| When the film Who Does She Think She Is? from 1975 summarized the life and art of Rosalyn Drexler, the fame of the “most well-rounded talent in town” was ebbing. But, for a brief moment in the 60s, she was celebrated as a Pop painter, a novelist and an avant-garde playwright—the “queen of the underground.” The recent rehabilitation of Lee Bontecou has reminded us of the predicament of 60s women artists. Drexler’s neglect, however, has persisted uncannily, despite her prodigious production and three rediscoveries since the 80s. “I am the beautiful stranger: Paintings of the 60s” reintroduces her popness and urges us to question both the marginalization of women Pop artists and Pop’s definition. |  |
Rosalyn Drexler: The Beautiful Stranger – Kalliopi Minioudaki
When the film Who Does She Think She Is? from 1975 summarized the life and art of Rosalyn Drexler, the fame of the “most well-rounded talent in town” was ebbing. But, for a brief moment in the 60s, she was celebrated as a Pop painter, a novelist and an avant-garde playwright—the “queen of the underground.” The recent rehabilitation of Lee Bontecou has reminded us of the predicament of 60s women artists. Drexler’s neglect, however, has persisted uncannily, despite her prodigious production and three rediscoveries since the 80s. “I am the beautiful stranger: Paintings of the 60s” reintroduces her popness and urges us to question both the marginalization of women Pop artists and Pop’s definition. Organized by Pace Wildenstein, it promises to take the work and the eccentric persona of this pioneer “stranger” out of obscurity. Considering that Drexler still works at home rather than in a studio, lets hope it will also catalyze interest in her current work, instead of burying her alive in the laurels of her historic significance.
The exhibition momentously reunites Drexler’s masterpieces (such as Home Movies, Race for Time, etc., long forgotten in museum storages) with unknown Drexlers (Woman with Gloves, etc.). As painting-collages of de-contextualized and over-painted cutouts from posters, magazines and newspapers (often mechanically enlarged), Drexler’s faux paintings manifest both her popness and postmodernist relevance. With their appropriations of reproductions of reproductions embalmed in paint, they internalize the structure of industrial reproducibility and repetition, presented in layered form rather than in a Warholian, grid-based series. In light of the exhaustive sampling of her themes at Pace-Wildenstein, Drexler’s popness relies on her perverse fascination with the gritty side of the American pop culture (with the exception of Chubby Checker, her penchant for crime and death, sex and bloody sports almost echoes the themes of the National Police Gazette) as well as the brilliant Technicolor backgrounds, the quasi-photographic look of the over-painting and the framing devices that refer alternately to magazine layouts or the screen. One could only have wished the titles—often derived from media culture—were more prominently displayed, since they constitute an integral part of Drexler’s ironic poetics.
Drexler’s proto-feminism is revealed by her “bad” girls, at once victims entrapped in violently erotic embraces and active agents of sexual power willing to go as far as they can (Teenage Romeo) or fight back (Self-Defense). Noir underlies the pathology and the passions of most of her imagery, making a recognizable excerpt from Weegee’s crime photography in Study for No Pictures a fitting appropriation and an overlooked link to Warhol’s early fascination with modern death and outlaw criminality. The disbelieved “depth” of Pop is disclosed with political coolness, as a disabused view of America is acted out by interchangeable figures of authority: executives, statesmen, gangsters, mafiosos and technophiles. As a mute soundtrack, the lyrics of a nostalgic song about the South, Is it true what they say about Dixie?, accompany ironically the fascist march of one-dimensional statesmen (known protagonists of Southern racism at the height of Civil Rights movement) in a non-violent evocation of racist violence. Humankind, tellingly reduced to mankind, is embodied by the figures of the late capitalist techno-crowd, literal MacLuhian extensions of both mechanical and electronic “media”: guns, phallic lenses, printing machines and computers. Men and Machines I, where the machine looks somewhat like an old-fashioned computer station, is worth comparing with the ominous interactions of computers and men in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville or, conversely, the sexy commercial façade of James Rosenquist’s visions of push-button culture. Media and history lies are most poignantly exposed by her lesser-known The Defenders of 1963.
Echoing the title of the liberal Saturday TV hit of the Kennedy era, it depicts a scene of bloodshed gangster-ism and terrorist anarchy—the word terror pasted in its middle. It thus counteracts the popular TV narratives of stately lawfulness, revealing the delusions of their master narrative: American democracy of the Cold War era and after. Executed in 1963, a restless year of change according to The New York Times, whether before or after the Kennedy assassination, it unfortunately still resonates in light of today’s successes of both terror and “Law and Order.”
