Allison Katz, Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So Cock (detail), 2019
Courtesy the artist and Gio Marconi, Milan. Photo: Filippo Armellin
The concept of Post-Performance Future that I first laid out in issue 63 of Mousse dealt with the impact of performance on the visual arts in the twenty-first century. I followed it up with an article in Mousse issue 66 positing that Post-Performance Painting exists as a source or destination for performance. This third chapter focuses on paintings. The constellation of artists that I address are linked both through their works and through one another: for example, Allison Katz studied with Charline von Heyl, who was close to Martin Kippenberger, whom Andrea Fraser knew as well. I am speaking less about filiations, and more about conjunctions of uses and approaches to painting in a plural, “fucked-up” way. My interest is now directed at a generation of artists who have taken a new path regarding certain questions of style and slippages of taste.
I have discussed with almost all of the artists here the question of “bad taste” and “bad girls” in painting as a genre, attitude, and social position. But above all, what determines their link to Post-Performance is the question of the object produced by or embodying performative acts, while remaining a painting. The issue of how to be a bad girl and a good artist—is it still relevant today? It made sense to start by looking at the works and seeing how most of them attack Modernism, yet also consider it as a patriarchal moment to be investigated. The works considered here were created as paintings, mostly canvas stretched on a frame—a standing panel with a typical frontality at first glance. Yet whether object or subject of the performance, scenic object, “post-consumer” object, accessory, or set, it is also the landscape-stage that goes beyond the classical veduta. Every painting is “always already” a performance, a series of actions. It involves and provokes movements, steps back—actions that are consequences of performance. Performativity of speech acts, of the literal space of the viewer, of random imagery, with a consciousness of painting as non-neutral object, but a critical tool and a liminal field.
Allison Katz, Cock Fiction, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai
This “in-between” space which is that of “no taste,” of “bad taste,” but also of a multiplicity of styles, is at the heart of the plurality (Charline von Heyl, Allison Katz, Manon Vargas). It is also a place for a conversation between painting and audience: painting as a scenic object (Charlie Hamish Jeffery), as a relation of glances (Lynette Yiadom-Boakye), or as the remnant of a story (Lucas Ajemian). Sometimes it is a suspicious beauty, no longer the ideal of a flat, symmetrical, quiet, balanced model, but a distorted and ambiguous one (Autumn Ramsey, Allison Katz, Pui Tiffany Chow), which is a way to break the uniqueness of the grand maniera (Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Gigisue), or to create new languages (Hatice Pinarbasi) and new spaces (Monster Chetwynd). These new paths are critical because they don’t rely on one direction but break the canonization process of fashion, market, and post-internet values. They are definitely not images, not flat, not screen.
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Allison Katz also uses humor and sensuality, attraction and repulsion, persuasion and seduction: “I am attracted to images insofar as they can communicate a surplus of meaning. I like the contradiction of using a fixed surface to infer that the premise is inexhaustible. I think it’s possible to preserve the boiling point (that which moves one to action, to actually risk making something) within the artwork itself. To that end it’s a balancing between belief and doubt.” The artist creates impossible spaces, for instance a world in a mouth. This is close to virtual spaces and alternate editing, the temporal ellipses at stake in Rococo or Baroque sculpture. Her use of ornament is also a structural break in the purity of Modernist surface. Accumulations, juxtaposition, and leitmotifs (monkeys, mouths, snakes, noses, pears) create an actual spatial and time-based experience. She uses loose associations that are counterparts of the drift of Vargas’s loot. Her cock (rooster) series (2011–ongoing) is a compulsive collection of different styles. Rice grains is her brand. Covered in paint, they become a vibrant impasto recalling Johannes Vermeer’s use of sand (for instance Delft View [1660–61]). The trick of playing with light and also as “sand in the gears” creates a chiasmus. Each canvas has its own style, but the whole series has one motif: the rooster. It is a surrogate of the question of subject in painting, and the rice an element of frustration, an effect of the “real” encounter. How to make a portrait, today? Its real presence reminds us what we might lose with the screens, and that painting has an infinite possibility of spaces and times.
Read the full article at moussemgazine.it