MARTHA MAYER ERLEBACHER
Forum Gallery
745 Fifth Avenue
New York 10151
Tel. 212.355.4547
Through December 13, 2003
By MAUREEN
MULLARKEY
Martha Mayer Erlebacher
Adam and Eve (The Return) 2001
oil on canvas, 62 x 62 inches
Courtesy Forum Gallery, New York
COVER December 4, 2003 shows Three Cats at Dusk 2002-03
oil on canvas, 74 x 80 inches
If you were raised on Elihu
Vedder, then this is the show for you. If not, you might find yourself
averting your eyes from figure compositions that ought to have been
an embarrassment to paint.
Erlebacher's gift is for
matter-of-fact description, a quality that stands her in good stead
as a painter of still lifes. But it is a hindrance to the kind of mythopoesis
she strains after in narrative work. Her skills and sympathies are better
suited to trompe l'oeil than to story-telling. She serves herself best
with the still lifes on view here. The successful figures in this exhibition
are those in which a single model is set anonymously on a draped platform,
back to the viewer, then lit and handled like any other nature morte.
There are passages of real beauty in Erlebacher's paint. Yet the overall
impression is one of silliness and misplaced ambition.
Three Cats at Dusk is a working
compass to Erlebacher's difficulties as a narrative painter. Three air-brushed
women--pussies, oh my!--languish on a rock set against the wastes of
an unspecified landscape that looks borrowed from Odd Nerdrum's last
show. Skies that never were are done in a ruddy labial rose. One female
arches her upper torso heavenward in a gesture that suggests impalement
on a dildo. A second is forced into an unnatural crouch to serve compositional
needs. Another is laid flat for the same reason. Then there's the obligatory
spread of classical drapery. Rose-red, It flows to the ground from under
the haunches of the sweetheart transfixed on . . . whatever. At an asking
price of $35,000, it is clearly intended as the exhibition's show-stopper.
So it is.
Add to this The Tarantula
Nebula. On offer is a naked--no drape this time--man and woman assuming
the missionary position on center stage somewhere at the edge of the
planet. Real action is overhead in the Milky Way. Shooting nebulae explode
in marvelous colored dots all over the canvas. This is no ordinary f**k,
folks; this is galactic fusion. [Fusion II is the title of a neighboring
piece.] By now, the equation of fireworks and sex is as haggard as a
cinematic train roaring into a tunnel. But these are compositions for
an audience without memory. And without a grasp of art that goes deeper
than market price. What else could explain all these implausible, listless
women languishing in the buff near one shore or another, resembling
something beached, washed in with the tide, less lively than drftwood?
The entire shining ensemble
of multi-figure compositions evokes the tact and polish of that other
tasteful old venue, Playboy. And why not? An approximate formula--part
exoticism, part kitsch--worked for Vedder. It still works, albeit with
an Viking slant and more tactile surface, for Nerdrum. No reason a woman
should not have a go at the old game.
More worrying is Erlebacher's
Adam and Eve (The Return). Once past the fine foreground figure of Adam,
bent to the ground in remorse, the painting sinks into the dangers of
literalism. A wild-eyed Eve lies supine across a rock slab (the same
one supporting Three Cats on the next wall). Here comes another blasted
landscape, this one on loan from Vedder's The Questioner of the Sphinx.
Under a pitiless sky, an incongruous trail of long white drapery covers
Eve's crotch, providing a spot of relief from the punitive gloom. A
fading glow, visible through a crevice in the ground, suggests Eden
as some sort of Middle Earth from which Adam and Eve have been propelled
upward and out.
The literalness of the depiction
makes comedy of Eve's loin cloth. [Did she work a loom in Eden? Was
she given time to pack up her linen or did the angel hand her a valise?]
Worse, it snuffs all life out of the ancient story, one of the few cultural
remnants still recognizable by all of us. The Genesis tale is painted
in outmoded, fundamentalist terms, as if Eden had longitude and Adam
and Eve were historical characters. Erlebacher approaches the myth as
though it were a moment in history, tacked to the wall like a moth and
just as dead. One more still life.
Biblical mythos is as trustworthy--or
no more untrustworthy--for illuminating the ground of our condition
as the modern mythologies of Freud and Jung. But expulsion from Eden
is no longer creditable as the loss of some idyllic place, all date
palms and fair weather. It has relevance to us moderns only if it is
greeted from within and retold for our time. Our own Paradise Lost is
Western civilization's ancestral faith in the meaning of man and of
history. To be east of Eden is to carry our chosen despair with us.
It is a cultural burden, not a material one. Despair flourishes in the
rich, rotted undergrowth of plenty as surely as it exists in squalor
and wasteland. Adam and Eve's predicament, as depicted by Erlebacher,
could be fixed with a Swiss Army knife and a cell phone.
The empurpled prose of the
press release ["Lust, hunger, greed, heat, cold, beauty, horror:
all are here. . . .With formidable intellect, amazing skill and tremendous
talent, Erlebacher enables a journey to a place where our identities
are drawn and defined."] is less appropriate than an observation
once made by Wendell Berry: "The significance--and ultimately the
quality--of the work we do is determined by our understanding of the
story in which we are taking part." Erlebacher lacks purchase on
the story she inhabits.
