11/11/2023 0 Comments John currin portraitsThe way we often feel, standing outside ourselves, looking in, while having genuine experiences. At the same time he scaled his work way down from the grand size of all that older work he was referencing or reviving and channeled a titanic dual irony and sincerity. Currin blasted through Neo-Conceptualism, the cool of Commodity and Pictures Art, and changed what art about the body was by making it in a long-dead, non-modern figuration that had been relegated to the ash heap of academic art history. When he started showing his work, along with his Yale colleague, Lisa Yuskavage, the art world hadn’t seen representational work like this in ages, if ever. Meanwhile, the New York Times wondered if these paintings of women should even “be regarded as acceptable” at all. Back then, Village Voice critic Kim Levin called for his show of already fractious pictures of women to be boycotted. This 59-year-old mid-career artist has raised hackles since his 1992 debut. All male commodifications of female sexuality and subjectivity. Instead we find ourselves observing a kind of male loathing, contemplating different rotted ideals of female beauty: the grotesques of Victoria’s Secret models, deviant physiognomies of inflated sex dolls, empty-headed potbellied Renaissance maidens, tubercular Romantic heroines, Cubist torsos with X-shaped anuses and malformed breasts coming from every appendage. No one gets off on Currin’s pictures of women with lute-shaped faces. Bram Dijkstra called paintings like these - visions of women as semi-comatose wanton succubi - “Idols of Perversity.” It’s an apt phrase: Currin gives us the warping power of the curdled straight male gaze on culture, history, women, and even straight men themselves, twisting them - us, me - into noxious secret agreements with one another of tittering ridicule, leering laughter, glaring impotency, and insecure contempt. Personally, I glaze over at all the smooth ye-olden labor-intensive historical rendering that goes into his work. To say his paintings are better because they’re sort of Renaissance-looking is like saying a poem is better for being written in Greek hexameters or a bad opera is better for being produced at Bayreuth. Currin has no more or less skill than any good artist. That is where I am with Currin.Įveryone writes about his great skill. Our tastes often betray us as we find ourselves drawn to questionable things we know are problematic. Someone whose work is so specifically fucked-up, perverse, shocking, visually insolent, menacing, and mesmerizing that as it puts us off, it also pulls us in.
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