JOHN CURRIN
Whitney Museum of American
Art
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
November 20, 2003 – February 22, 2004
By MAUREEN
MULLARKEY
John Currin Skinny
Woman 1992
Oil on canvas, 50 x 38 inches
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from
The List Purchase Fund and the Painting and Sculpture Committee. Photographs
by Geoffrey Clements; courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
Currin is an accomplished
stylist who knows how to cover a canvas. His paintings are full of small
seductions. The edges of his forms are everywhere graceful. His handling
of drapery and clothing can be delicious. His yellows, glazed over solid
brushwork, are particularly toothsome. His compositional eye is a designer's
envy. And he is deft and appealing in his handling of still life. Without
doubt, Currin offers good reasons to look at his work. But more compelling
are the reasons to look away, because the problems with Currin do not
lie in his brush. They lie in a deficit of meaning. And in his disdain
for his subjects. The over-riding character of this work is a casual
nihilism that disdains its audience as well.
His paintings are parasites
on their allusions, with no inner life of their own. Currin's facility
gives the paintings a credibility they do not deserve. All showmanship,
the work derives from the history of practical jokes. Whatever loveliness
it holds is put to the service of sight-gags that have more in common
with P.T. Barnum than any of the masters he burlesques.
One of the earliest paintings
on view, "Skinny Woman" (1992) retains enough reality---a
hint of self-awareness in the gaze---to lend the model a humane dimension
missing from almost every other figure in the show. Here is one of Tom
Wolf's social X-rays, a well-heeled matron who strains after the appearance
of youth by staying as thin as possible. Figures of fun, these are women
who battle time and gravity by depriving them of flesh to work on. In
this single painting, the humanity of the sitter emerges ascendant over
Currin's cartooning. The rest of his dudes and dudesses are graphically
smart but emptier than discarded SlimFast cans.
Currin's series of balloon-breasted
women are . . . . . Never mind, use your own adjectives. You don't need
mine for this. In artspeak, these gals are cunning strategies designed
to explore the social construction of ideas of beauty. In real life,
they are bodice-rippers aimed at teenagers with their hands in their
pants. Breasts of Venus? Marky Mark's penis? Drop your Calvins and hold
on for ART. Such is marketing in the age of Fabien Baron. Outwitting
the audience is the real game. The rules are the same on museum walls
as on Times Square billboards.
John Currin Homemade
Pasta 1999
oil on canvas, 50 x 42 inches
The Rachofsky Collection, Dallas
Under cover of hip pretenses,
Currin harks back to mid-nineteenth century popular presses with their
backwoods stereotypes. One such type was the astonished Negro servant:
big-lipped, frizzy-haired and bug-eyed. In our own enlightened era,
the graphic humor of old regional presses---from which every contemporary
artling would shrink in horror---is okay so long as the stereotypes
can be refitted to a contemporary rhetoric. Currin gives us Linda the
Cigar Girl, circa 1840s, kitted out as a 1990s Valley-girl bimbo: big-boobed,
big-haired and bug-eyed. Women are the new blacks in Currin's oeuvre.
His approach to men is equally
reductive but of a different temper. His male couples do not depict
men so much as types, embodiments of gaydom. His typology sets the wall
plaque chirping about "the politics of representation" and
wondering aloud about which groups have the right to depict others.
In other words, Currin's straight eye for the queer guy is a daring
public act.
Not really. If there is politics
going on here, it is not the kind the plaque refers to. Currin's gay
men are icons of domesticity, devotional in tone and tender as Della
Robbia madonnas. "Homemade Pasta" has them sweetly at home,
in the kitchen, while the grizzled old hetero of "The Never Ending
Story" is out chasing tail. In their display of mandatory pieties,
these paintings serve much the same purpose as statues of St. Francis
in Bensonhurst front yards.
Currin's history of art is
a spent inheritance. Easy come, easy go. A little Betty Boop goes nicely
with a handful of Thomas Hart Benton. A bit of Botticelli, please. Don't
forget the Cranach. That DaVinci hand looks good. And give us all the
Norman Rockwell you've got. Maybe an old movie poster, too. Sound like
fun? Yes, parodies are. Trouble is, fun is a short-lived sensation,
better suited to ephemera---sitcoms or greeting cards---than painting.
On canvas, nothing palls faster than a tongue crazy-glued to the same
cheek. Currin plays to attention spans as steadfast as Brittney Spears'
55-hour marriage.
"Nude on a Table"
is typical of Currin's art-history-for-frat-boys. It mimics Mantegna's
"Dead Christ" only to assert Currin's cleverness over the
grandeur of Mantegna's achievement. Reversing perspective, the figure
gets bigger as it recedes. The joke unfolds beneath a candelabra dripping
wax, left behind from some Addams Family episode. Is this Morticia on
the slab? No matter. You look once and move on. Channel-surfing for
the museum crowd. Mantegna's encyclopedic accomplishments---beyond the
reach of any contemporary painter---are lost to an audience high on
Krispy Kremes.
Currin's popularity resides
precisely in his distance from painting and his proximity to TV culture.
Neil Postman, who died recently, was a valuable guide to that culture.
His "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the age of
Show Business" (1985) had some things to say that apply here: "When
a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined
as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation
becomes a form of baby talk, when, in short, a people become an audience
and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself
at risk; culture death is a clear possibility." Earlier, in "The
Disappearance of Childhood" (1982), Postman argued that television
abolished the difference between childhood and adulthood by making both
reliant on the same sources for information and entertainment.
The destruction of childhood
points to the dissolution of adulthood as well. The phenomenon of John
Currin testifies to Postman's prescience.
read David Cohen's 2001
article, Curryin' Favor and
John Goodrich's review of the Whitney retrospective
