Deborah Kass created the Artwork Historical past Work out of frustration at not seeing herself within the halls of museums at the same time as she fell in love with the work of the artists themselves. That contradictory dynamic of attraction and repulsion is what offers these work their energy, as her biting critiques are tempered by her humor, and her formalist sensibility marries disparate components to create searing assaults on the historical past of exclusion.
There’s a curious picture of a headless, chestless, and armless Lucy van Pelt from the favored Peanuts sketch that Kass reproduces à la Warhol on two of the dozen work in her present exhibition, The Artwork Historical past Work 1989–1992 at Salon 94 gallery. Rendered as a easy white line on a black floor, the erasure makes the usually recognizable cartoon determine virtually indecipherable, reworking it into one thing unfamiliar whereas pushing us to query the foundations of what we predict we all know.
Works by Kass, left to proper, “Before and Happily Ever After” (1991), “Nature Morte” (1990), and “Untitled (First World, Third World)” (1990)
“Puff Piece” (1991) pairs a black-and-white, Pollockesque splash with Superwoman or Supergirl (I’m unsure which) who blows a stream of air on the semen-like splurt. The entire sequence performs with David Salle’s well-known postmodernist portray sequence from the Nineteen Eighties by which he juxtaposed pictures that we usually don’t affiliate with each other. In doing so, Kass collides the stylistic calling playing cards of outstanding male artists with a brand new, extra sexualized studying that turns splashes of paint into cum photographs. She instills the portray with a extra frank and illuminating sensibility, in contrast to Salle’s shadowy power, that just about all the time finally ends up feeling like we simply walked into the latter’s remedy appointment.
Maybe it’s as a result of Salle’s sequence is much less influential at present than it was within the ’80s, and his creative declare that which means is usually as much as the viewer to outline seems like simply one other repackaging for {the marketplace}, however Kass seems much less all for that advertising and marketing recreation. As an alternative, she’s targeted on the ability of the methods that problem us and might take away our company within the act of viewing.
Deborah Kass, left to proper, “Making Men 4” (1992) and “Puff Piece” (1992)
In “Untitled (First World, Third World)” (1990), the artist strikes on the Chilly Battle language of the interval, which positioned the liberal democracies of the West towards what we might name the International South at present. By combining a basic Cubist composition with an African panorama, Kass hints at Picasso’s influences that propelled his personal experimentation with area. In the identical approach, Disney, as represented by the Dumbo franchise, is transported to the African savannah — a symbolic act of return? — versus Florida, the place the big-eared fella’s story usually takes place. Whereas the African heritage of the Cubist work is extra obscured, the position of the beloved cartoon elephant, adorned with full circus make-up, in what might look like a extra historically appropriate panorama appears absurd — by no means thoughts that Dumbo is an Asian elephant with amorphous African elephant options, together with large ears and being virtually hairless. African affect has migrated in lots of instructions, leaving the oblique progeny of that continent in a conceptual limbo on the African plains. The paths of affect stay invisible, however intuitively we see them. The depopulation of an African panorama flattens the place right into a silhouetted sundown scene in distinction to the spatial improvements of Cubism — each of which mine Africa for various functions.
Kass’s work is most pointed when she focuses on lesbian or queer identification. Two of among the most well-known pictures of lesbians in Fashionable artwork are mixed with a extra fluid, all-over summary type in “How Do I Look” (1991), together with Jasper Johns’s “The Critic Sees” (1961), by which Johns swaps a critic’s bespectacled eyes with mouths. The coital French girls are drawn atop rosy swirls, as a severe Gertrude Stein appears out from her Picasso-painted portrait. Every little thing is rendered in excessive distinction, and the austere public persona of the Jewish-American mental dominates the extra delicate portrayal of same-sex love. Whereas Stein was brazenly lesbian at a time when prohibitions towards being out existed, Johns has all the time been extra coy about his personal sexuality, even a long time after Stein’s loss of life. It additionally brings up the query: Once we stroll by way of a museum, will we even acknowledge queerness? This portrait of lesbian ardour was painted by a straight man, but it’s the most identifiably LGBTQ+ picture for the customer. “Are we actually looking?” Kass asks, or, like Johns’s slam towards critics, are we unable to see whereas we proceed to talk?
Deborah Kass, “Subject Matters” (1989–90)
Warhol, Pollock, Lichtenstein, Motherwell, Salle, Picasso, Johns, Courbet, and Walt Disney all obtain their share of punches within the enviornment with Kass as she tears aside the pretentiousness of favor and branding, whereas serving to us concentrate on the unseen. But, there’s a deep sense of longing within the work, one which hints on the energy dynamics of erasure.
In “Subject Matters” (1990), a letter “I” from an illuminated manuscript is central to the composition as a declaration of selfhood, although it additionally evokes Robert Morris’s famend “I-Box” (1962) sculpture, the place the capital I opens to disclose a nude Morris smiling on the viewer with a self-satisfied grin. The letter is flanked by the identical semé of headless Lucy’s, and on the opposite aspect by Johns’s bespeckled critic, however this time stacked atop a pile of eyeglasses paying homage to the haunting {photograph} from Auschwitz that she floods with the raking mild present in Rembrandt’s “Three Crosses” (1653). The connection between personhood and authorship is clear. Who’s allowed to declare “I” brazenly and publicly? Who’s allowed to obfuscate their identities in visible play whereas by no means rendering themselves weak to dismissal or assaults?
That is the primary time {that a} practically full sweep of the Artwork Historical past Work is on view (minus one which at the moment hangs within the Dallas Museum of Artwork and one other, a companion to “Emissions Control,” that couldn’t be added due to restricted area). Maybe it’s human to wish to belong, however Kass makes us really feel like that urge may come at another person’s expense. Is the artist a liberator or a performer dancing atop the labor, concepts, our bodies, or histories of people that could also be denied the chance to bask within the highlight. I think the discomfort within the works is why they proceed to resonate at present, full with their jocular humor, as we discover no place to cover within the starkness of their message — they poke us into contemplating the in jokes that pack artwork historical past, and opening ourselves as much as the query of whether or not we’re contained in the temple of artwork ourselves and who we could also be excluding on this revered area.
Deborah Kass, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (1991)
Deborah Kass: The Artwork Historical past Work 1989-1992 continues at Salon 94 (3 East 89th Avenue, Higher East Aspect, Manhattan) by way of March 29. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.