By Jock Ireland
|
Torild Stray Metamorphoses
1998-2001
oil on linen, 69 x 73 inches,
courtesy the artist
|
Torild Stray probably
hasn't spent a lot of time studying Richard Serra's work. They both
have shows up now though. John Currin has a show up too. I don't see
much of a connection between Currin's work and Stray's even though
bodies figure in both oeuvres. Currin seems to be interested in the
"technical" ways of making illusions---I don't know why---maybe
because he's an Artist. Stray's work is insistently physical, about
"real" presence---it's like Serra's.
In a couple of Stray's paintings
you enter the painting by marching your way up between a woman's legs.
You enter some of Serra's things by walking through a slit and arriving
in unfamiliar territory---space he's described not unlike that in
Japanese gardens, governed by memory and anticipation. Somewhere Henry
Miller describes entering a vagina as being like walking into a hotel
lobby. In the past the space in Stray's paintings has been more hotel
lobby-like, more "Renaissance"---the feel of her realism's
not unlike the feel of Miller's. What's new---at least what's front
and center for the first time---about the paintings at the Anna K.
Gallery is the weirdness of the space, its visionary dimension---the
room for memory, hope and fear. (Of course Miller has plenty of visionary
moments too---I'm sure he'd love Stray's work.)
Serra takes you for a ride. Stray
seems to be trying to tell a story, though she doesn't always seem
to know what she's talking about---which isn't necessarily bad---not
as bad as telling too easy a story---the story of how all women are
Oppressed Victims, for example. Her story is complex. It seems to
be partly personal, and to be trying to be universal---the cosmic
color, the "Northern Light" lifting ordinary studio events
(and some not so ordinary) into a strangely mythic realm. She struggles
to give meaning to the paintings pretty much all by herself. She does
look to the Western tradition of oil painting for help---there's prose
from Matisse, some Munch---but she looks impatiently, distractedly.
I'd like to see her just swipe a story---from Ping Chong's great Edda:
Viking Tales of Lust, Revenge and Family, say---in the way Nilima
Sheikh and Shahazia Sikander borrow from Asian traditions. But the
story and the drawing and the forms will become clearer, fuller---but,
I hope, not more "expert"---I have no need for another Lucien
Freud---with time.
Over the summer Arthur Danto wrote
about the Picasso Erotique show that was up in Montreal. The title
of Danto's piece was "Vagina Monologue." He began talking
about Duchamp's whatever-it's-called peephole thing, but what I remember
was at the end when he said 1. The Demoiselles was an inhuman, Formalist
masterpiece he's never understood, and 2. The "dirty pictures"
were really good---human. Stray's paintings don't have much in common
with Picasso's dirty pictures. Her paintings have more in common with
the incomprehensible Demoiselles. The dirty pictures are directly
about sex. Stray's are not. Her subject is vulnerability, but there's
a real dignity to this vulnerability---I guess because of its humanity---but
I don't really know where the dignity comes from. Vaginas are in these
days---so's The Abject. What makes Stray's work different from the
usual careerist engagement with these "themes"---it's NOT
that she uses oil paint instead of ketchup and mayonnaise---it's the
strange nobility of her figures.
see more images by Torild
Stray
Jock Ireland teaches sculpture at the 92nd Street Y.
