Ave Maria.
Storr, Robert
'Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented.' (1)
That's Willem de Kooning talking, and nobody knew the truth of this
statement better than he. Indeed, nobody has rendered the body in its
variously firm, flaccid or oozingly fluid aspects with greater accuracy,
pitilessness or relish than this latter-day Dutch master. De
Kooning's historical point of reference was Jan van Eyck, for in
Van Eyck the sculptural qualities of traditional panel painting with its
burnished but nevertheless dry tempera surfaces--call them the Medieval
bones of Renaissance art--acquire a skin, and beneath that skin is the
palpable pressure of muscle and fat. In short, Van Eyck gave the
'tactile values' that art critic Bernard Berenson recognised
in early Italian art a corporeal substance that they had never before
possessed.
The much-predicted death of painting that haunted twentieth-century
art, and now haunts that of the twenty-first--or at any rate, the death
of oil painting--presumes that we will abruptly exhaust our fascination
with the stuff of which we ourselves are made. But ever since we have
known how to create such richly carnal mirrors of our own all-too-human
fleshiness, the odds against this actually happening have been very
long, especially when our innate narcissism is factored in. Yet, one
could easily argue that the modernist quest for pure form and its
frequently corresponding hostility to painterly painting, if not
painting of all kinds, reflects currents that in most of us alternate
with that narcissism: namely, vanity (inordinate self-love) and
squeamishness (inordinate self-loathing).
As to the latter, the present vogue for the informe and its
perversely hieratic theorist, Georges Bataille, can correspondingly be
understood as an intellectual sublimation of some of the more extreme
manifestations of such excessive self-loathing, given that the chief
advocates of this academically sanitised school of thought count among
those least sympathetic to the medium. Funny how such brave explorers of
the unloveliest regions of the individual and collective subconscious
love to play with words but recoil from playing with themselves, or with
others who lend themselves to shameless fondling either directly or with
an unctuous brush.
Jackson Pollock, Wols, and other notables notwithstanding, the
problem for painterly painting in the post-war era was not a definitive
regression into formlessness (whether informe or merely informel) any
more than it was a definitive subordination to competing nonobjective
modes, hardedged and soft. After all, the looping line of the classic
Pollocks of 1950 coalesced into the nearly tangible shapes of the
canvases that immediately followed them, just as Wols's squiggles
of the same time quickened with organic life and de Kooning himself
abandoned the abstraction of Excavation, 1950 for Woman I, 1950-52, only
to double back to abstractions with breasts and buttocks and phantom
limbs. And even when painters left painting behind to access a greater
performative 'reality'--as did Gutai artists such as Kazuo
Shiraga, Atsuko Tanaka, Saburo Murakami, or the members of Viennese
Actionism, Hermann Nitsch, Gunter Brus, Rudolf Schwarzkogler and Otto
Muhl--painting continued unabated and gradually incorporated the lessons
of these departures whether they were permanent or just temporary, as
was ultimately the case in many instances.
No, the problem for painterly painting has never been to liquidate,
expunge or obliterate the implicit physicality of paint once and for
all. Instead, it has been to body it forth convincingly, though not
always literally, and in its full metamorphic flux. That in any event
has been Maria Lassnig's preoccupation for over half a century. It
may seem impolite tacitly to give away Lassnig's age in the same
breath as one introduces her, since it would be natural to assume, based
on the work itself, that she is much younger than her nearly 90 years.
But surprise and the need to correct assumptions about where it comes
from is one of the key satisfactions of her art. In this, she shares
something with other women of her generation whose careers were either
late to begin in earnest or late to be reckoned with--or both. To all
intents and purposes, hers started at just the historical turning
referred to before--the cusp of the 1950s--when Pollock and de Kooning
did what advanced critical opinion told them they shouldn't do, and
that was to reinsert the figure into nominally abstract compositions. As
such, her initial development is typical of many younger artists
contending with the primary reception, personal assimilation and
ultimate transformation of the medium's prevailing paradigms. As
evidenced in Lassnig's paintings and drawings, they included asides
to Wols--who quit the scene in 1951 at just that pivotal moment--as well
as traces of calligraphic gesturalism and quasi-geometric,
quasi-biomorphic versions of non-objective abstraction, all executed
with understanding and conviction, but derivative and generally modest
nevertheless.
In sum, Lassnig belonged to the legion of talented young people who
flocked to the French capital from around the world in the aftermath of
World War II, searching for a link to the School of Paris's fertile
inter-bellum period of 1918-39 and for a place in its chastened new
avant-gardes even as the School of New York's effects were first
being felt and Europe's horizons were being broadened overall.
Recognition of that fact would eventually bring Lassnig to Manhattan in
the late 1960s. There, in the waning of New York's halcyon days,
she would land in another city that was experiencing--as Vienna had
before it--the first inklings of the partial eclipse of a former
cultural dominance, but also the salutary aesthetic pluralism that
attends the passing of any hegemony. One might go so far as to say that
this tendency confirms Lassnig's characteristic vantage point on
history as a Viennese born in 1919 just after the end of World War I.
Lateness, it would seem, comes naturally to her. This is not in the form
of archetypical post-imperial melancholy and lassitude fin-de-siecle
style, but rather as an instinctive knack for finding the vital signs
and tapping into unused energy in situations where just about everything
appears to be, or is, agonisingly out of joint.
The first clear indications of this gift emerge around 1961-62,
about a decade after Lassnig's apprenticeship to Parisian informel
and its Austrian spin-offs. This, of course, was also the period in
which Actionism morphed out of the related experiments in the gestural
painting of Nitsch, Brus, Muhl and Schwarzkogler. In that connection, it
is worth stressing that like Surrealism--another Freud-influenced
movement devoted to radical de-sublimation--Actionism offered scant room
and still less autonomy to women participants. Knowing her as we do from
her work--and getting to know Lassnig in all her guises is for the
artist as well as the viewer what that work is basically about, though
her existential antiessentialism is explicit in the almost Hindu
multiplicity of her aspects--one can hardly imagine her submitting to
the blasphemous or scatological ministrations of Nitsch or Muhl or to
the martyr-like mortifications of the flesh of Brus or Schwarzkogler.
Obviously, neither prudishness nor any other sort of modesty, including
the painterly variety she abandoned along with the small format in the
early 1950s, have little to do with her abstinence in this regard. Nor
are pain and its dramatisation missing from her repertoire. On that
score, one can infer from her imagery and her testimony that the worst
episodes of Lassnig's psychic distress have been roughly the
equivalent of Brus's and Schwarzkogler's, and theirs were
plainly excruciating. What makes the difference--and the difference is
at least partly gender-linked--is humour. That quality is largely absent
in the work of the men who composed the Actionist phalanx, or at least
it is suppressed, and when present it is generally willed and aggressive
rather than genuinely playful. Hardly ever is it self-directed, as is
commonly the case in Lassnig's work.
Strikingly, in one of the earliest of her self-portraits, done in
1944--perhaps the darkest year of the Reich and of the crushing chain of
disasters it set in motion--one can detect an animation in her otherwise
wary expression, a latent facial mobility underlying the visible
immobility that could as easily turn to a twinkle or bittersweet up-turn
of the mouth as to a harrowed look more in keeping with the context. The
blank visage Lassnig wears in the faceted, monolithic heads she carved
out of impasto pigment in the mid-1950s--we can be sure that at least
some of them are her from the tell-tale wide cheekbones--also betray a
kind of plastic wit, as if she were caricaturing the 'archaic'
and the 'primitive', as it was then plentifully manifested in
painting and sculpture from that of the genre's grand old master
Constantin Brancusi, to the work of as yet less established but highly
regarded newcomers such as Jean Dubuffet and Lassnig's countryman
Fritz Wotruba. By the 1960s, that broad, Sphinx-like face took on a
frankly cartoon demeanour, and in the absurdly, albeit disconcertingly,
funny Square Body Sensation, 1960, she wraps cool geometric abstraction
in the flayed skin of biomorphism, conflates the reclining nude with the
portrait head (much as Philip Guston did at the end of the decade) and
with a stunning, at long last fully developed grasp of her own abilities
and prerogatives, laid claim to painting in the cause of fanciful,
self-referential invention at its most grotesque.
This is not the occasion to delve into the formal, entomological,
historical and cultural origins of that term, or to rehearse the
arguments that give it contemporary currency; having done that elsewhere
at some length I will spare the reader a repetition. Still, in every
sense that matters, 'grotesque' is the mot juste when it comes
to classifying Lassnig's wayward way with shapes and her
astonishingly uninhibited and associatively as well as dissociatively
provocative distortion of the natural. Well worth underscoring in that
context, and at a time when figurative art is 'back' in a
fairly wide array of narrative, approximately 'realist'
incarnations spanning the perennial grit and gristle of Lucian Freud and
the meat-slab-pictures of Jenny Saville (first-person clinical
counterparts to de Kooning's Rubensian caprices that judo-flip the
masculine gaze while pushing the burden of feminine amplitude up against
the limits of endurance for both the subject and the public) to the
similarly robust, marginally less conflicted but altogether stranger
images of Lisa Yuskavage, is the exceptional dimension of one type of
figuration in which Lassnig has specialised: the science-fiction of body
art.
The first overt example in Lassnig's work dates to 1963; it is
a seemingly anomalous picture, simply and declaratively titled Science
Fiction Painting. In it, two figures, one viewed from overhead and the
other from the side, confront each other like robots or bionic monsters.
Although their limbs and torsos bulge, they are graphic and
uncharacteristically for the artist, devoid of flesh, or at least of
fleshy paint handling. Glancing at them one is reminded of the
extravagant 'aliens' that populated movies and pulp magazines
in the post-Hiroshima era. One also recalls the legacy of Francis
Picabia and Marcel Duchamp's sexual mechanics, while looking ahead
to the baroque sci-fi-meets-Eros sculptures of Bruno Gironcoli,
Lassnig's junior and Wotruba's successor as the lead sculptor
at Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts. Meanwhile, like Eva Hesse, who at
the end of the 1960s would invent an iconography that resembles that of
her Austrian elder in certain respects, Lassnig was not making
'bachelor machines' in the manner of her Dada forefathers, but
projecting feminine anxieties on to forms suggestive of aggression and
desire at their most involuntary. In these automatons, instinct becomes
function, reflex response a programmed set of actions.
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In due course, Lassnig's pictorial schemata bulked out, often
acquiring an explicitly animalistic aura such as a rodent face or a
canine muzzle, but the skeleton of those machine-men and women can
clearly be discerned under the layers of tissue she added. And, at
various times since, it has exploded through the skin of her figures
like the uber-alien created for the eponymous film by the Swiss horror
meister H.R. Giger, though Lassnig's unique ability to mix comedy,
vulnerability and terror owes nothing to Giger's uniformly gross
creatures nor to the slickness of his illustrative style. In addition to
the parallels with Hesse's early drawings, far more revealing
comparisons can be made to the monstrous body-surrogates of Louise
Bourgeois and Dorothea Tanning, in particular the soft, biomorphic
sculptures to which each has devoted herself--Bourgeois in the 1940s and
again in the 1990s, and Tanning in the 1970s. One might also cast an eye
in the direction of Alice Neel, whose often garish--some would say
Expressionist--palette, and startlingly rapid, direct and discursive
manner of simultaneously drawing and painting, delineating and shaping,
has many similarities to Lassnig's, not least the electric sparks
that her hand seems to discharge as it bolts or skips or scurries across
the surface of the canvas.
Counterbalancing this anti-natural strain in Lassnig's work,
with both its classically grotesque and science-fiction variants, is a
recurrent, superficially forthright but still eccentric, emotionally
loaded and generally autographical naturalism. The most concentrated and
developed phase of this side of her work coincided with her New York
sojourn, starting in 1969 and lasting on and off until 1979, when she
returned home to take up a professorship in painting at the Academy for
Applied Arts in Vienna, the first woman in Austria to have been offered
one. The decade of the 1970s also roughly coincided with realism's
resurgence in New York as a part of the panoply of aesthetic tendencies
that flourished during that pluralist interval. Hybrid pictures such as
Self-Portrait as an Astronaut and Whitsun Self-Portrait, both 1969, show
Lassnig working away from tire burlesque Sado-masochistic vocabulary of
upholstered blocks and masses that she used to build her monstrous
bodies, towards comparatively prosaic but effortless and compelling
descriptions of hands and arms and other details that anchor these
curious figures in the everyday world. Her still lifes of the same
period follow a similar trajectory. Breakfast with an Ear, 1967, is a
fantasia in which electric blenders, juicers and other household
appliances, outlined in the most rudimentary but still ominous manner,
loom over a plate on which sits a fork and a detached ear that has, by
contrast, been fully modelled--premonitory shades of David Lynch's
Blue Velvet. Compare this with Still Life, 1971, where the traditional
table set-up includes two unexpected but hardly uncanny elements. The
first is an almost empty bottle of vodka or gin, and the second two
Saran-wrapped packages of fruit, which in their cultural and temporal
specificity have USA consumerism written all over them but without
blatantly Pop styling, while at the same time nodding to the treatment
that the American realist Janet Fish was then giving the same mundane
packaging of grocery items.
In an image from a year later, Saran wrap or its equivalent carries
entirely different meanings. Self-Portrait Encased in Plastics, 1972,
revisits Lassnig's long-standing fascination with her own
countenance. The observation-based understatement of her painterly
realist mode makes the mask of plastic she wears all the more anomalous
and all the more poignant as a device for focusing like a pliable lens
on her features, for playing with the notion of preservation when signs
of aging are readily visible in her face and its forlorn expression, for
implying hermetic containment or isolation, and for evoking the
suffocation of suicides who cover their heads in plastic bags, without
going all the way and staging that desperate act herself. There are many
other self-portraits of the 1970s in which similarly banal but
disturbing attributes are combined with unblinking depictions of her
middle-aged nudity or partial nudity, and one that shows her fully
clothed twice. In the background she is standing inside the frame of a
painting within the painting and her face is partially obscured by a
movie camera whose multiple lenses/ eyes are trained on the viewer. In
the foreground in front of that painting she sits slumped forward with
her eyes closed and her chin resting on her hand, but the face she
exposes is only one of many stacked on top of each other, thus
emphasising that all of her many faces are masks, and that behind each
is hidden another. Although this work belongs to her New York period, it
reminds us that she shares this penchant for making faces with her
fellow Viennese Arnulf Rainer, whose guiding spirit has been the German
sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, and that while this double
self-portrait is a comparatively sober example, Lassnig's
personifications of her many moods can be as wild as Rainer and
Messerschmidt combined.
After the 1970s, Lassnig launched into a long, strenuously
pyrotechnic crescendo of symbolic and allegorical pictures in which such
naturalism is for the most part set aside and imagery is distended,
warped and shredded by bold, shape-shifting strokes of paint alternating
with painted or unpainted voids. What recognisable body parts there are,
are just that: parts, fragments--a mouth, a snout, clumps of
liver-colored paint that resemble raw knuckles or viscera. (Remember,
Lassnig hails from the city in which Nitsch mounted the first
performances of his OMT, or Orgies and Mysteries Theatre, with its
gruesome parodies of blood sacrifice and abundant displays of offal.)
Altogether inexplicable but unnervingly believable fusions and
deformations of organic and geometric abstraction take Square Body
Sensation, 1960, to extremes that would have been impossible to
anticipate, and result in pulsing, swelling thought balloons whose
contents are the various distillates and tinctures of hallucinatory
madness.
Against this background, it is tempting to ascribe the unrestrained
weirdness of Lassnig's work of the 1980s and 1990s to some kind of
hysteria, or a protracted fugue state, and there are enough indications
of distress in her self-representations to lend support to such a
reading. However, accepting such an interpretation turns Lassnig's
imaginative leaps into pathological symptoms--a tried and true way to
contain and marginalise the achievement of women artists of a certain
emotional intensity given that in Freud's view hysteria was a
peculiarly and prejudicially female complaint--while ignoring
Lassnig's competitive drive and the test provided for it by
Neo-Expressionism of that period. No matter how highly strung she is,
Lassnig is first and foremost a painter, and her intuitions are not just
innately histrionic, inner-directed, selfexamining; they are
outer-directed and, in the best but most unrelenting artistic sense,
self-interested and self-advocating.
As if to squelch such undercutting responses to her work, Lassnig
has lately come back to her naturalist manner of the 1970s, but used her
own likeness sparingly so far as frequency is concerned, though
unsparingly so far as appearances go, even though she has increasingly
relied on younger models. Plastic makes its comeback as well, insulating
two lovers from each other like giant condoms--Couple, 2005--or
screening the painter herself from full view--The Power of Fate, 2006
and Illegitimate Bride, 2007. As before, humour leavens angst in
Self-Portrait with Cooking Pot, 1995. And when it comes to the bulkiest
and seemingly most brutal of personae, as in The World Destroyer, 2003,
or Bugbear, 2003, humour is also a leveller. Even the obscenely zaftig
Don Juan d'Austria, 2003--which has the same male protagonist as
the two previous pictures--is laughable, that of course being the point,
for rarely has masculinity cut a less romantic but more life-like
profile. And if such a man is driving Lassnig to the brink, her
pistol-wielding self-portrait You or Me (Du oder Ich), 2005, not only
matches his anything-but-Calvin-Klein physique with her
anything-but-Kate-Moss hanging breasts, protruding belly and pubic
baldness, but leaves us guessing as to whether Lassnig will accept her
victimisation or, seconding Nancy Spero's feminist recasting of
Oskar Kokoschka's famous dictum, act on her compatriot's
implicit command that 'Murder, [is] the Hope of Women'. Or
does the 'you' of the title refer to individual members of the
public who watch her suffer, in which circumstance the gun pointed
outward signals that voyeurism is dangerous? Or, by linguistic
displacement, does it refer to the artist caught regarding one of her
alter egos and so to the perils of narcissism?
More matter of fact is Lassnig's Adam and Eve suite of 2005,
made up of some five canvases in all. Again, the initial impression is
of conventional studio nudes, which, at the most basic level, they are.
But for those as unembarrassed by those conventions as they are by the
enjoyment of commonplace adult nakedness, these paintings exude a
vitality that is irresistible, not for voyeuristic reasons, but because
Lassnig is able to transmit the sensuality of her own delight in the
visual so frankly and so powerfully. Meanwhile, eyes attuned to modern
art from Germanspeaking countries will savour the added pleasure of the
correlations between these paintings and Max Beckmann's Adam and
Eve, 1917--especially in the off-key flesh tones--and the work of Lovis
Corinth. These correlations are unmistakable but indirect, open-ended
and deeply satisfying, in part because Lassnig eschews overt historicism
in favour of the freshness of her gaze.
Lassnig knows tradition and belongs to tradition, but reserves the
right to play havoc with it; she exercises that right regularly but
without warning, as if to mess up any pattern that might be imposed on
her production from outside. And so it is that each turnabout in her
evolution no sooner begins than it turns or twists again, sharply inward
or outward in the midst of its initial arc, resulting in a wildly
gyrating, periodically snarled spiral like a spring that has been
contorted yet somehow retains, indeed increases, its basic tensile
strength. And so it is that intermingled with Lassnig's recent
figure studies are ever more freakishly somatic conjuring tricks,
ranging from cartoon variations on her naturalist paintings such as The
Dream Couple, 2004, to religious themes (Abraham Sacrifices His Son,
2007), to self-satire (The Artist, 2006) to self portraiture in extremis
(Self-Portrait with Bubble, 2007), to oxymoronic pictorial riddles
(Tenderness, 2004), to current events as archetype (Children as
Warriors, 2006). The scope of her referents and allusions is amazing
when one lays them all out, but the nature of the tensions and
antagonisms with which Lassnig deals rarely involve more than two people
and often, just one, who is in conflict with himself or herself.
Society, insofar as it is accounted for in her world, is a
multiplication of ones and twos, an amalgam of individual longing and
misery and foolishness that flows unstoppably from her brush but is
accented jarringly here and there by spasmodic flicks of the wrist.
Whose longing, whose misery, whose foolishness, and whose struggle
with the awkward choreography of being and whose obsession with fright
masks of identity are these? In the first instance, they are
Lassnig's, of course. In playing her game of hide-and-seek she
offers her pictures as a series of clues, and the rules of that game as
she has written them mean that, Medusa-like, the images threaten to
overwhelm the psyche of those whose do not avert their gaze. But rather
than turning the unwary viewer to stone, Lassnig's Gorgon stare
agitates the mind until it vibrates in synch with her febrile
imagination. The effect is at once invigorating and exhausting, a
demonstration of painterly virtuosity and a mise-en-abime of the self
that sucks in everyone whose eye is caught in her mirror. And in so far
as Lassnig successfully co-opts the viewer by using her protean identity
as bait, it is a game, not of hide-and-seek, but of tag.
(1) Willem de Kooning, 'The Renaissance and Order',
Trans/formation 1:2,1951.
