Walmarts of Wall Power
James Kalm
Adela Leibowitz, Daffodil 2004, oil on canvas 54 x 72 inches
Members of Manhattan’s art elite are not moved by thundering engines, polished chrome and brute horsepower. No, what sets them aflutter is "Wall Power." Sheri Warshauer has devised a clever gambit loaded with art world "dish," a situation of portraiture in absentia, personalities divinized by those fine art objects collected, and the zones in which they are displayed.
In "The Return of Hank Harron," an essay which appears in Endgame, Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture, Thomas Crow states: "Weakness was the gift of the 1960s, of the drastic reduction of pictorial and sculptural incident, followed by the assaults of the conceptual artists on the hallowed status of the object itself. So debilitated, the art of late modernism has been freed from its own history and made available, like the liberated signifiers of advertising and commercial entertainment, to endless rearrangement and repackaging." Warshauer has selected as her subject the interiors and exteriors of collectors’ home, that is, the art works and how they are presented in the privacy of one’s own abode. The tenor recalls the Post Pop realism of Hockney, Caufield, Adami as well as Ruscha, in their deadpan rendering. A stiletto jab of cultural critique is delivered while Warshauer masquerades as a naive enthusiast.
In Six Degrees of Decoration (2004), a large oval seating arrangement or conversation pit, with strategically placed "Mod" styled pillows, recedes towards the rear wall. Overhead a chunk of pale blue is visible through a skylight. On the right a Basquiat hangs in a burnt sienna hallway. To the left resides a large Lichtenstein. The setting is a harmony of beiges, pale grays, ochres and taupe. There is no modeling of form, walls meet at corners without color differentiation. Cubic space is flattened. There would be no allusion of depth at all without the perspective lines of the floors in this neutrally toned designer world. Warshauer’s painting technique is about control, a control that builds up planes of form as delicately as building a house of cards. There is a disquieting sense to this "wan aesthetic." The process removes most of the signs of handwork and generally negates the brush stroke, that fetishized symbol of so much overheated New York School’s rhetoric. This also reduces "virtuosity" and "touch." Traditional drawing is replaced by the cutting of stencils. The homogenized painting appears like a digital surface rather than an analogue one. Ironically, like the dilution of tinctures in Homeopathic medicine, this "weakening" of traditional painting methods seems to produce a greater resonance through diminishment, as if the mind, trying to balance these omissions, overcompensates. A parallel exists between the flatness of the paint, the neutral tones and the leveling effect of the installation on the works themselves. The works seem transformed, somehow, less "great art" and more "luxury commodity" or "status trophies" encoded with messages and clues pertaining to the image desired to be projected by the collector, a higher level of personal branding. Certain liberties are taken with the compositions. Windows are added to expose exterior neighborhoods; wall moldings, doorways and columns are combined with the paintings and laid out not unlike a Mondrian. "Embracing the Elements" (2004), though reminiscent of the famous Hockney painting of swimming pools, is nonetheless one of the most satisfying pieces. Pictured is a collector’s backyard pool graced by modern sculpture. The depiction of sharp architectural forms under brilliant sunshine, it’s cantilevered platforms and notched pool, fits perfectly with Warshauer’s cut and masked forms. The jagged green fronds of tall palm trees, their shadows and reflections in the limpid pool, provide a vertical rhythm that counters the straight lines of the architecture. A pair of stylish chaise lounges implies the presence of the "collectors." This is a world that has been frozen, flattened and processed, a perfect product.
In this group of paintings, Adela Leibowitz seems fixated on anticipation: in these dramatic situations, it appears as though unforeseen happenings may at any moment spring into the frame. Young girls are depicted in pensive poses, arms and legs held close, either in defense or denial, awaiting some adult glance or question. The paintings are keyed to a Prussian or thalo blue tonality, which implies twilight or the onset of mist and fog. The titles of all the pieces refer to flowers, not the particularly sunny and happy variety like roses or daisies, but the beautiful and sinister ones with poisonous effects, as in Deadly Nightshade. The backgrounds are groves of saplings and trees, as might be seen at the edge of the forest. The knee length dark dresses worn recall a bygone era of modesty and secrecy. In Daffodil (2004), a fair-haired girl leans against a tree trunk in the right foreground. At her feet lay three sheep. Her pose, arms held across her chest, legs together, implies an oncoming chill or perhaps just the cold realization that something odd is happening to her lambs. Are they asleep, dead, or drugged? In any case Mary’s little lambs ain’t so merry. A black crow at the foot of another young girl is the dark focal point of "Black Hendane" (2004). Here again we see a girl, about seven, standing in a field. The tonality of the painting, the simplified forms all echo the illustrations one might find in adolescent novels of the first part of the twentieth century. The symbolism and mood portrays another aspect of American Gothic but these little women are not victims, nor perpetrators, but witnesses to some strange forces unfamiliar to the to the observer. In a way these works seem too balanced, the colors, too neutral, the composition without areas of enhanced detail or contrast. The eye desires some points of compelling interest, a final crescendo or closure to the theatrical tension set up by the artist, Leibowitz might pull the trigger.
