Feeling very sad that I missed out on this one when we were in NY last month: Kristine Moran at Nichelle Beauchene Gallery, June 18-July 25, 2009. More Kristine Moran.
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July 22, 2009 by Chris
Feeling very sad that I missed out on this one when we were in NY last month: Kristine Moran at Nichelle Beauchene Gallery, June 18-July 25, 2009. More Kristine Moran.
nice. Albert Oehlen meets Dana Schutz.
It’s like Rococco Cubism. I keep thinking if I stare long enough at the images that some perfectly sensible scene is really there, but it never happens.
yeah, i was going to mention the Rococco thing too. Watteau instantly popped into mind.
Perfect coinage, Chris. I’m using it, here on out.
Rococco Cubism is a very cool term.
Another thing I find fairly striking is the sort of scalability of her marks. The gestures and movements that work in the larger scale work seem to work similarly in the smaller ones as well.
That doesn’t always happen and its kind of cool when it does.
Yeah. I agree. I had been conscious of size when I was looking over the images, kept thinking “This one is small,” and “Now this one is big”. It instinctively seemed important but I couldn’t quite place why. I think you’re on to it though, banole.
anybody found the teeth?
not me.
Rococco Cubism. Yep. These are great.
Some of these, especially “Glamour Shots” remind me of Glenn Brown because they are very abstract and painterly but also very plastic, like the brushstroke is a real form in space. I’m more drawn to the newer paintings which seem to have fewer perspectival space behind the blobby objects. Some of those spaces work for me but others feel kind of generic.
Yeah. I get the feeling that, despite appearances of improvisatory breeziness, this working method might require a tremendous amount of patience and planning.
Anyone else see Francis Bacon, spun a round a bit, like you’re looking into the side of the painting, rather than the front? What with the sort of “framing” lines setting up space around some hovering squiggle? Especially in “Unravelling of Self”…
here’s a (gealt-like?) question:
is the facture of krtstine moran, rosson crow, inka essenhigh, cecily brown gendered?
…i see a lot of similarity in their approach to applying the paint and how masses interact (in terms of both spatial effect and surface treatment). some variations on a methodological theme, or something.
I would want to spin the question a little bit, because if we’re asking if this work and work like it is gendered in some essential way, I just don’t know how to approach that topic. If I’m trying to think about why work like this would seem like more of an option for women at this moment, or why painting like this by women would be accorded more value, that I could start to wrap my head around.
i’m asking that, but also just wondering about the hand itself.
in some sense what linda nochlin and cecily brown were saying at their des moines talk a few years ago was that brown was appropriating and owning a male hand, making it possible and, in some way, more resonant or useful as a female hand. i got the sense that there was an undercurrent suggesting that joni mitchell or lee krazner had simply used the abex facture, but never owned it. this seems a little extreme to me.
but i’m wondering how that idea of an ownership of the stylistic impulse of the hand might play into the way the hand distinguishes the work…
joan, not joni, dammit. always do that.
i think when people identify or are identified through style or ‘the handedness’ of their work, (and i don’t think that this necessarily is the first parallel we draw with every painter out there) that style is seen as a choice made in order to cement the form of the painting as some necessary part of how it is received and read.
This may be, or become, different when style becomes the device through which the form of the painting is a critique of other forms of paintings, or through which the form of the painting becomes inextricable from the meaning of the painting being itself a type of critique (apart from the meaning of the painting as a singular visual event). I think this sort of choice is made based on an awareness of history and an awareness of the ways in which aesthetic itself identifies groups of artists in a manifesto sort of way.
For most mature painters there probably is a point when they understand the hand in the painting to be more significant than something that they use or do simply because it is a part of their training. I would bargain that this is the sort of evaluatory stance that Brown was speaking about regarding her form. I think with Brown it goes much further than this. Her subject matter also considers inversion and appropriation as a matter of content and critique (as does Moran’s).
If we assume genderedness to be a contingent of the category of style or hand that these painters seem to be involved with, then probably what we are also supposing is that it is somehow a reaction against the very assumption that it was originally (historically) seen as somehow gendered in the inverse (meaning that it somehow, at some time belonged exclusively to men). It’s like critiquing an affectation. Style is all an affectation in one way or another; all painting is artifice. Appropriation and derivation usually just serve to point out the ubiquity of artifice in the big picture. Like with some of Picasso’s collages: often he would use a shape that looked identifiable as an object or thing, and it was being used as a symbol, but often instead of materializing into an identifiable object, it became the symbol of an artificial device, like perspective or something. Like saying, “this shape is perspective.” instead of saying, “this shape is a table that appears to be receding in space.”
I think it might be easy to assume that Krasner and Mitchell didn’t ‘own’ the ab-ex thing. But they also weren’t making shows of paintings with titles as strident as ‘laugh until my teeth fall out’. With a title like that, we maybe start to believe that her agenda’s a little more loaded. and this ties into how we view the style of her paintings being somehow a filter or a proponent for her content.
I also don’t really think that Essenhigh’s hand is part of the same language as Moran or Brown…
I’m reallyreallyreally hoping to get more folks involved in this conversation. I wonder, just to get started if we ought to define the term “hand”? I’m wondering if the term is a little Indiana U specific. It’s more than style, right? It is facture and surface. But, it’s also how facture points to the work’s expression, language, genre, charisma (as David Cohen might say). It involved with an artist’s idea of volume, space, speed. What else?
Also: The idea that there’s an absolute truth of the artist’s ‘hand’ has been pretty much dismantled by folks like Richter, Kippenberger, Mike Kelley (who was involved in some reverse gendered-genre swiping way back in the 80s), but as a provisional truth it’s still pretty useful for artists, as a starting point.
Who else can tell me about ‘hand’?
In my IU days we talked a lot about “touch” rather than hand. It was Barnes’ language, which I understood as some sort of expression of intent or connection on a deep level. A lot of us ended up really trying to push the sensuousness of the paint, but I think we missed the point. How I think of it now is neither an unmediated AbEx direct expression of personal life force, nor the use of markmaking as a language to create a “text” that can be parsed, but as related ( going out on a shaky limb here) to a state of mind. I have noticed that my own “touch” or hand is much better when I am really inside the painting.
Would it help to have a few analogies? ‘Hand’ is almost like ‘cadence.’ Even if you’re changing up your vocab, or fooling with your grammar, there’s something irrepressibly yours about how you deliver the words.
i like that sam… cadence. i also think that cadence is seen in terms of an innate sense of scale, of certain formal relationships, even of viscosity in the material, etc…
anybody else wanna throw in on hand?
as we turn back to the idea of language and gender, here’s a link to a study that a lot of you have probably heard of “How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think?” that might be relevant, though it comes at it from the opposite end. how the language affects the individual’s perception in a gendered way rather how the individual’s use of language reflects gender.
ok, it is kind of stretching, but it’s a really interesting article…
wow, chris, this article is fantastic. thanks for sharing it.
it reminds me of leonard shlain’s awesome text entitled the alphabet versus the goddess (a survey text i believe should be standard for art undergrads and which i’m going through with one of my grads over the summer session). the book covers much of the sort of information boroditsky talks about in her piece, but it goes even further to show how much how literacy (and other specific/varied “literacies”) has altered the human experience of the world… and how it, and other media forms, continue to alter the information we receive and project. i really highly recommend the book.