Lisa Yuskavage at David Zwirner Gallery
Sex Sells
By: Charles Giuliano - Mar 24, 2009
Lisa Yuskavage
February 19 through March 28
David Zwirner Gallery
533 West 19 Street
NY, NY, 10011
212 727 2070
Like her friend and classmate from Yale (MFA 1986), John Currin, the artist Lisa Yuskavage (Born, Philadelphia, 1964) is a remarkably skillful and provocative, representational painter who has made a career of creating fantasy, erotic images of bodacious bimbos with bra busting bosoms and delectable butts.
Of course, the sexually charged adolescents depicted in their paintings exist, let's hope, only in one's active imagination. The images, which have earned these artists fame and fortune, feed to the testosterone saturated obsession discussed in feminist theory as "the male gaze." While it may make macabre sense that Currin, as a male artist, would explore this smarmy but fertile material, how to understand that Yuskavage, a woman, would pursue a similar strategy? The conventional critical approach has been to discuss Yuskavage as one of the Bad Girls, a bevy of transgressive babes who burst into the art world a while back. Another would be, back in the day, Cecily Brown, but her work has veered off from the explicit sexual imagery that first put her into the limelight, to ever more absurdly inept attempts at ersatz abstract expressionism.
The challenge for young artists who emerge on the scene with some form of gimmick, in the case of Yuskavage, Lolita inflected soft porn, is how to sustain the momentum. Too often the super charged artist of the moment proves to be a one trick pony and their careers devolve over time. How to keep it fresh and exciting? The trick is to evolve and explore new possibilities while not straying too far from the material and style that attracted the initial interest of collectors, critics, and curators.
Gaining a lot of attention at an early stage of a career, particularly for representational painters, can prove to be catastrophic. Currin, for example, was honored by a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art at an absurdly early stage of his career and development. Visiting his exhibition only underscored inept beginnings and a narrow reserve of inspiration and imagination. Rarely has one encountered so many really terrible paintings.
Ironically, it was shortly after the Whitney fiasco that Currin's paintings took a turn for the better. For awhile he began to study and emulate the exquisite distortions and excesses of the Italian Mannerists, particularly Parmigianino (1503-1540). But he then veered off to paint a series of works based on hard core porn appropriated from the internet. He stumbled into an aesthetic quagmire because the hard core imagery left little or nothing to the imagination. There was shock value but not much beyond that and one wonders if, as a career move, that work tarnished his halo.
In the past the paintings of Yuskavage have been vaguely amusing. Interest in the images had the holding power and stickiness equivalent to viewing a cartoon in Playboy Magazine. One did, however, admire aspects of the work as within their narrow limits one conceded that they were well painted. But you can go just so far with a fixation on big boobs and the white bottoms left from tan lines. In a public setting looking at such work has obvious limitations.
With this prior knowledge of Yuskavage's work the current exhibition at Davis Zwirner Gallery called for tearing up the playbook. Within the restricting confines of her subject matter, which continues to offer up nubile, button nosed, big busted babes there was remarkable evolution and aesthetic development. The fantasy is far richer and more complex as the artist has located her sex kittens in every more exotic settings. The earlier paintings mostly presented her buxom nude women in rooms, generally bed rooms. Now they are embedded in nature. In one small painting, for example, the only hint of a tart is a pair of gangly legs sheathed in striped stockings thrust akimbo out of a stylized cave assembled from shards of piled crystals of rock. My goodness.
The range of the paintings is absorbing. In one work a monumentally scaled nude woman is seated in the foreground set against a receding landscape. On the lower left edge of the canvas is a foot bridge in perspective on which ever smaller figures hike into the distance. It is a haunting and evocative image.
Another painting presents a baby howling in front of a hill on which is perched a stone sculpture of a very pregnant woman. In the left background of the seated baby is a rendering of a grave yard. What does that mean? Other works are more explicitly and obviously erotic such as two girls in an embrace. Or a woman with a pie thrust over her face. The painting is titled "Pie-Face" but one speculates what other substance might be used to create a similar image. It may or may not be about a prank with whipped cream. Clearly there is a vivid and bizarro imagination that charges these intriguing paintings.
There is far more narrative at play in the current work. There are deeper layers of fantasy and eroticism. This complexity of subject matter and setting is further enhanced by remarkable triumphs of painting. The color and palette are finely nuanced and the brushwork is approaching the skill of a master. While she has always been precocious the paintings on multi levels are becoming remarkable. One concedes that a lot of sweat equity has been involved in taking skills to this level of execution.
Yet again, however, for all their redeeming complexities just who are these super sexed Kewpie dolls and where do they come from? Critics have explored just how Yuskavage settled on this imagery. The conventional, and not very compelling explanation, is that it evolved from therapy and the images, like the work of Cindy Sherman, represents a series of extreme self portraits. Good grief. But it doesn't seem productive to put provocative artists like Sherman and Yuskavage through the process of pop psychology. We get enough of that on TV. I am not suggesting that Yuskavage and Sherman take their hang-ups to the American people on Dr. Phil.
No, art should remain separate from that impulse to shrink everything to a quest for compassion and normalcy. Rather, one delights that artists like Yuskavage, Currin and Sherman are willing to dig so far down into the lower depths of their psyches to come up with such richly imaginative work. Of course, their work is grounded in metaphors that touch on our humanity. Most of us ordinary folks, however, are spared such roiling excess of the subconscious. The artist is our extreme traveler and Yuskavage has chocked up a lot of aesthetic mileage.
Discussing this genre is arguably as risky as creating it. The critic is vulnerable to falling into obvious tropes and traps. For the heterosexual male critic there is the risk that excessive drooling over the work invites branding as a male chauvinist pig. While a female critic trashing the work is too readily skewered as an uptight feminist. In that sense the work is exciting to look at and write about. Because it is dangerous, clever, and comes with the risk of collateral damage. What fun. Oops, sorry about that.