Curryin'
Favor, by David Cohen
This article was first
published in Blunt Edge, the "underground" annual edited by
Roy Oxlade in Great Britain, in December 2001. It is posted here to
complement the author's paper, "Ambiguity and Intention,"
a contribution to the symposium, Art and Cognition, organized by Noga
Arikha and Gloria Origgi at interdisciplines.org.
John Currin Autumn
Lovers 1994
watercolor and wash on paper, 12 x 8 inches
Collection Stefan Edlis, photo courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery ©
John Currin
Yale professors are telling their students that John Currin paints as
well as Botticelli. I heard this yesterday from a young painter who
was sent my way for career advice. Yale has probably the most illustrious
art school in America. Its alumni litter the firmament; Currin (b.1962
and the hottest ticket this season) is only the most recent ascendant
star. What does it portend if instructors at prestigious Ivy League
Schools, and not a few cognoscenti elsewhere, genuinely extol the painterly
technique of so disingenous and meretricious a hack as John Currin?
Recently, a solo exhibition of his work was staged at the Andrea Rosen
Gallery in New York. The exhibition coincided with a blockbuster at
the Guggenheim of Norman Rockwell, a more likely peer than Botticelli
(or Dürer, Tiepolo, or Breughel, artists obliquely referenced in
his smorgsbord of styles). *
Like Rockwell, Currin has
facility in rendering and a propensity to please. His target audience,
however, is not the mass consumer but the artworld insider. For Rockwell,
vulgarity is merely a side effect of his hackneyed strategies, whereas
for Currin, it is the strategy itself. "Bad Painting", of
course, is as well-worn within the (modernist as surely as postmodernist)
avantgarde as illustrational exploitation of academic tropes are within
Norman Rockwell's unchallenging aesthetic. While Rockwell sought to
console the million, Currin would probably be content to rake one in.
Disingenuous, I say? Am I
not committing the classic critical blunder of confusing intentions
with results (the Tolstoyan fallacy)? Is not the road to Paint Heaven
paved with bad intentions? So what, one might ask, if the artist has
confused or corrupted ideals, if at least on occasion - as in fact Currin
does - he comes up trumps? Amidst the schlock horrors and gratuitous
sillinesses at Rosen, Currin was able to offer a few roses among the
many thorns. There were about three small pictures on show - unlikely
to end up in museums (unlikely, in other words, to influence future
Yalees and arbiters of taste) and more a sop to conservative taste among
private collectors than public strategy art - and this handful included
such throw-away gems as a little Tieopoloesque putto-head, compellingly
sweet from thirty feet, and a couple of John Singer Sargent cum Adolf
Menzel interiors. But the vast majority were Rockwellian romps of phoney
narrative, rehashes of big busted illustration-book beauties, more Reginald
Marsh than Rubens, and gaudily-framed beaux-art parades of dexterous
caricature, in no wit superior to the dashed-off efforts of portraitists
at Leicester or Times Square.
The late theorist and painter
(and Yale professor) Louis Finkelstein developed an interesting concept
of "split intentionality". It was proferred as an educational
tool rather than a critical one: to help explain to painters where they
were going awry. Naturally, Finkelstein, despite flirting rampantly
with many styles in his own painting, was a modernist: reconcilliation
and wholeness were his goals. Current artists are entitled to want to
orchestrate more complex projections of self and intention, to allow
for artistic multi-personality. It seems to me, however, that Currin
is not in the least bit schizophrenic. He veers, on the contrary, towards
mono-mania. There is no dualism in his art, as there is in many of the
greatest artists. His desire to have his cake and eat it, to exhibit
painterly facility but all the while subscribe to fashionable anti-aesthetic
postures, is not a split intention so much as one that is nauseatingly
over-focused - on success.
For Currin is quite simply
on a no-lose ticket (a good hiding to everything): Bad Painting with
quality technique. Keep the theorists chattering and the buyers salivating.
Conceptually, he adds nothing to near-century old Dadaism. He is a fashionable
footnote to Picabia. And technically? It is here that one has to despair,
because of what the warped prevailing taste for Currin says about actual
sensibility for painting of the past. If sub-Rockwellism actually looks
to taste makers and key educators to be on some kind of parity with
the art from the raided image-bank of history, if old-master technique
is merely an abstraction to be referenced, like a brand or celebrity's
name knowingly dropped, then we are in trouble. If you think this sounds
like Tory hysteria, that the old masters can stand their own, that a
bit of lighthearted iconophobic misreading won't do them any lasting
harm, just stand back and think through the practical consequences of
such bad taste. Where are future picture conservators coming from? Museum
curators? Art dealers? What degrees of nuance and sensibility are going
to inform the people who decide what to put in national collections,
and how to clean them, and what to hang them next to? Sure, past geniuses
are robust plants, but they need a forest to live in, not a desert.
This student, meanwhile,
wants advice. Should she do an MFA? Is there a future for figurative
art? She has sent me jpegs of her work. She looks pretty talented. Most
of her paintings are done from photographs. It transpires this is not
from a Degas-Sickert-Warholian fascination with the implications of
artifice, but for the above-mentioned prosaic reasons (no space or dollars
for a model). Shoulders above these in quality are a couple of canvases
done from life and a self-portrait. At least this appears so from her
reproductions. Facility is seen giving way to freshness of vision. The
right kind of ambiguity and awkwardness is creeping in, exactly the
kind, in fact, that Sickert and Degas got from photography. It is not
a matter of "Use photos or don't". Rather, it's the magic
of unlearning versus the conjury of knowingness.
Elizabeth Peyton
Paradis (Kirsty) 2001
oil on board 40 x 30 inches
courtesy Gavin Brown's Enterprise, Corp.
Anyhow, this young Yalee
wants to paint like the old masters, she says, but to do so as a feminist
in the early twenty first century. And - oh, yes - without irony! If
Lisa Yuskavage, Currin's peer (sidekick would be unkind) who renders
vintage soft-porn big busted girlie illustrations in lurid slippery
paint in mammoth canvases doesn't quite do it for her, where and how
and with whom should she study, she wants to know.
Without irony, eh? Maybe
we could substitute irony for just a little attitude, and then some
possibilities open up. In fact, there are possibilites for figurative
painting of the kind she is struggling to define for herself among contemporaries
worth looking to who are remarkably close to the Currin camp. A painter
most Currinists quite like, and who I really like, is Elizabeth Peyton.
I withheld my thoughts on Currin from readers of my column at artcritical.com,
but allow me to repeat what I said there about Peyton. One reason I
do so, incidentally, is to discourage any suspicion that I am anti-Mannerism
per se. I like authentic mannerism (please permit the oxymoron) as much
as any po-mo in town. Thinking about Peyton here should have the same
effect as citing the shade of Sickert (who of course was a great ironist
and synthesist). The following is quoted from an article entitled "Thank
Heaven for Little Pictures" which lead with a review of the
Whitney's exhibition, Alex Katz: Small Paintings:
There is a similar
[to Katz] "authentic despite" quality to Elizabeth Peyton,
the Watteau of Blah. Katz and Hockney are her most conspicuous contemporary
artistic heroes, choices, when they were made a decade or so ago, that
were almost poignantly retro in themselves. I mention Watteau because
of an insouciant whimsicality underpinned by psychological substance.
Another old master she recalls in this respect is Forain. It's in drawing
technique, specifically, that she resembles Hockney, whereas the kinship
with Katz mostly has to do with brinkmanship. She constantly bids high
in her wagers against naffness. In her case, the traffic between the
synthetic and the perceptual runs in the opposite direction from Katz.
With Peyton, falsity and mediation are the sine qua non alike of source
and style: she starts with media images of pop stars and House of Windsor
princelings, or with snapshots of downtown boho friends posing so nonchalantly
they might as well be minor celebrities. Her painterly style proceeds
to flirt rampantly with the fashion plate, as Katz seems to with the
billboard and the cartoon. What makes her highly wrought images so tantalizing,
in my opinion, is the exquisite correlation between emotional attitude
and painterly investment. In Katz, a twist of poignancy gives edge to
his high jinks with style. In Peyton, where sloppiness and feyness characterize
so perfectly an alienated, narcissistic longing, it's not a twist but
the whole fruit that is thrown in.
And then, after quibbling
about details in her technique and comparing her with Katz for a bit,
I concluded:
But perhaps such
technical issues come down to time as much as talent. Peyton gives us
cause for great hope. As Bad Painting goes, she is as good as it gets.
* Of course, we are way beyond
the point of bewailing the fact that an institution like the Guggenheim,
and a reputed scholar like Robert Rosenblum, the curator of the Rockwell
show, should commit themselves to anachronistic kitsch in so savvy a
fusion of avantgardist posture and gate-swelling populism. Concurrent,
incidentally, with the Currin and Rockwell exhibits was a retrospective
of the modern academic painter John Koch (at the New York Historical
Society) whose success ratio - painterly success that is, and to my
eye - was about the same as Currin's. But in terms of actual technique
and honorable intentions the younger, artworld star cannot compete with
this sedate old-world socialite.
