feel good paintings for feel bad times
Paul Kasmin Gallery – Sept 7-Oct 13

Daddy, 2007

Looking at Deborah Kass’ recent paintings is like a Sunday afternoon drive through the last half century of American painting. Kass describes her recent work as ‘nostalgic, longing for post-war high times, when anything was possible.’ Each painting headlines a brassy phrase grabbed from Broadway, popular movies, music and Yiddish, with a supporting cast of bold colors, shapes and fonts. Kass ‘ recent series feel good paintings for feel bad times follows her acclaimed Warhol Project of the 1990’s in which she preempted Andy Warhol’s signature silk screening into personalized mementos.

Kass’ new paintings ache for recognition and put everything up front for the taking like all the wannabe actors in A Chorus Line screaming DADDY I WOULD LOVE TO DANCE! If you fancy paintings, you might even find yourself a little randy standing in front of these sexy squares. But despite the staccato smears over the stencil edges, which breaks up the otherwise perfected hard edge and glossy aesthetic in a piece like Mighty Real, the longer you look at these paintings, the less they reveal. It can leave one feeling a bit cheated.

An uncharacteristically bashful painting amongst Kass’ glitz is the cartoony Hard To Be a Jew. The title hearkens back to an ancient Yiddish saying and to the play written by Sholom Aleichem in the early twentieth century, in which two boys, one Jew, one not, exchange identities in Czarist Russia. In 1983 the play experienced a revival in New York, if not to the popular appeal of Dirty Dancing or Sylvester’s Do Ya Wanna Funk.

In the 90’s Kass all but deflated the whoopee cushion of Warhol’s gender ambivalence, getting audiences to laugh at the noise. The joke for Kass this time around is that we don’t take Sunday drives anymore, in fact America doesn’t believe in Sunday. And it’s not hard to be a Jew, it’s hard to be a Muslim.

Hard To Be a Jew, 2003

I recently perused through Vitamin P: New Perspectives on Painting, a 352 page image-filled collection of 114 contemporary painters who have been selected by critics, curators and other experts. Any young artist should be aware of the painters in this book, and kudos to the publisher for making available this work in a condensed survey format. However, I was surprised (perhaps this is my naiveté) how defensive many of the accompanying text blurbs, each written by a different person, were in stating that such-and-such artist shows that painting is not dead. Wouldn’t you think that 352 pages of internationally recognized painters, many of whom are working in diverse idioms, is statement enough that painting is alive? If anything, this text documents for posterity how at the beginning of the 21st century we who would champion paintings feel like the bastard sibling of Art’s other named disciplines.

If I am correct in interpreting Vitamin P’s proposal that Painting is the application of pigment in a vehicle, then with my addendum that the contemporary result constitutes no concrete utility, how could Painting ever be in a dead state? Color that has no utility serves no function by which upon serving its function one can consider it useless. Then again, perhaps Painting’s deadness betrays him who has the authority to declare it dead. He has not only used it, he has used it up: the difference between shooting and shooting it dead. If Painting no longer functions to bolster his authority, then what of it is left? Dump the corpse in the river, or better yet leave it hanging from a tree for everyone to see.

Cave paintings executed by our ancestors date to the Upper Paleolithic, ±40,000 years ago. Cavernous museums around the world are filled with pigmented artifacts whose group utility diminishes exponentially as we pretend travel from those cave paintings to the paintings of today. Yet, group utility does not stop those of us who would paint. I would ask if perhaps there is something human in this pursuit, something unalienable, even in its self-contained, self-supporting, self-centered life, something akin to Selbstmord?

As for the official who would declare Painting dead, he can only superficially subdue the urge to paint (please refer to the past ±40,000 years.) True death would only accompany an evolution of the human species in which the artist gene(s), if such genes exist, were removed. Who knows how we will modify ourselves in the near future. Who knows if we are able to remove the artist.

At any rate, the declaration of a death of an artistic discipline should only bring unease to us loyal linear historians. For those of us who prefer circularity, we may find solace in the many reincarnations due to Painting before it will experience Moksha, ultimate release from the cycle.