In the News
The Mess He Made
By John Haber in New York City
Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing.
It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis that we get at the
real meaning of things.
— Georgia O'Keeffe
Laurel Farrin, Cyrilla Mozenter
For Georgia O'Keeffe, God was not in the details. When not
take the next logical step, then: why not eliminate everything? For a formalist,
abstract art gets at the real meaning of things because it eliminates everything
but the painting. Instead of selecting what in reality to emphasize, it
selects something just as real, the emphasis.
Abstraction
keeps coming back, but in a way truer to O'Keeffe: as often as not, it
begs for contamination from the real world. Laurel
Farrin, for one, imitates Mondrian, but as a container for the scraps
of her life. For Cyrilla
Mozenter, canvas gives way to scraps of another kind, of fabric, covered
by geometric forms and cryptic signs.
They are hardly alone. More often than not these days, painting
functions as a comfort zone, a respite from new media and installations.
It can afford to incorporate imagery into abstraction, as what Postmodernism
would call two complementary sign systems. In the process, it continues
Modernism's strategy of appropriation, starting at least with Cubism and
continuing through such New Image painters as Susan Rothenberg and Jonathan
Borofsky. It finds both irony and pleasure in the impurity of sensation.
But can the signs still signify much
of anything? As two group shows suggest, the search for a comfort zone
parallels opportunities and crises elsewhere in contemporary art as well.
La bella Piet
Piet Mondrian held to an austere sense of beauty, but his paintings have their uses. For Laurel Farrin, they help manage her life.
Her art confesses to an austere lifestyle anyhow. In her hands,
Mondrian's asymmetric geometries of red, yellow, blue, and black suffer
only the most low-budget interruptions. As her postmodern
still life, Farrin appears to have added a crossword in progress, the
logo from a pizza carton, a coat-room ticket, a photograph of Henry David
Thoreau, and a casual sketch. Are these her diversions, her inspirations,
or her necessities? Where Jason
Rhoades or David Ellis recreates
his studio as the scene of an all-night binge, this seems truer to life.
In a career, as in art, the scraps of the everyday are hard to keep together.
On inspection, even the abstraction dissolves into a found
object. The white or off-white ground looks found and rumpled, as if poorly
stretched. The slim stripes look like elastic bands holding the collage
in place. Is this what Mondrian meant by Neoplasticism—a new plastic
art (or maybe latex)? Yet this, too, proves an illusion. Farrin has painted
everything in oil and acrylic.
As her tour de force suggests, Farrin is not above boasting.
Hey, she does her crossword in ink. She is also claiming some distinctly
American ancestors, only starting with Thoreau. Her trompe l'oeil, like
the straps of an old-fashioned letter rack, owes a debt to such nineteenth-century
models as J. F. Peto. More recent painting abandons Mondrian's stripes
entirely, much as he would have disdained her illusion. She retains, however,
her fictional collage.
The passage of Modernism to America meant a collision of worlds.
With Broadway Boogie-Woogie, Mondrian celebrated New York as the antithesis
to European high culture. New York, in turn, helped push his late work
in series to greater extremes of spareness and activity. At the same time,
though, New York was rebelling against the School of Paris for quite the
opposite reasons—in response to what critics would call "mere" illustration
or decoration. Older models like Peto became newly relevant to Abstract
Expressionism's immersion in the picture plane. Thoreau's peers and the Hudson
River School supplied precedents for an American
sublime.
Perhaps Mondrian has the last word after all. The Transcendentalists
shared his ideals of spiritual harmony. A confusion of artistic purity
and function also accords with De Stijl's wish to encompass architecture
and design. Farrin's logo, La Bella Pizza, could easily echo—or parody—Mondrian's
ideal of the beautiful. He even let loose at the end, with Broadway Boogie-Woogie.
But would he have ordered in pizza?
Like last-night's takeout, Cyrilla Mozenter's work looks awfully
familiar. That sense of comfort could be a dieter's—or an artist's—kiss
of death. Yet the paintings grow even more familiar over time, as one catches
on to what that sense of comfort missed. Mozenter places silhouettes in
shades of gray against equally uniform, mostly colorless fields of gray
and black. I could place it even on a quick glance, and I was wrong.
She structures a painting around monochrome curves and rectangles,
in layers of gray on gray. They recall gradations of surface in Robert
Ryman or early Brice
Marden. The occasional pencil outlines or paired images underscore
her minimal vocabulary. A frayed edge or loose flap here and there should
get formalists talking even louder about painting as object. Forays into
three dimensions, in slim curved or straight blocks, rest comfortably on
the floor like Minimalist sculpture.
Mozenter's take on geometric abstraction looks warm and idiosyncratic
but tired—until one notices something: one is looking at the outline
of a pair of ice skates. The background fabric, too, gives way to familiar
creature comforts. It looks like canvas, but she works with silk threads
and industrial wool. Like Mondrian in America, she is watching worlds collide.
And the comedy of everyday life has a lot to do with its inscrutability.
Does that lumpy outline represent a bear, a boot, or a household iron? Does the pink stripe make the felt slab into a gift box? Here, too, she tempts one to pigeonhole her art. Pop Art dealt with cartoons and commercial imagery long ago, while Claes Oldenburg had no end of puns on sculptural conventions. And that is before artists turned on geometry more aggressively, with Neo-Geo. I had seen this before, right?
In the 1980s, parodies and allegories came to stand for Postmodernism,
including parodies and allegories of geometry, and much of Chelsea still
cannot give them up. Rather than irony, however, Mozenter deals in things.
The warmth of fabric speaks about art as caring. So, paradoxically, does
the unraveling of traditional craft. Hal
Foster has described the return
of the real. Amid the unreality of the art market, here it comes again,
only this time at home with old lessons about defamiliarization.
Mozenter shares space with David Storey, and they make a strong contrast. He works with ordinary oil on canvas, he works large, and he has to crowd it all in. The wiggly black curves run every which way, with no particular formal discipline. Her boots have slipped across the room to become his feet. Her gray rectangles have become his living color (and, no, he is not the British playwright). Her reserved humor has become his open smile.