Big RED & Shiny: An Art Journal

September 19, 2004

The Charged Image is a collection of 2D and 3D works of largely figure-based work centered on the erotic and evocative. All from the collection of Douglas S. Cramer, the bulk of the show is made up of work done in the last twenty years with a few samples of earlier pieces. With the exception of an excellent male nude drawing by Warhol, the strength of the show is carried by the quantity and quality of the pieces Cramer acquired from the artists of today. With names like Richard Prince, Damian Loeb, David Salle, Eric Fischl, Inka Essenhigh, Fred Tomaselli, Ghada Amer, the Chapman brothers, Cecily Brown, Lisa Yuskavage, John Currin, Louise Bourgeois, Ghada Amer, David Hockney, Jim Dine, and Sigmar Polke, the show is a must see.

The Greeks looked to the silvery sky for their gods and chose Eros as the god of erotic love. Today, it can be argued that we look to the silver screen for our gods, so why not a smiling Cary Grant as the Eros of our time? In Kurt Kauper’s seven ft. tall painting, Cary Grant stands in Kouros figure fashion, like a statue of Eros inviting us into a temple of allure and luridness. Kurt Kauper’s piece, titled Carry Grant #3, works well as the entrance piece of the show because it is an invitation. A naked Cary Grant, tan lines and all, walks through his mansion to greet us the viewer into his home. The tastelessness is amusing and humorous, but there is something lacking in this painting that most of the other pieces in the exhibition fulfill. I sense no personal desire in Kauper’s work, either in the way it is painted or what is painted. I sense only reference, critique, and commentary. Cary Grant #3 feels like a graduate school textbook for social critique. It comes across as one-dimensional. The strength of the majority of the other work in the exhibition is that even though there is a critique of desire or the erotic, the artists have not placed themselves above or outside of the desire they critique.

One of the highlights of the show was a piece by Fred Tomaselli, called Breathing Head. In his work Tomaselli fuses acrylic, gouache, and photo-collage in multiple layers of a clear resin. Up close you can perceive the shallow distance between the layers of resin, sometimes even seeing objects in the upper layers cast shadows on lower layers. This provides a tension to the extreme flatness created by the arrangements of photo collage that populate his image. Breathing Head has a medical illustration of a flayed, disembodied head in profile. Streaming out from the base of the neck come rows of flowers, birds, butterflies, insects, and bees that circle the head as a mandala. Implications of the relationship of one row to another bring forth sexual interpretations. The flowers are dependent on the insects for their fertilization. The birds penetrate the flowers for nectar. We see the birds and the bees as neighboring rings. There are suggestions of consumption, creation, penetration, and secretion in the relationships between one ring of objects and the next. The head itself emphasizes the senses and the sensual. We see hundreds of eyes, ears, noses, and lips. We also see depictions of tears, saliva, sweat, and blood. There is a general fascination with the diversity of fluids and substances that is supported by Tomaselli’s diverse use of materials.

The Chapman brothers get the prize for the most explicit piece in the show. The Island of Dr. Moron is a life-size sculpture of a centaur-like adolescent creature peering out of a wooded island. The four legged nymph has four blonde-hair-blue-eyed heads joined at the chin by an anus. Each head has two penises as horns that protrude through the wavy locks. The overall effect of the head of the creature is a flower. Jake and Dinos seem to be punning on the word “horny” and “foreplay” (fourplay), and poking fun at the phrase “take time out to smell the flowers.” The sculpture uses the props and toys of sex shops as added appendages of the anatomy. When these isolated fantasy objects are brought together as a single creature, the effects are so grotesque and horrifying that they enter the realm of humor. Wearing Nike sneakers with the giant letters A-I-R printed on them, the creature further presents the idea of fantasy by “walking on air.”

Also in the show is a gem of a Cecily Brown painting titled Spree. Much more substantial in color than the paintings Brown showed in this year’s Whitney Biennial. There is a nice relationship between her characteristic De Kooning-like strokes of heavy impastoed color and the phallic vertical at the top of the painting left blank by the surrounding masses.

With the more explicit pieces in the show, sexual innuendo is prevalent. Damian Loeb’s effectively disturbing painting, Blow Job (The Three Little Boys), is a case in point. The Three Little Boys part of the title references the children’s story of The Three Little Pigs and The Big Bad Wolf,” where the wolf states, “I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house down.” In the painting the three boys smile and smirk, two of them looking out towards the viewer. In the background a female youth in a school uniform performs oral sex on what looks to be a young male worker (he wears work boots). The setting is an industrial factory with pipes, and there is a valve for one of the pipes centrally located in the painting as if to suggest that soon the floodgates will open. Loeb adds controversy to already loaded image by a distinction in class between the boys in the foreground and the youth in the background. The boys look affluent in their gold buttoned sports coats and yuppie haircuts. There is ambiguity as to whether they have paid to watch or are next in line. The formal characteristics of the painting add to its effectiveness. Loeb blurs out or softens the edges of particular areas of the painting to suggest movement and depth of focus. This references both photography and video- the typical mediums for pornography. The background looks like a video done by an amateur. The softened edges around the head, but not the uniform of the kneeling girl, suggests movement while the consistent softness of the extreme background suggests depth of field. The skewed horizon line is a trademark of amateur camera work. Even the choice of a thick-weaved linen signifies the texture of the denim the female holds on to.

The Charged Image provides the controversy and evocativeness you might expect from a show of erotic art, but Cramer’s collection is of a very high quality and much of the work adds insight to the subject.

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Links:
The University of Hartford

"The Charged Image" is on view September7 thru October 17, 2004 at the Joseloff Gallery of the University of Hartford.

All images are courtesy of the artist and the Joseloff Gallery.

Nathan Lewis is a New Haven based painter and educator and founder of the group ICAANDI (Intelligent Contemporary Art And Narrative Driven Imagery). Nathan is a regular contributor to Big, Red & Shiny.

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