JANET MALCOLM
Lori Bookstein Fine Art
50 East 78th Street
New York NY 10021
Tel. 212.439.9605
October 9 to November 8,
2003
By MAUREEN
MULLARKEY
Janet Malcolm Untitled
2001
paper collage, 9-1/2 x 7-1/4 inches
cover image, November 6, 2003: Richard Weiner 2001
paper collage, 9-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches
all images, courtesy Lori Bookstein Fine Arts
As a challenge to traditional
painting, collage is one of Modernism's lasting gifts. Argus-eyed, it
endows its audience with a kaleidoscope of viewpoints along a scale
from the personal and recondite to the purely formal. It is an art of
association and surmise, its graphic symbols hinged to a range of experience
that is as varied as the audience that looks at them.
Janet Malcolm handles the
medium with the same attention to nuance, the same passion for exactitude
that informs her writing. What becomes apparent in this exhibition is
that a writer's eye for telling details is quickened by the same nerve
that excites pictorial intelligence. The aim of both is to get it right.
Malcolm's journalism career began with articles on interior decoration,
design and photography. The visual preceded--and, throughout her working
life, informed--everything.
This is beautiful and serious
work, poised in a solitude all its own. It comes after twenty years
of engaging papier collé‚ for her own pleasure. On view
are thirty-three collages. Some originate in the rigor and self-effacement
of Russian avant garde sensibility. Others, more fluid in form, depend
on the graphic power of objets trouvés, a quarry of fragments
mined for visual and associative effect. There is a Surrealist edge
to certain ones that is carried off with great aplomb. The ensemble
orbits around Malcolm's long-held attachments to literature, psychology
and art.
Her reservoir of objets trouv‚s
leans toward the familial: the paper trail of a family history and its
intellectual life. But biography is not the subject of this exhibition.
Every artist reaches, psychologically or in fact, for those things closest
at hand. In the end, what matters is not the artist's experiences but
her capacity to transmute private responses into forms that speak to
strangers. Malcolm's work speaks eloquently of the life of the mind
and its capacity to civilize, order and interpret the confusion of the
lived life.
Vladimir Tatlin, heady with
art's appointed mission in 1920, declared his distrust of the eye. But
Malcolm, an attentive student of Kurt Schwitter's genius, is careful
to give the eye its due. Her attraction to hallmark Constructivist designs
seems true to her own temper which, on the evidence here, is both reserved
and austere. There is a structural composure-a calm-to these compositions
that calls to mind that other acolyte of Kurt Schwitters, the lovely
Anne Ryan.
Malcolm, like Ryan, chooses
her floating fragments with a keen eye for texture and color. The works
of each woman are on an intimate scale and convey an illusion of confidentiality.
They suggest something sequestered, revealed behind closed doors to
just the two of us. This is particularly true of Malcolm's inclusion
of old handwritten items. We respond to these stimuli in quite personal
ways. They are catalysts of memory, her remembrances triggering our
own. Acknowledgements of a human presence, they have the impact of letters
from the dead.
Typography, where it appears,
is chosen as much for its architecture--the weight , balance and magic
of alphabets--as for signal value. Ryan jumped the boundaries of language,
thoroughly subordinating the connotative aspect of printed stuffs to
her palette. Malcolm, by contrast, has spent a life time using language
as an instrument. She naturally retains and exploits verbal associations.
Her selections mean what they say. An entry ticket to Cezanne's atelier
is intended to a be recognized for what it is. A scrap of a letter typed
on an old manual typewriter serves its design purposes while it remains
a sly but deliberate reference to Schwitters.
Son 2003
paper collage, 11-1/2 x 10-1/2 inches
The floated faceting of these
collages is subtle, elegant, many of them witty. But one particular
image, titled Son, chilled me. A photo of an old crib hovers, weightless
and off-axis, over a splayed black ground. The metal crib, on casters,
is institutional, shorn of bedding or any suggestion of nurture and
comfort. It stands empty in a space barren as any barracks. Here is
an image of cold containment, pragmatic, unyielding, more suited to
prison than the nursery. A cage. Given the time frame suggested by the
age of the crib and the black and red Constructivist surround, it is
impossible not to see it as an icon of detention and deprivation. The
image is freighted with a weight that has not lifted since the 1930's.
Malcolm's artistry is consistent
with the restraint, discipline and regard for object, rather than process,
which characterized early Constructivist work. Her temperament respects
control. And control slips only once.
The oversized America 1950
is predictable feminist kitsch. A catalogue of male portraits smile
at us from annual reports circa late 40's. The single female face is
shrouded, as if in purdah, by a piece of vellum. The whine is almost
audible: women are exiles in a man's world. Coming from Janet Malcolm--no
outsider, she--it seems disingenuous. The piece indulges in the reflexive,
approved disdain of a politicized present. Besides, Malcolm's Dadaist
models took aim at their contemporaries. Anybody can kick a decade long
finished.
But false notes have their
uses, if only as reminders that art is measured by what it rejects as
much as by what it embraces. There is an elegiac quality to this work
that extends beyond the personal. Without necessarily intending to,
it bears witness to the illusional character of its antecedents. Art's
contra mundum stance in the opening decade of the twentieth century
has not brought down the house. In art, radical breaks heal over and
yesterday's daring become today's decor.
There is a lesson in Malcolm's
gravitation toward Constructivist design principles that extends beyond
their approriateness to family history. The formal achievements of a
previous age remain alive and enlivening to those who respond to them.
It is the dead hand of the present that has to be feared.
