L.A. Portraiture: Post-Cool

Art in America, Oct, 1999 by Michael Duncan

At the end of a decade in which "issues of the body" have preoccupied so many artists, not always with salutary results, a number of Los Angeles painters are turning to portraiture for its specificity, humanity and lack of pretense.

The '90s have had no equivalents to the large 1989 group shows "Image World" (at the Whitney Museum) or "A Forest of Signs" (at L.A. MOCA), which seemed to put a capper on the media-besotted, image-text work of the late '80s. However, it has been apparent for some time that one of the dominant artistic modes of this decade is figurative and addresses "issues of the body," as evident in the practice of artists such as Robert Gober, Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley, Louise Bourgeois, Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler, Janine Antoni and Alison Saar.

This figurative work seems in part to be a response to the AIDS pandemic and to the increasing complexity and sophistication of feminist, gay and multicultural movements. In tough-minded paintings and photographs, as well as sculpture using materials such as charred bodily remains, gnawed lard, wax, mannequin parts and stuffed clothing, this figurative art has depicted the human body as traumatized, fragmented and sensorially deprived. Kiki Smith's sculpture of a paper-thin fetus, for example, and another of a fruit basket filled with internal organs suggest a grim grappling with the body's frailty and vulnerability. Similarly, John Coplans's wall-sized photographic close-ups of his own aging flesh seem to flaunt mortality as a banner, presenting the body as a kind of geographical terrain inhabited by folds, freckles, wrinkles and graying body hair.

The message and tone of this figurative work, diverse as it is, can be seen as an update of the postwar angst and existential trauma that characterized the Museum of Modern Art's 1959 exhibition "New Images of Man." Including works by Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon, Reg Butler, Cesar and Rico Lebrun, that show was widely criticized at the time--the dawn of the Pop era--for its bleak vision of human experience. Despite later acclaim for such "New Images" alumni as Leon Golub, Eduardo Paolozzi and H.C. Westermann, non-Pop figuration remained a marginalized genre of contemporary art, emerging only as a kind of sidebar to the body-oriented experiments of '70s Conceptual and performance art. The contemporaneous emergence of the feminist movement also gave new gender-specific meanings to bodily investigations by analyzing stereotypical societal roles and points of view.

While powerful, figural art of any generation runs the risk of devolving into an overly general statement regarding the human "condition." Today's body-centric art can too easily be read as a response to a world ravaged by disease, paralyzed by neuroses and depleted by fear of sexual contact. With their whipped-up sexual content, works by contemporary sculptors Dinos and Jake Chapman, Sarah Lucas and Takashi Murakami, for example, demonstrate how readily such responses can degenerate into simpleminded, often exploitative one-liners.

In part to avoid such reductivism, a loosely knit group of artists on the West Coast has reinvigorated portraiture, a genre that dates back to art's earliest days. Strong, revelatory self-portraits by Tom Knechtel, Monica Majoli and Amy Adler, as well as fascinatingly intense portrait or quasi-portrait projects by John Sonsini, Kurt Kauper, Judie Bamber, Keith Sklar, Tim Ebner and M.A. Peers, have been among the high points of the last few gallery seasons. Disarmingly direct, these artists work at a level of specificity that tends to preclude grandiose pronouncements or trite sentiments. Instead, they use their artistic means to perform psychological investigations that are essentially literary in nature.(1)

Although almost all painters, these artists do not limit themselves to the figure-painting tradition. Examining portraiture from the more psychologically inclined perspective of body art, they use the figure as a means to consider questions of gender and social identity in some depth. Their work marks a significant break from the "cool," antipsychological figural treatment favored by painters such as Alex Katz and Chuck Close, invoking instead the charged, off-kilter portraiture of two other artists who came to prominence in the '70s, Gregory Gillespie and Lucas Samaras.(2) (L.A. artist Lynn Foulkes's self-portrait relief paintings are also an important reference point for these younger painters [see A.i.A., Jan. '97].)

As one of the oldest forms of representational art, portraiture by definition deals with gender and identity--as well as such good old-fashioned concepts as virtue, beauty, vanity and corruption. The tension in a portrait between the particular and the generic creates a kind of narrative in which viewers are asked to unravel the backstory of a subject's life and, implicitly, to compare it with their own. At its best, portraiture can capture a historical moment, recording a particular subject at a revealing time. It is a kind of theater of the human, directed by the artist/voyeur and starring the subject/exhibitionist.