Frances Muldoon
Deb Todd Wheeler
Third Research Paper
December 9, 2013
Four
Artists Five Ideas
In
this paper I will be examining four artists whose work intersects not only with
each other’s but with my own studio practices as well. Each artist deals with
the grotesque, childhood, femininity, cartoons and sexuality. These five
elements have emerged as imperative to my work this semester. First I will
examine two male artists, Mike Kelley and Carroll Dunham and their connections
to these themes. Secondly I will examine two female artists, Sue Williams and
Lisa Yuskavage and how their work deals with these ideas. I will then determine
whether there are significant differences between how the two male artists and
two female artists deal with these topics. Finally, I will explore how this
connects to and affects my own studio practices.
I will first view the prolific and extensively diverse
work of artist Mike Kelley. Mike Kelley has ventured into the realms of
sculpture, performance, film, drawing, painting, and collage as well as many
other forms of art. [1] Mike Kelley’s work with
plush stuffed animal’s can be identified with childhood as well as femininity. Although,
his work with plush stuffed animals was initially intended as a commentary on
the “commodity culture of the 80’s” (SEGMENT: Mike Kelley in "Memory") viewers
saw the work as concerning not only childhood and abuse, but as involving Kelley’s
personal history of abuse.[2] His work with the plush
animals can be associated with femininity as well. Particularly when looking at
work such as Love More Hours Than Can
Ever Be Repaid which is composed of afghans and handmade craft items sewn
onto canvas. Crafts are in general associated with low art or art created by women,
or with the feminine. Kelley realized this and took up sewing as an adolescent
to upset his masculine father (Welchman
64) and later used these skills to produce dynamic artwork.
In
Missing Time Color Exercise 3 (1998) (Welchman
24) Kelley combines “high art” through the use of Modernist grids and complex
color theory with the “low art” of Sex to
Sexty Magazines, a dirty magazine featuring “country bumpkins” (Welchman
23) In this work Kelly not only combines high and low art but sex, cartoons and
the grotesque. These cartoon magazines revolving around sex can be seen as
grotesque, first for their crude content and cartoon images but also in
relation to the high art aspects of the work.
Carroll Dunham’s work certainly
combines all aspects of the grotesque, childhood, femininity, cartoons and all
in relation to sexuality. [3] In regards to childhood
and Dunham’s personal history he does not deal directly with toys as Mike Kelley
does but rather connects to this idea through his incorporation of the passing
of time in his work. [4] Dunham connects to
sexuality quite obviously upon viewing much of his recent work involving women
and their holes. He has recently created a series of “Bathers” paintings, which
depict women in nature, whose sexual organs are continually on view but whose
faces are never seen. Vaginas, anuses and breasts call all be seen at once in many
of these paintings but the woman’s face is always covered by wiled thick
strings of black, pubic like hair. These painted women broach not only the idea
of sexuality, but also the idea of femininity, or rather a lack there of. There
is nothing feminine about these paintings although they are of the female body.
Dunham’s thick black cartoonlike outlines are abrasive when applied to the form
of the female body. [5] Dunham’s work from the
1980’s and 1990’s places a greater focus on male gentiles. Much of his work
concerned attaching penises or phallic shapes to other cartoonlike metamorphic
shapes. When interviewed for BOMB Magazine in 1990 and asked why he chose to paint
sexual organs his answer was “Well, that’s something I feel like I have the
right to draw and paint.” (Sussler)
Sue Williams’ work easily can be
seen to embody femininity, sexuality, and the grotesque. The aspect of childhood
in her work intersects with the cartoon like lines and bright colors she uses
in her work. Ideas of the feminine, feminism and sexuality are all intertwined
in the oozing canvases of Williams’ paintings. In an interview with Nancy Spero
for BOMB Magazine in 1993 Williams delves into details of her troubled and
abused past and is explicit about sexual violence in her work, a feminist
pursuit. While creating work associated with
her abuse, such as Try to Be More
Accommodating[6] William’s keeps up
an ever-feminine persona making comments about how cute her paintings of
intestines are and how her avoidance of the dark colors is because they “are
not pretty.” (Spies ) Her work is a dichotomy. The grotesque and horrifying
ideas of sexual abuse drive her work, but her feminine persona and choices of
light color and cartoon like style of painting create contradiction. It is this
contradiction of grotesque and feminine that I find so interesting in Williams work, and which
I work towards in my own studio.[7]
Yuskavage’s work can very easily
be seen to include sexuality. The grotesque in Yuskavage’s work is less
obvious. It comes from the feminine being pushed to its nth-degree, and
changing from something pleasant, the immaculately painted image of a beautiful
nude woman into something disturbing. Her candy colored pallet reminiscent of
childhood, as well as paintings of young, at times possibly pre-pubescent girls
are responsible for this shift into the uncomfortable. [8] One can see this dichotomy
in work such as Triptych (2011). In
the first panel a young girl lays on her belly in the distance, feet up in the
air, plump butt facing the viewer, sucking carelessly on a lollypop. The second
panel leads us to another young woman, her face not visible, but rather a full
frontal of her vagina greats the viewer. While this could easily be seen as
pornographic, the artist disputes that it “feels innocent because it almost looks like a baby.” (Torre) This
dichotomy between childhood, femininity, sex and the grotesque makes
Yuskavage’s work at times difficult to take in, but this is the artist’s
intent. [9]
These four artists, while
overlapping in terms of subject manner, remain vastly different in the art
created. It can be concluded that the work of Sue Williams and Lisa Yuskavage is
more easily summarized than that of Mike Kelley and Carroll Dunham. Kelley and Dunham’s work, while consistent in
themes, seems to generally be more diverse than that of Williams and of Yuskavage.[10] Although the styles of
the artist are different I have found no great divide when it comes to subjects
being off limits to these artists because of their gender. Kelley tackles the
feminine with stiches; Williams and Yuskavage both utilize the female body, and
all its parts and Dunham feels it is his right to paint whatever he fancies.
Ideas of childhood and the style
of cartoons have always been present in my work. However this semester I felt
other ideas emerging, femininity, the grotesque and sex. Through this paper I
was able to explore artists who are dealing with similar ideas and to examine
the different ways in which they do so.
Bibliography:
Kardon,
Dennis. "Art In America." Carroll Dunham. Art In America, 26
Mar. 2013.
Web. Nov. 2013.
Nathan,
Emily. "Lisa Yuskavage Something Like Sirens." 's New Paintings at
David
Zwirner
Gallery. Artnet
Worldwide Corporation, Fall 2011. Web. 06 Dec. 2013.
"SEGMENT:
Mike Kelley in "Memory"| Art21." ART:21 | Watch Online | PBS
Video.
PBS, 2005. Web. Nov. 2013.
Spero, Nancy. "BOMB Magazine: Sue
Williams by Nancy Spero." Bombsite.com/BOMB
Magazine.
BOMB, Winter 1993. Web. 02 Dec. 2013.
Spies,
Michael. "Sue Williams Digs Down to the Icky." New York Village
Voice. The
Village Voice Art, 10 Sept. 2008. Web. Nov. 2013.
Sussler,
Betsy. "BOMB Magazine: Carroll Dunham by Betsy Sussler." Atom.
New Art
Publications, Winter 1990. Web. Nov. 2013.
Torre,
Mónica De La. "BOMB Magazine: Lisa Yuskavage by Mónica De La Torre."
BOMBSITE The Artist's Voice Since 1981. BOMB, Fall 2011. Web. 01 Dec.
2013.
Welchman,
John C., Isabelle Graw, Mike Kelley, and Anthony Vidler. Mike Kelley.
London: Phaidon, 1999. 1-130. Print.
[1] Kelly has descried his work as dealing with “sublime play”
or “sublime humor.” (SEGMENT: Mike Kelley in "Memory")
[2] Kelley has described his work as being quite reactive to
the responses his work elicits from viewers. He responded to the viewer’s idea
of abuse by making his work about his own supposed abuse, and about collective
abuse. (SEGMENT:
Mike Kelley in "Memory")
[3] “Dunham’s
paintings cross the boundaries of taste, belching disorder in an experience of
painting that is simultaneously accomplished and uncivilized. What is beautiful
and what is grotesque become mated in a world that uncovers a revelry of the
spirit.” (Sussler)
[4] According an
interview in BOMB Magazine Dunham states that “When I started doing a lot of drawings, I wanted to be able to
track them, to order the chronology and also the space and time that separated
one idea from the other. Things come about in time. Time is one of the
materials. I don’t plan things and then execute them. They come about by me
doing them. And some notation of time seems important to their truth.” (Sussler)
[5] These paintings
of women have been described as “Sexualized but faceless, voluptuous but
unerotic, she sports features that might belong to a specific woman without
representing a real person. Her depiction veers from intellectually formal to
adolescently sarcastic, as Dunham makes our point of view feel surreptitious .
. .” (Kardon)
[7] In William’s interview with Nancy Spero,
Spero confesses that she was “attacked for using images of women. This has to
do with one feminist theory that women artists should avoid creating a woman’s
image for men.” (Spero ) This idea leads directly to artists
Lisa Yuskavage, a woman and artists who is creating candy colored, erotic
paintings of female nudes.
[8] Yuskavage described how she views her paintings “I saw them as similar to a
pubescent girl who does not like to be looked at, but can’t help but being pert
and vulnerable at the same time. . . They did not enjoy being impotent
spectacles—they couldn’t walk away or defend themselves from the glare or ogle
of the viewer. But I could load these characters up with the ability to make
the looking feel bad for everyone involved. The exchange would go like this:
Okay, go ahead and look all you want, but it’s going to be unpleasant for both
of us. They (the paintings) really confused a lot of people.” (Torre)
[9] Yuskavage describes how she likes to make her work
somewhat difficult or confusing for the viewer, referring to Triptych “I like that this bright green sky gives you a
hard time,” she said, when asked about her color choices. “It’s inappropriate;
it’s in the wrong place.” (Torre)
It is not Yuskavage’s intent to make easily digestible paintings, but rather to
challenge and to disturb.
[10] This could also
be due to the amount of time Dunham and Kelley have been viewed in the art
world versus that of Yuskavage and Williams.
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