In the City, Two Women
By Michael Rush
Art exhibitions are often born of "propositions" that curators, after much looking and thinking, seek to illustrate through assembled works of art. Hand-Painted Pop, for example, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s consideration of the cultural influences on American painting at midcentury, and Global Conceptualism, the Queens Museum of Art’s survey of conceptual art movements in parts of the world not usually examined by historians (such as Africa or Eastern Europe), both had strong points of view supported by relevant artworks and critical essays.
Two Women: Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe might appear to cry out for several propositions, each related somehow to feminist art, queer theory, performance, and any number of other readily available markings of contemporary art and politics, because these two particular women are lesbians who share their life together. But no such grand scheme is afoot here. In fact, to enlist such headings, worthy as they may be, would be to rob the work on view of its essential importance: that is, its transcendent artfulness.
Truth be told, the occasion for Two Women: Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe is nothing more (nor less) than the opportunity to celebrate under one roof the visual and intellectual richness of two artists whose journey is leading them, separately and jointly, ever more deeply into the formal and conceptual questions that have occupied artists since the turn of the last century. Both are seeking a new and intensely personal pictorial language.
Moyer’s and Pepe’s work bear no obvious resemblance to one another, yet when they are viewed in tandem, one can see that both artists display a clear interest in abstraction and the formal qualities of painting and sculpture. Pepe’s mammoth handmade installation stretching from the second-floor balcony of the PBICA and hovering above the vast ground floor at the back of the space swoops down on Moyer’s canvases, which in turn infuse the gallery with bursts of color and a plethora of forms that, in a sense, create a dance of light and shape with Pepe’s construction.
Moyer, self-described as the child of "hippie" parents, was raised in a series of West Coast communes and has supported herself for several years as a graphic artist. Social issues and poster colors find an easy alliance in her paintings, but it would not be a surprise if this artist were to evolve into a pure abstractionist.
In many of Moyer’s pictures, organic shapes, drips of color, words, hands (clenched fists), and images of political pop icons (Marx and Lenin, for example) cohabitate in color fields of purples, oranges, reds, and rust. This collision of politics and beauty, often garnished with glitter, as in Everything for Everybody (2001), is a decidedly post-Communist strategy that attaches a now-tired political message to a revitalizing feminized worldview. The two godfathers of a failed totalitarian system here look pretty in pink, fading into the background of what appears to be a voluptuous female form. That same form (fleshy torso and legs) resurfaces in Affiche #6 (Avenger) (2002), but without any sign of male despots. What looks like a many-ventricled heart descends on the mustard-and-gray curved shape that dominates the piece. Is the heart the great avenger? For Moyer, perhaps abstraction is.
Moyer has taken a 1980s East Village sensibility, characterized by a politicized street sense mixed with pastiche, bold colors, and kitsch, and reunited it with a longing for modernist sobriety. In her paintings, increasingly biomorphic shapes swimming in empty (white) space stake a claim for the feminine in the customarily male dominated world of abstraction. Sue Williams, a few years her senior, and others are engaged in the same enterprise. Moyer may find another predecessor in Janet Sobel (1894—1968), one of the unheralded women of Abstract Expressionism, whose work progressed from primitive yet recognizable figures to allover abstractions in which she poured paint on the canvas or blew on it when it was still dripping wet. (1)
Far from having a hippie childhood, Sheila Pepe grew up in an Italian immigrant family in New Jersey. It is not accidental that her preferred materials include shoelaces and rubber bands. Her grandfather owned shoe repair shops, and she has been consciously paying homage to him in her work for several years. Pepe’s fierce intelligence as an artist is cast in a deep appreciation for everyday life and simple encounters such as one might have in a corner store (her parents ran a restaurant) or over the phone with a vendor. She enjoys purchasing her ingredients from mom-and-pop shops and relishes having been taught to crochet by her mother.
Her artistic enterprise is far from simple, however. Pepe has much more in common with such internationally known artists as Robert Gober, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Jessica Stockholder than she does with neighborhood sewing circles, yet she would feel comfortable in the company of either group. Herein lies Pepe’s enormous appeal: her work is propelled by an enduring identification with both the stuff of home life and the complex problems of art historical inquiry, especially the formal concerns of modernism. Her entangled constructions initiate profound interrogations of sculptural space while engaging the human body in the making and viewing of art. There is no passive way to encounter a Pepe installation.
In 1942, the maverick manipulator of space Marcel Duchamp created his installation Mile of String for the exhibition The First Papers of Surrealism in New York. He transformed an entire room with twine, from top to bottom and side to side. In subsequent years, artist Fred Sandback and theater director Richard Foreman also energized space with allover webs of string. Pepe’s shoelace structures, while sharing some surface affinity with these antecedents, are much less aggressive, even as they incorporate viewers inescapably into their morass.
They are also charged with humor. Contemplating a sculpture made from thousands of shoelaces cannot help but bring a smile to one’s face. "What is this person doing?" is a familiar refrain heard from museum- and gallery-goers when they encounter Pepe’s obsessively intense work. What she is doing is radical. In the practice of crocheting, she is reclaiming the feminine and liberating it from operative stereotypes (from both ends of the spectrum, conservative and liberal) that view "home work" as either fundamental or oppressive. In this regard, her lesbianism stands in the face of those who would criticize traditional women’s labor as retrograde and submissive. She’s here, she’s queer, and she’s crocheting.
This is not to say that Pepe is trumping "traditional values." Crocheting, learned at her mother’s table, is simply something that she enjoys and has perfected. It becomes triumphant when she takes it to the monumental level that she does here (and elsewhere, including Shrink [2000] and Under the F & G [2003]). She imbues this activity with social and gender significance, but the resultant construction is radical in itself. Even knowing nothing of the artist’s background or sexuality, one can appreciate how the installation dramatically transforms its surroundings and throws into question the very nature of museum space.
Traditional curatorial practice is preoccupied with the organized, balanced placement of objects in a gallery aimed at maximizing viewer enjoyment. Pepe’s work is an invasion of the exhibition space: it is a seemingly chaotic assemblage of insultingly "low" materials that disorients the viewer and forces bodily interaction, including, at the very least, stepping around, stooping under, looking up, looking through, and exercising faculties of mind and imagination that one all too frequently checks at the door before looking at less demanding art. Beneath the seemingly arbitrary joining of her shoelaces (and, in this case, almost fifteen hundred feet of super-durable nautical tow lines) is a rigorous architectural plan that stares modernism in the face, at once embracing and dismantling it.
Moyer’s and Pepe’s interests converge in their mutual affection for the city. They live on New York’s Lower East Side, and their studios are in unglamorous sections of Brooklyn. The payoff in Moyer’s walk-up is a spectacular two-sided view of the Manhattan skyline. Pepe, by contrast, works in a dark, tattered building near the Gowanus Canal. Moyer’s portraits (yes, she also draws with well-practiced skill) are of street types one might have seen around Tompkins Square Park in the ‘70s: mop-haired and bearded, unemployed, aimless.
Pepe’s drawings are tightly packed, claustrophobic cityscapes that look like fanciful infrastructure renderings by a city planner gone haywire. They are reminiscent of Joseph Stella’s rhapsodic renderings of skyscrapers and the Brooklyn Bridge from the 1920s and ‘30s.
Moyer and Pepe are part of the big rewrite of contemporary art history. Along with their predecessors Lynda Benglis, Lee Bontecou, Carolee Schneemann, and so many others, they will receive a place at the table, not as protesters but simply and gloriously as two women, in the city, making art, expanding our lives. (2)
1. The present exhibition is not intended as a marker of neofeminist art. It is important to note, however, that the two artists, Moyer in particular, as a cofounder of Dyke Action Machine!, are deeply involved in progressive politics.
2. Postscript: After completing this essay, I reread some entries in the important collection edited by Joanna Frueh, Arlene Raven, and Cassandra Langer, New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action (New York: Icon Editions, 1994). In one, "The Masculine Imperative," Laura Cottingham mentions exhibitions that "erased" women from art history. One of them was MOCA’s Hand-Painted Pop, which I quite arbitrarily and, I thought, innocently, mention above. The coincidence was startling and revealing. I have let the reference stand…an artifact of my own ignorance. I trust the rest of this essay serves as a corrective, however late, however inadequate.
