present exhibition: "I Think It’s In My Head." But whatever the word is, whatever the drawing, there is THE BED. But here we have a bed relieved of detritus, a more refined bed than the one in her earlier Lehmann Maupin exhibition–clean and with a colorful, stitched quilt.
There is autobiography a plenty here or, again, is it narcissism? One remembers the tent in the first New York exhibition that was appliqued with the names of everyone she had ever slept with including her twin brother (she explained in an interview that she had meant "slept" literally). What the body does in her work–its exposure of the female pudenda, etc.–the language may do even more, and it is a language with careless spelling (a self-advertising ploy?) that is completely part of the uncensored personality (or the cleverly created personality) that is Tracey Emin.
Adolph Gottlieb: A Survey Exhibition
The Jewish Museum (1109 Fifth Avenue, New York City, through March 2, 2003) is showing thirty-one paintings of one of the leading American Abstract Expressionist painters, Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974) The exhibition was organized by IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez in Valencia, Spain, and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation in New York. Before arriving in New York the work was shown in Valencia and Madrid, Spain, as well as in Wuppertal, Germany.
Though seemingly not a very large exhibition, the impact is strong and telling. We see the painter emerging from representation-based easel painting to large, even mural sized abstract pictures. He called his abstractions "pictographs," actually symbols enclosed in grids of strange forms of animals and signs of various sorts within compartmental spaces. Sometimes the later free-flowing figures remind one of Miro, but the earlier closely arranged and compacted grids are much too busy to give the sense of the more open Miro. Yet in the later work, like Miro, Gottlieb leaves major white grounds empty of figuration with floating circles of vivid reds or greens or yellows to assure a viewer that what the artist sees is no easy surreal abstraction.
Gottlieb is a bit of a philosopher or perhaps more of a thinker about the sorrows of humanity. Very much a Jungian, he was influenced as were other Abstract Expressionists during World War II by theories of the "collective unconscious." So it is that this artist of the pictographs could write–and how especially relevant are his words during our own turbulent times: "Today when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is reality.
