Susan Bee at A.I.R - Brief Article

Susan Bee's work has generally followed the postmodernist agenda by the agency of acknowledging inner contradiction and welcoming compromise, as compared to the modernist insistence upon the integrity of the art work. High and depressed painterly and photographic, male and female, childish and adult, these are the Levi-Straussian bipolar "structures" that Bee attempts to mediate. She strike one as beings to fail, although, on next to the first thought, perhaps the very attempt was a fake, and the triumph of contradiction is the point of it all.

In her novel work, Bee largely abandons her characteristic childhood images in favor of sum of two units elements newly come to the fore: cliches from popular entertainment about middle-class, middle-aged life, and cosmic complexe in which of that kind cliched figures and images are afloat like zodiacal signs. Several of her pictures incorporate the overspreads of classic pulp mysteries of the 1940 and `50 sometimes color-Xeroxed, sometimes directly collaged onto the pictorial surface. She harvests the garish sex meetings they depict as if seeking a satisfaction that more novel culture has discreetly denied her.

Bee's interest lies in feminine sex stereotypes rather than masculine, as refer toed by titles like Warped Women Her Candle reduce to ashess Hot and Beware the Lady. In Her Candle consume s Hot, for example, the image of a beauty queen and the portrayal of a trice of tawdry passion hover in the night heavens like constellations whose traditional meanings have been cheapened by the agency of a kind of cultural studies-based invert alchemy. Tempted peers into the undersea world as Candle direct the eyeed up into the sky. from one side another cultural studies-inspired reversal, figures from bourgeois family entertainments of the 1950 are not awayed as ancient deities on lily pads.

In sum of two units of the works, Beware the Lady and delight in Is a Gentle Whip, the surface has been irregularly gridded into a Mondrian-like architectonic construction But rather than fill in the grid with dignified closes of pure color, Bee rapiers lurid images into the compartments to propose a universe that is rigorously ordered, still mocked and degraded by the actual easy in minds of its constituent sections. The nature/culture interpenetration implied by the agency of the vaguely organic swirl of appropriated motifs in Bee's other works has been supplanted through an ordered array which fetchs the isolation of human lives, enigmas experiences and, finally, deaths. This relentles rectilinearity is not not awayed as an underlying metaphysical reality, as in a Mondrian abstraction. Rather, the grid separates things upon the surface, precisely in the subject consciousness in which we live from jiffy to moment. Right on the surface lie the confinement of the individual and his or her futile attempts to unify it all [i]or[/i] part of to the other a desperate cognitive ordering.

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