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This Week's Contents
(scroll to see the full content of each article; click the cup to compensate the writer):
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Banned at the Whitney: Three Brilliant
Artists You Have Never Heard of
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Randi Matushevitz: Expressive Intensity |
Moby Dick in the Pandemic |
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Ruth Bader Ginsburg
(March 15, 1933 - September 18, 2020)
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We weep on this dark day
for the United States of America
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Banned at the Whitney: Three Brilliant Artists You Have Never Heard of
by Matthew Kangas
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Ann Leda Shapiro, “Two Sides of Myself,”
1973, watercolor on paper
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For a variety of reasons these three artists — Ann Leda Shapiro, Carol Adelman and Patrice Tullai — all maintain committed full-time studio practices, but rarely show in galleries, do not have agents, and work in both physical and geographical isolation. Yet they are among the most unusual and accomplished artists I have ever encountered.
All three choose to rely on online sites for their sales and on interior, personal issues to drive their aesthetic purpose, which is fueled in each case by considerable ability. Collectors, dealers and even most critics’ responses do not interest them; they work for a small circle of intimate friends and the community where they live. In Tullai’s case, her audience includes a cohort of fellow West Coast and Los Angeles rock musicians (she was part of Pretty Mary Sunshine). Shapiro maintains an acupuncture practice that connects her to appreciative New Age neighbors.
Tullai and Shapiro live in rural areas, an island in the case of Shapiro. Within Puget Sound, islands tend to nurture inward-looking populations, eager to support one another’s farm products — or in her case, paintings. While galleries exist there, they are open only sporadically and indifferent to the art market.
After attending the San Francisco Art Institute (BFA, 1969) and UC Davis (MFA, 1971), Shapiro experienced a mini-revival a few years ago when the Seattle Art Museum acquired two of her paintings, including “Two Sides of Myself,” which was censored and removed from her solo debut at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1973. Initially associated with and encouraged by the feminist movement, Shapiro’s art trended away from Judy Chicago’s abstract genitalia, instead creating a universe of bi-gendered individuals floating in space like astronauts.
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Cross-sections of their bodies reveal double sets of genitalia, anticipating the emergence of transgender artists during the past decade. With her science fiction tableaux, Shapiro echoes and parallels African-American artists and writers such as Robert Pruitt and Olivia E. Butler, who created, respectively, artistic and literary fantasy worlds of escape and pride that exist quite separately from the oppressive Planet Earth. This may also be the point of Shapiro’s ambiguously gendered spacemen and spacewomen. In both cases, Shapiro and her black colleagues are fleeing a hopeless world of oppression, discrimination and authoritarian rule. Eerie and colorful, her work is equally compelling and disturbing. |
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After Adelman was educated at Carnegie Mellon University and University of Washington, she assumed teaching positions at Louisiana State University (2001-2002) and Dickinson College (2003-2004), before accepting a visiting lecturer position at the University of Washington in 2008. Rejecting abstraction, Adelman earlier spent time in Washington, D.C. as advertising director of “Museum and Arts” magazine before the teaching jobs and move to Seattle. During her stay in the nation’s capital, Adelman absorbed Old Masters at the National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Phillips Collection, where she also worked as an educator. These experiences turned her toward portraiture. She began a series upon her arrival in Seattle, as well as curious re-interpretations of canvases by a diverse range of masters, such as Van Eyck (“Madonna of the Chancellor Rolin,” 2010), Watteau (“Pierrot, 2010”) and, recently, Lucian Freud.
Her sitters’ piercing and psychologically revealing gaze grows out of the artist’s own experiences with querulous vision, inadvertently reinforced by an unexpected return of ill health that for a time extinguished her studio activities. Today she is able to work regularly if slowly, teach small groups, and participate, if quietly, in the Seattle art scene. Joining many artists that have been pushed out of town due to the skyrocketing rents fueled by Amazon and Google employees (over 150,000 in the last five years),
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Carol Adelman, “After Van Eyck: Madonna of the
Chancellor Rolin,” 2010, oil on panel, 12 x 12”
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Adelman now lives in Lynnwood, a suburb north of Seattle. She is able to maintain a reduced-size studio in the Ballard neighborhood. Though her pictures benefit from a strong undergirding of drawing, the viewer’s perspective shifts from crisp to blurry depending upon the figures’ unstable position within the composition. |
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Patrice Tuliai, “Moana,” 2020, oil on canvas, 58 x 44” |
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Taking a lighter approach than Adelman’s somnolent characters, Tullai, a native of Hawaii who was educated at University of Washington (BFA, 1992), casts her net wide in terms of both subject matter and style. Early landscapes such as “Kiholo,” “Kukio,” and “Honokauna,” (all 2006) capture tropical beach scenes and turbulent water that appears perfect for surfing. Others are Pop Art-inspired vignettes of food still lifes and commercial products. As if her geographical isolation were not enough, Tullai has created an artistic pseudonym, Alice Dean (“sounds like LSD,” according to the artist), also the name of one of the three rock groups with which she performs.
These activities do not seem to contradict her meandering subject matter. Among these, one area, all-over abstract painting, seems more fully explored materially and formally. Color explorations, such as “M Painting” (2009), “Seven Painting” (2009) and the “Monochromatic Hypnotic Repetitive” series (2009) inform larger works averaging four by four feet, with dozens of variegated squares jammed into a bulging frame, emulating both quilt patterns and the legendary blue-and-white “ikat” tie-dye textiles of the South Pacific islands such as Java. “Colorful Pixels,” (2011) displays a wide palette and demonstrates Tullai’s chromatic facility.
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Recent works like “Moana” (2020) have gotten larger and allude to Hawaiian sites with churning water and surf through drips of paint applied in horizontal swaths.
Tullai is also unknown beyond the confines of the internet. She continues to work at her studio-home on the Kitsap Peninsula. Her talents deserve wider attention, as do those of Adelman and Shapiro. Such a likelihood is, however, slim given their current contentment and commitment to comparatively reclusive lives. The art that each produces is the best argument for the wisdom of that decision.
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Matthew Kangas is a corresponding editor for Art in America and Sculpture magazine. He has written for numerous publications including the Seattle Times, Artweek, Preview and Art Ltd. Four collections of his reviews, interviews and essays have been published in New York by Midmarch Arts Press and are available at Amazon. Books by Matthew Kangas at Amazon. He is also the author of the recent award-winning monograph Italo Scanga 1932-2001.
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Randi Matushevitz: Expressive Intensity
by Betty Ann Brown
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“Man screams from the depths of his soul; the whole era becomes a single, piercing shriek. Art also screams, into the deep darkness, screams for help, screams for the spirit. This is Expressionism.”
— Hermann Bahr
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Austrian art critic and playwright Hermann Bahr (1863-1934) was one of the first to write about the cultural movement he termed Expressionism. Bahr did so in the early decades of the twentieth century, during the rise of Fascism. Today, Los Angeles artist Randi Matushevitz deploys Expressionism to respond to parallel cultural developments: the pervasive sexism, blatant racism, violent homophobia and rampant white supremacism of our current era.
The early Expressionists introduced exaggerated and distorted forms; intense, non-local color; and adamant, frequently harsh brushwork in order to convey their emotional response to the horrors of their time. Matushevitz reinterprets these expressive devices to create dynamic figurative compositions and resonant symbols floating in dark, churning worlds.
Because early Expressionists like Ernest Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff rejected academic standards of idealized anatomy and illusionistic space, the Nazis labeled them "degenerate." They destroyed hundreds of Expressionist artworks. They tortured and imprisoned several of the artists. A century later, although Matushevitz's paintings can be seen as offsprings of the European Expressionists, it's unlikely she will be labeled degenerate or thrown in jail because of her work. Instead, we recognize her as part of the honorable lineage that started with the Europeans, morphed into the work of Jackson Pollock and his Abstract Expressionist entourage, then climaxed in the late twentieth century with Jean Michel Basquiat.
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Randi Matushevitz, “Chuckles … Ode to Mathew
Barney,” 2019, oil on linen, 20 x 16”
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Randi Matushevitz, “Cluster 16,” 2020, oil on linen, 30 x 24” |
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German Expressionist Max Beckmann wrote, "Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement: for transfiguration, not for the sake of play. It is the quest of our self that drives us along the eternal and never-ending journey we must all make." Matushevitz's oeuvre gives voice to that same journey, as it embodies and reveals the human condition: our quest for connection and the pain we all suffer as part of this earthly existence.
She conveys that embodiment through fierce ghostly figures that scowl and howl and dream, their faces declaring the intensity of their experience in sardonic contortions. Black lines snake around a cheek. A white ear is transformed into a pointed horn. Heavy black feet are anchored by uneasy red contours. A dense leaden sky looms heavy over a fractured landscape. Circular discs of color and texture shower down onto denuded fields. A tiny human sinks into a well, recalling some of the miniature figures anguishing in the torments of Hieronymous Bosch's Hell.
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In her current work Matushevitz expands her painting practice to include video, animating these haunted faces so that they silently speak or scream or moan. Howling in anxious frustration, mouths open to reveal discouncertingly "real" teeth. The rubbery facial distortions, the uneasy contrast between painted and actual features, and the agonizing silence of their attempts at communication make these new animated portraits even more disturbing than the artist's earlier ones. It's as if Francis Bacon's most disconcerting figures have come to life in a new century. Are they modern-day Cassandras? Victims of the pandemic? Perhaps they are casualties of the current political turmoil. Or do they suffer from the extremes of climate change?
Matushevitz addresses the troubling destruction of our natural environment, depicting a realm more akin to a zombie apocalypse than our flesh and blood domain. The only lights are uneasy windows of Day-Glo chartreuse, the only brilliance a sickly fluorescent orange. The artist's dystopian perspective is assertively ugly and impressively powerful. She performs artistic alchemy, allowing her intensely rendered marks to fuse with darkness and light in order to express the very nature of existence. Under all the expressive — even assaultive — distortions, there remains enduring hope: hope that we will survive, hope that we will continue to seek connectivity, and hope that creativity is the best path to do so. Within all the intense expression, Matushevitz reveals the beauty of the human condition.
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Randi Matushevitz, “Cluster 3,” 2020, oil on linen, 30 x 24” |
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Betty Ann Brown, Ph.D., is an art historian, critic, and curator living in Pasadena, California. A professor of art history at California State University, Northridge since 1988, she has been active in art world politics and served as President of the Board for both the Los Angeles Woman’s Building and the Southern California Women’s Caucus for Art. Among the many exhibitions she has curated are retrospectives for Hans Burkhardt, Roland Reiss, Linda Vallejo, John M. White, and Mark Steven Greenfield and Mark Dean Veca. Books by Betty Ann Brown.
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Moby Dick in the Pandemic
by Margaret Hawkins
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Rockwell Kent, “Moby Dick,” illustration, Modern Library edition, 1930. |
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I read “Moby Dick” this summer, preparing to teach it this fall.
I was hungry for something consequential and thought my students might be, too. I craved content that was soulful, dense, dark. Longer than 280 characters. Chapter 42 (“The Whiteness of the Whale”) features a sentence that runs to 467 words.
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The project felt crazy — tackling Herman Melville’s 1851 epic about a vengeful sea captain chasing an albino sperm whale through the oceans, while I was social distancing in the Midwest in the middle of a pandemic, then trying to talk about it over Zoom with 38 anxiety-ridden undergraduates — but so did everything last summer. Soon I was hooked.
I knew the story, sort of, about Ahab steering his crew toward oblivion in monomaniacal pursuit of the elusive and uncannily intelligent whale that bit off his leg. But I had no idea the book was also about race and justice, greed and virtue, fear and courage, fate and God and will and reincarnation, the crimes of colonialism and missionary-ism, the smug heartlessness of the pious, the decency man owes to animals but fails to pay. Oh, and WHALES.
Ah, so much about whales. True, there’s some 19th century science and Melville erroneously calls Moby Dick a fish, but, really, who cares. He gets the big stuff right. In Chapter 86, “The Tail,” Melville praises the whale’s flukes: “Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it.” Later in the same chapter he describes how sperm whales fight their fellows with their heads and jaws, reserving their tails, “contemptuously,” for human foes.
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Frank Stella, “A Bower in the Arsacides” from the “Moby Dick” series, 1993, lithograph, etching, aquatint, relief, collograph on white TGL handmade paper, 58 1/4 x 49 5/8” |
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Melville’s language is enticement enough to read the book. Biblical, nautical, and Shakespearean all at once, it nods to the bard’s love of the bawdy and the phallic pun. The book is funny! Also radically irreverent. Mostly, though, it’s haunting. Chapter 23 offers this: “Better it is to perish in the howling infinite than be dashed upon the lee.” It will send you to the dictionary to look up lee, which means protective shelter.
I worried about my students wrestling with the vocabulary, especially in the sterile context of Zoom discussions, but the first week, when a girl returned from a breakout room and said, “So we looked up woe …”, I knew it was going to be OK. We’re all looking up woe these days.
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Paul Romano, “Leviathan,” cover art for
the album Mastodon, “Leviathan,” 2004
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I’m a slow reader. Even scanning a menu, I fall behind, lingering on words like tender. This book took me a good month. I got myself three copies, two from the library. My favorite edition has large type and is illustrated with Rockwell Kent’s woodcuts. It’s like an 800-page children’s book about death. And whales.
I’m tempted to say the whales are the only noble characters in this book, but that’s too simplistic. All the characters are complicated, even Moby Dick, and Captain Ahab isn’t evil. This moral subtlety surprised me, accustomed as I am to a world where the word “evil” gets slung around a lot. Melville is too great a mind for that. This book is not about evil. It’s about the deadliest sin, pride. It’s a book for our times.
The book is about obsession and soon I was obsessed, too. I started following my husband around the kitchen in the morning, reading bits out loud while he boiled eggs and cut up fruit, excitedly paraphrasing scenes.
“Science! Curse three, thou vain toy!” I shouted, imitating Ahab trampling his quadrant with his whalebone leg, destroying the one tool he might have used to steer them out of the typhoon. How could he — the masts were burning like taper candles! Yet, I understood. I was thinking of GPS and my laptop and the gas grill I couldn’t figure out how to light.
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Then the grimmer parallel dawned. I remembered another lost, vengeance-obsessed captain on a four-year voyage who turned his back on science and steered his crew into the storm: on purpose.
I finished reading the book on Labor Day, on my landlocked patio, rooting for the injured whale but heartbroken, too, for the senseless suffering of the loyal men who fought it and died. I mourned all the hunted creatures in the sea and all the suffering humans in Melville’s world, the children on shore waiting for fathers who would never come home, and the suffering creatures in my own world. And even Ahab, tragic in his wasted life.
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Then a gust of autumnish wind blew through the yard. My pile of yellow stickers, with notes scrawled on them that I’d been transferring from my library edition to the smaller-print student edition, suddenly lifted into the air and swirled into a little vortex like the one that took down the Pequod. I gathered up my things and went inside. Later, when I looked in the mirror, I saw that one of the little notes had stuck to me. I was wearing a tag that quoted Starbuck: “It’s a brave man that weeps!”
I’d worried that reading a book this long, written so long ago, might further deaden my sense of reality in an already unreal time. But the exact opposite happened. I haven’t felt this excited in ages. Now I’m thinking ahead to November, and I have to say, I disagree with Ishmael. In present circumstances, being dashed upon the lee is better than perishing in the howling infinite.
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Jay Hunter Morris (Captain Ahab) in “Moby Dick,” opera by Jake Heggie (music) and Gene Scheer (lyrics), San Francisco Opera. 2012. Photo by Cory Weaver. |
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Margaret Hawkins is a writer, critic and educator. Her books include “Lydia’s Party” (2015), “How We Got Barb Back” (2011) a memoir about family mental illness, and others. She wrote a column about art for the Chicago Sun-Times, was Chicago correspondent for ARTnews, and has written for a number of other publications including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Art & Antiques and Fabrik. She teaches writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Loyola University. Visit Margaret Hawkins' website.
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Contact Information:
PO Box 2029, Thousand Oaks, CA 91358 • Ph: (213) 282-3444
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