Jenny Saville

Anyone familiar with contemporary figurative painting knows the formidable work of Jenny Saville. For the past thirty years, beginning as a peripheral YBA, she has steadily climbed the ladder of contemporary art stardom to sit somewhere near its pinnacle. She emerged through Charles Saatchi in the early nineties with a gift for figurative realism, somewhat in the style of Lucian Freud, and from there expanded her range to the Bacon-esque deformation of the human head, whether through injury or plastic surgery. The wounds, disfigurements, and corporeal bodies announced her consummate mastery of painterly realism on a scale that took on the big boys of painting. But it is precisely this taking on of the big boys that plants the seeds of doubt.

Bacon and Freud were formative influences and, for a young painter finding her voice, wholly expected. In more recent work Saville has obviously been watching the strategies of Abstract Expressionism, de Kooning in particular. Her building up of flesh has taken on greater gestural authority over time. The substance of paint itself becomes a stand-in for flesh, perhaps even flesh itself. Her scale has remained enormous, and that scale flirts with the problem of overblown importance. Extremely large painting announces its importance ahead of time. The viewer is robbed of a sense of discovery. It is as if the work tells you what to think before you have drawn your own conclusions.

With scale, authoritative facture, unimpeachable skill, and shock firmly established as tools of her trade, Saville in the last decade has aligned her practice with the titans of painting. This includes not only Bacon, Freud, and de Kooning, but the Old Masters and the explicit introduction of abstract gestural painting. That move exposes the work to new criteria and reassessment. It is one thing to paint heroic figures in a de Kooning manner, whether in irony or as a feminist stance. It is another to fold in Old Master composition and technique and invite comparison on a more exposed level.

The recent paintings are more obvious in their construction. Saville begins with a frenzy of abstract gestural tropes and then superimposes her trademark realism over the top, leaving strategically placed passages of the underlying abstraction. The result can feel less like a unified statement than a series of quotations. Perhaps she tired of the body as a site of disruption, elective surgery having already provided both subject and topical content. Now the work seems in some ways purely formalist. She appears interested in how paint behaves, how style performs: if one style is fused with another, will the scale be justified? Can tradition and modernism be made to work together?

These quotations announce importance in the same way scale does. Out of One, with its pastiche of Old Master draughtsmanship, pentimenti, and Abstract Expressionist calligraphy, compounds the sense of vulnerability. Saville risks losing her grip on what she has been very good at: using her unquestioned ability with paint to state something honestly and directly as a painter. Instead she wanders into a postmodern maze, quoting all the important influences — Twombly-esque scribbling, Old Master reference, painterly bravura — in an effort to produce a grand unified statement. The results, while superficially impressive, can appear hollow.

There is a danger here of cushioned ambition. Quoting Leonardo or invoking the Old Masters can protect the work by association. Risk is diminished. A dull safety enters. The pallor of mastery remains, but it can feel like a pale veil rather than a living necessity.

I have no doubt of Saville’s sincerity. Her development echoes that of a number of highly successful artists of the last forty-five years, artists pushed by market pressure, discourse, and the demand to keep presenting something new. Saville appears to have her head firmly on her shoulders, but she has strayed somewhat in order to feed the discourse. That is always dangerous. Fashionable strategies and borrowed theories can easily slip into pose. Saville is better when she addresses her own concerns.

Dan Colen
Poetry
Gagosian Gallery, New York

Vast Abstract Expressionist canvases made with chewing gum and confetti, a skateboard half-pipe, a toppled row of Harley Davidsons, and a large brick wall fragment propped up by huge steel I-beams: Dan Colen’s exhibition arrives with all the apparatus of spectacle. Predictably, the naysayers are out in droves with the usual outcries of disgust or polite dismissal. Larry Gagosian, master of art as spectacle, has once again provided a stage for work that aims to shock a public thought by now to be shock-proof. Yet Colen’s show is not much of a shock. It is more an adolescent prank writ large on Gagosian’s monstrous walls.

There is a strong stench of adolescence throughout the gallery. One cannot help comparing much of the current art world to what used to be known as the rock world, a world of institutionalized adolescence. Art stars are molded and hyped in much the same way as musicians, the audience smaller, but the analogy still holds. Colen’s work belongs to this culture of hype, youth, and spectacle, and it knows it.

The main buzz surrounds the paintings. To an unsuspecting viewer they might look like one more tired round of Abstract Expressionist painting. But these are not merely bad rehashed Pollocks. Their stringy Pop-colored skeins are actually chewing gum. There is the twist. There is the joke.

The question is whether the joke carries enough weight. What does this work say about Abstract Expressionism and the triumph of American painting? Is it an homage by way of teasing, a swipe at abstraction by Pop, or a dismissal of a generation’s accomplishment delivered with the arrogance of youth? Perhaps it is all of these things at once.

There is, of course, a vast difference of intent between a Pollock, say Number 31 of 1950, and Colen’s work. A sense of humor is at play here, but it struggles to overcome a self-congratulatory giggle at its own joke. Abstractions made out of gum are hilarious for a moment, but they lapse quickly into weak one-liners. A more generous view would be that Colen is posing serious questions about the demise of high culture in an age of media overload and tabloid hype. That becomes harder to accept when he is also the direct beneficiary of the hype, to the tune of a rumored $300,000 for a single canvas. Still, given the benefit of the doubt, the work seems to ask whether painting means anything to us anymore, never mind a Jackson Pollock. Do we have faith in art anymore? Do we even care?

Colen appears to be challenging Damien Hirst as a commentator on life and death and everything in between, at least within the art world. Even the titles share the same epic, contrived construction. Though Hirst has been guilty of excess, I would still give him the edge. Hirst has obvious debts to Bacon and Minimalism, especially Judd’s boxes, while Colen draws on Abstract Expressionism and, in his photo-realist work, on Gerhard Richter. His candle paintings, although derived from Disney, call to mind Richter’s renderings of candles. Hirst has addressed deep issues with dark means. His meat and flies are more disturbing than fallen motorcycles. Colen, by contrast, faces large issues with a lighter touch.

There are precedents for Colen’s strategies. Lichtenstein’s comic-book brushstrokes come to mind, as do Larry Rivers’s diner menus and history paintings served up as gestural painting. Colen’s work belongs to that lineage of quotation, parody, and ironic re-use. But quotation alone is not enough. The work still has to earn its seriousness.

What irks viewers most about Colen is not simply the chewing gum. It is the sense that the work arrives with a middle finger already built into it. He seems to be thumbing his nose at art and everything else while also asking to be taken seriously within the very tradition he mocks. That tension is central to the work’s effect. Colen is a product of a bubble gum culture, but he is also a beneficiary of the culture he critiques.

This points to a broader unease. We have an uneasy relationship with the way we live, our dependence on that way of life, and our simultaneous need to critique it. If we are so critical of our culture, why do we continue to live this way? Do we get the culture we deserve?

Gagosian is the Disney of the art world. His galleries are places where people go to be entertained. It is precisely this value of entertainment that affronts many art lovers. Art as spectacle, art with mega-production values, cannot help but be compared to a Hollywood aesthetic.

As for the bubble gum, it is an apt material. When the bubble bursts, it has a nasty habit of coming back in our face.