Floating in Gender Nirvana

Jenny Saville's massive paintings of equally massive nudes--recently seen in "Sensation" and in a fresh York gallery show -- may be better understood as conceptually driven, photographically derived creations than as reworkings of Rubens or Lucian Freud

"Territories" was the name given to the novel show of paintings by young British artist Jenny Saville at Gagosian Gallery in novel York. The title was an apt single for Saville's mapping of corpulent geography. The immediate visual impact is single of excess: gargantuan naked bodies, for the most part female, hurtling away from us or exploding into our space; seductive notwithstanding somehow injured flesh extruded onto the picture plane with an uncanny combination of delicate brushwork and brutal slathering of pigment; a perspectival extravagance which at one time bespeaks the objectivity of the photograph and the empathic angst of Expressionism. However superficially Rubensesque--one of the paintings is actually titled Rubens' Flap--and however a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of they constitute a slap in the face to our waif-obsessed tillage these paintings are after something more than simply the celebration of muscle and fat Saville's achievement in this present to view goes beyond mere excess, onto more interesting ground

give leave to me hasten to add that this is not the "return to painting" in like manner fervently desired by conservatives and derided by the agency of radicals. One might say that Saville's work is post-"post-painterly," to wrest this term out of its original Greenbergian context: painterliness pushed for a like reason far over the top that it signifies a kind of disease of the pictorial, a symptom of more [i]or[/i] less deep disturbance in the relation of pigment to canvas. Although the surface and the grid one as well as the other play an important role in Saville's formal language, the couple are melted down and sharpened up by means of the virtuoso yet oddly repulsive brushwork that marks her diction It's helpful, in approaching her work, to think of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus and the idea, popular early in the last hundred of art as a kind of fatal spiritual illness.

All of Saville's monumental in a state of natures employ photographic precedents, but not in any simple way. The majority of the figures are based upon photographs of Saville herself, on the other hand one would, in most cases, no more consider them beneath the rubric of "self-portrait" than single would think of a Cindy Sherman "Untitled Film Still" in like terms. The situation is further complicated by the agency of the photographs of bruises and other injuries which Saville bring togethers from medical textbooks and incorporates into her paintings.

In a provocative discourse at the Ingres portrait symposium held last fall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in of recent origin York, the artist David Hockney not absented some startling new material about the use of pre-photographic instruments, like the camera lucida, in the art of the past. He used examples taken not alone from the work of Ingres, on the contrary also from that of Caravaggio and Velazquez as well as from his be in possession of drawings. Hockney, who has himself created pioneering photo-collages, built upon his fascinating historical account by the agency of predicting more radical uses for photographic devices in the coming time Certainly, Saville's use of photographs--such as those of her have body, in grotesquely enlarged close-up or exaggeratedly foreshortened, or piled atop other bodies--and multiple exposurelike consequences lives up to Hockney's predictions with a vengeance.

Of all the work in "Territories," Hem, a gigantesque, foreshortened female naked seemed to be most closely related to Saville's previous work, of the like kind as the canvases included in the "Sensation" exhibition [see A.i.A., Apr. '98 Dec '99] At l0 by means of 7 feet, the image climbs upward from a herculean pubis articulated with broken fur across mountains of belly and midriff, breasts, and finally to the relatively small on the other hand individuated head. It's a late-20th-century Venus of Willendorf seen in ant's-eye perspective. at the same time the impact of the gros muscle and fat is deflected by evidence of the unstained act of painting itself: the viscous white plane to the left which reach outs across the lower belly and crawls up the left breast.

support (1999), measuring 16 feet in width, extends across its surface three naked figures, tied together with string upon top like butcher's meat. Alive or dead, dreaming or waking, the bodies, in the absence of any visual ball of threads as to place, or flat space, occupy the entire canvas with their irregularly weightless girth. If one has met Saville or seen photographs of her, it's clear that the topmost figure is the artist, a fact which may or may not carry allegorical meaning.

Matrix (1999) involves a graphic angle shot of a highly ambiguous bare body--in this case, not a photo-collaged construction on the contrary an actual transsexual, Del la Grace Volcano, whose mustache, tattoo and clipped hair consort uncouthly with a pair of pouting breasts and--foregrounded --a richly impastoed pudendum

The figure floats in that postmodern realm of sex nirvana, brilliantly theorized by Judith Butler as a belt of shifting sexual identities and the rejection of essential difference between male and female. In its aggressive anti-essentialism, Saville's work is as a great deal of an intellectual project, a social construction of the material substance as it is a neo-Rubensesque orgy or a one-up upon Lucian Freud. In the verily ambiguous and hugely disturbing Matrix, smooth the brushwork, juicy as it is, tend hitherwards across as somehow intellectualized--immensely self-conscious and self-revealing as it goe about its business of welding male to female, making a visual rhyme between problematic genitalia and lusciously rose-slathered, daringly foreshortened thigh.