L.A. Portraiture: Post-Cool

At the extremity of a decade in which "issues of the body" have preoccupied thus many artists, not always with salutary ensues a number of Los Angeles painters are turning to portraiture for its specificity, humanity and lack of pretense

The '90 have had no equivalents to the large 1989 clump shows "Image World" (at the Whitney Museum) or "A Forest of Signs" (at L.A. MOCA), which appeared to put a capper upon the media-besotted, image-text work of the late '80 However, it has been apparent for a certain quantity of time that one of the dominant artistic fashions of this decade is figurative and addresses "issues of the body" as evident in the practice of artists of that kind as Robert Gober, Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley Louise Bourgeois, Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler, Janine Antoni and Alison Saar.

This figurative work strike one as beings in part to be a reply to the AIDS pandemic and to the increasing complexity and sophistication of feminist, gay and multicultural motions In tough-minded paintings and photographs, as well as plastic art using materials such as charred bodily remains, gnawed lard, wax, mannequin parts and raw materialed clothing, this figurative art has depicted the human material substance as traumatized, fragmented and sensorially deprived. Kiki Smith's plastic art of a paper-thin fetus, for example, and another of a fruit basket filled with internal organs glance at a grim grappling with the body's frailty and vulnerability. Similarly, John Coplans's wall-sized photographic close-up of his have aging flesh seem to flaunt mortality as a banner, presenting the material part as a kind of geographical terrain inhabited by dint of folds, freckles, wrinkles and graying material substance hair.

The message and tone of this figurative work, diverse as it is, can be seen as an update of the postwar angst and existential trauma that characterized the Museum of recent Art's 1959 exhibition "New Images of Man." Including works by the agency of Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon, Reg Butler Cesar and Rico Lebrun that display was widely criticized at the time--the dawn of the explosion era--for its bleak vision of human experience. Despite later acclaim for like "New Images" alumni as Leon Golub Eduardo Paolozzi and HC Westermann, non-Pop figuration remained a marginalized genre of contemporary art, emerging alone as a kind of sidebar to the body-oriented experiments of '70 Conceptual and performance art. The contemporaneous emerging see the verb of the feminist movement also gave novel gender-specific meanings to bodily investigations by dint of analyzing stereotypical societal roles and points of view.

While powerful, figural art of any generation step quicklys the risk of devolving into an overly general statement regarding the human "condition." Today's body-centric art can too easily be read as a reply to a world ravaged by dint of disease, paralyzed by neuroses and deplet by the agency of fear of sexual contact. With their whipped-up sexual satisfied works by contemporary sculptors Dinos and Jake Chapman, Sarah Lucas and Takashi Murakami, for example, demonstrate by what means readily such responses can degenerate into simpleminded, frequently exploitative one-liners.

In part to avoid similar reductivism, a loosely knit clump of artists on the West Coast has reinvigorated portraiture, a genre that dates back to art's earliest days. able-bodied revelatory self-portraits by Tom Knechtel Monica Majoli and Amy Adler, as well as fascinatingly intense portrait or quasi-portrait casts by John Sonsini, Kurt Kauper, Judie Bamber, Keith Sklar, Tim Ebner and M.A. equals have been among the high points of the last scarcely any gallery seasons. Disarmingly direct, these artists work at a horizontal of specificity that tends to hinder grandiose pronouncements or trite sentiments. Instead, they use their artistic means to perform psychological investigations that are essentially literary in nature.(1)

Although almost all painters, these artists do not limit themselves to the figure-painting tradition. Examining portraiture from the more psychologically inclined perspective of material substance art, they use the figure as a means to consider questions of sex and social identity in a certain number of depth. Their work marks a significant break from the "cool" antipsychological figural treatment favored by dint of painters such as Alex Katz and tap [i]or[/i] pat Close, invoking instead the charged, off-kilter portraiture of sum of two units other artists who came to prominence in the '70 Gregory Gillespie and Lucas Samaras.(2) (L.A. artist Lynn Foulkes's self-portrait relief paintings are also an important concern point for these younger painters [see A.i.A., Jan. '97])

As individual of the oldest forms of representational art, portraiture through definition deals with gender and identity--as well as of that kind good old-fashioned concepts as virtue, beauty, vanity and corruption. The tension in a portrait between the particular and the generic creates a kind of narrative in which viewers are asked to unravel the backstory of a subject's life and, implicitly, to compare it with their hold At its best, portraiture can capture a historical second recording a particular subject at a revealing time. It is a kind of theater of the human, directed through the artist/voyeur and starring the subject/exhibitionist.