Texts
Rupturing Beauty Exhibition
January 13 - February 22, 2002
Rupturing Beauty
In contemporary painting, the search for that which most ruptures the highest elevation, and for a blinding brilliance, has a share in the elaboration or decomposition of forms.
- Georges Bataille, from Rotten Sun, 1930
While works in Rupturing Beauty hold varying dialogues with Georges Bataille’s ideas, the artists have created exceptional art independent of this association. We chose the artists because of their nontraditional ideas about beauty or form. These include either beauty ("the highest elevation") erupting or rising out of something low, or beauty itself being ruptured, broken, or sacrificed. For the catalogue, two scholars, Jeremy Biles and James Elkins, have produced radically different interpretations of Bataille’s influence on the conception of the exhibition. We celebrate this rupture and perceive it as an integral part of an ongoing inquiry in contemporary art. Françoise Meltzer and Amy Hollywood of the University of Chicago will further this conversation in lectures on February 6 and 20.
The two painters, Marie Krane Bergman and Michael Kiresuk, demonstrate this dichotomy. They strip the act of painting of its typical elevated associations, but their final works achieve a subtle and new beauty. While maintaining the traditional rectangular form, they simultaneously mock it as arbitrary -- capable of infinite expansion in any direction with no right side up or upside down.
Kiresuk’s methods belie the impetuous moments when, dyeing Easter eggs as children, we poured all the colors together to produce the gray egg. In “Life Like,” Kiresuk has trowelled 60 thin layers of acrylic through window screening onto Plexiglas. Four translucent layers of magenta, black, yellow, and cyan produce an earthy gray. As he spreads each layer, these pure, intense colors are corrupted or canceled -- ending in the neutral shade. But unlike our childhood egg, the original colors are not obliterated, but radiate out of the surface and as quickly dissolve back into it. The telltale grid of the screen archives the artist’s meticulous process and obsessive repetitions. This careful, controlled process ironically creates larger patterns that appear randomly across the surface. We see abstracted natural forms that seem life like.
Whereas Kiresuk starts with simple color layers and ends with abstracted landscapes, Bergman has shredded the genteel flower painting into an elemental color code. “Part of One Year (June/July)” results from two years of observing the flowers of a single hydrangea bush. Month after month as the flower heads formed, bloomed, withered, and finally collapsed, she has recorded the colors in small marks on a gridded ground—like a scrivener marking down gains and losses in a ledger book day after day. Bergman reduces the painter’s entire repertoire to a single mark. She rejects traditional painterly expressiveness, and instead repeats the same motion over 22,000 times to create the painting. When complete it has no defined top or bottom. Its placement becomes our choice. Traditional flower painting has been transformed into a record of time and the artist’s observation of the inevitable decay and collapse of beauty. But true to Georges Bataille, Bergman’s observation of collapse and her simultaneous rejection of expressiveness produces a beauty that is radically new – serene, compelling, and moribund.
In contrast to Kiresuk’s and Bergman’s processes, Shane Huffman’s cannot be contained within a rectangle. Instead, we feel as if we are seeing raw, unfinished works. His pieces explode from the image onto the surrounding paper and the walls. Photographic images are amplified with drawings, notes, and arrows. Neither can individual works be clearly delimited, but instead flow from one into the next as they are taped or pinned to the wall. The work appears as a snapshot of an artistic moment rather than as a concluded artistic product. But even that momentary stillness of the gallery installation is disrupted as people moving through the gallery eclipse projected images. In the same manner, the images transmogrify. On first impression the work is filled with heavenly bodies – phases of the moon, the night sky filled with stars, planets captured by a NASA camera ready for the next edition of National Geographic. But in reality they are bits of cement on exposed photo paper or photographs of floor or dirt. Great sweeping galaxies are simultaneously particular spots or places where personal pain, stimuli, or memories fester. They are embarrassing moments of childhood or interactions with family or intimates. For Huffman, there is no separation between the low and the high, the beautiful and the mundane.
The two sculptors in the exhibition, Frances Whitehead and Jocelyn Nevel, radically shift the context in which we perceive notions of beauty from popular culture.
Frances Whitehead’s installation raises the specter of perversity inherent in some forms commonly thought to be beautiful – the mounted butterfly. She has juxtaposed a case of exotic moths with the instrument, the setting board, that was used to preserve them. Whitehead twists that juxtaposition by scaling the setting board to human size. We see the final torture instrument from the insect's perspective. The viewer becomes the insect -- recalling the narrator in Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock contemplating his future: “When I am pinned and wiggling on the wall, how shall I spit out all the butt ends of my days and ways?” Whitehead asks the question, “Would we be as willing to pin, preserve, and enjoy these creatures if the members of the order of Lepidoptera were comparable to ourselves?” Our response may be banner-waving animal rights fervor or wry bemusement with such political stances. Our reaction may also be layered with awe at the scientific process of collecting and categorizing or even the sadomasochistic eroticism of being strapped and pinned to such a bed.
The fifth artist, Jocelyn Nevel, challenges our notions of beauty by transforming the underpinnings of feminine allure – brassieres and pantyhose. In the case of “Bras”, the common foundation of female form, the brassieres become a flattened, lumpy, that is, formless, rug. Likewise the most intimate parts of panty hose are stretched and displayed like stained-glass windows in the series “Crotches.” Nevel collapses and stretches and, in the process, warps our erotic associations with the original materials. We are confronted with a vista of wrinkled breasts at our feet or crotches larger than our heads hanging daintily in quilting hoops. These latter works also resonate with the social and racial issues of commercial culture’s definition of beautiful skin and skin tone. As with Whitehead, Nevel takes commonplace forms of beauty and prods us into discomfort at the same time as she creates witty, engaging objects we can enjoy.
None of the five artists goes to the excesses or extremes that Georges Bataille craves in his exhortations for “rupturing beauty,” but all illustrate the richness and variety that contemporary artists find when challenging and deconstructing that traditional tenet of art -- form.
Chuck Thurow and Patricia Swanson
Curators
January, 2002
The curators would like to recommend, as well as recognize their indebtedness to, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss’ Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997).
Catalog continues on next page...