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[[image]] stage & canvas step out of your world by Natalie Haddad [[image]] [[from this day forward...painting is dead @ museum of new art]] TELL ME HOW LONG A longtime fixture in New York's art world, painter Elizabeth MURRAY has been a pioneer in modern painting for the past 20 years. Murray's aesthetic is rooted in an art-historical moment around 1980, in which graffiti made the leap from the street to the gallery. As opposed to artists like Jean Michel Basquiat or Kenny Scharf, Murray didn't begin a graffitist; she was always in the gallery. (The same animated immediacy that links the work to graffiti alludes as well to such old-school painters as Frank Stella or Philip Guston.) It's the overlap, therefore, that she sources, where fine art absorbs the properties of graffiti without the context (which inevitably subrogates formality for subversion). Murray's works are neither abstract nor representational. Mundane subjects- sometimes pets or household items- are reimagined or concealed in dynamic comic-strip colors and manic, zig-zagging lines and shapes (reminiscent of a 1950s sci-fi Jell-o mold in 2000's "Cry Baby"). At best, her canvases seem primed to grow legs and take a walk. In a 2003 review, New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman bottom-lined Murray's work, saying, "Ms. Murray loves to paint." It's simple, but poignant. The complexity of the pieces isn't philosophical as much as it is visual. Murray has come closer than virtually any other contemporary painter to merging characteristics of painting and sculpture while pre-serving her specific medium. Her earlier paintings are on chunky, three-dimensional canvases, constructed from multiple stacked panels that jut from the wall, cheeky revolts against the conventions of the medium. For her more recent works, featured at the Susanne Hilberry Gallery, the dimension of past paintings has considerably diminished. There are a few uneven planes; more often, though, Murray adjoins multiple flat canvases into one variegated form, something of an exclamation point to the act of painting. The brilliant lime green of the aforementioned "Cry Baby" is suggestive of a teacup. Painted on contiguous elliptical canvases, however, the materiality of the object becomes lost in a bubbling optical illusion. Likewise, the spectacular, airy "Muddy Waters, 8:05 AM" is a composite of erratic shapes and pop colors––all pinks and blues and seafoam greens––with just enough evidence of a winding, cartoon road to tempt the Roadrunner. The exhibition juxtaposes the vast paintings with a series of small watercolor-on-paper drawings, which re-present Murray's technique on a miniature scale. The resulting works relinquish some of the dynamism of the paintings, but they allow more attention to their quirky details. Murray's sense of fun isn't explicit, but it is ubiquitous in her sensibility. In person, though, it's overwhelmed by the breathtaking virtuosity of the construction, of painstaking brushwork and gradating colors, which, for all their whimsy, never reduced to jokes. The works of Elizabeth Murray run through September 11. For more information, call 248.541.4700 or visit www.susannehilberrygallery.com. BEFORE THE RIGHT ONE As exhibition titles have repeatedly evidenced, the Museum of New Art has a tendency toward grand gestures. Though at times the hyperbole risks undermining the art, it's persuasive as a means of situating the exhibitions within a context broader that the museum's immediate milieu. It would be absurd to take MONA's latest exhibition, From This Day Forward... Painting Is Dead, as an obituary for painting. What it does indicate, then, is the emergence of photography as a viable fine art form. That's not to suggest that it wasn't previously one. However, because documentary is inherent in the medium, photography doesn't perform as painting does. So painting is big again, but so is fashion photography as fine art, striking an almost identical pose to the new representation and photographic abstraction––and classical photography, another derivative, with painting, of the art world's atavism. Painting Is Dead considers the new (or newly modish) genres of photography with a cross-section of works by local and international artists. Among the locals represented, Anne Reinhardt contributes a series of moody, blue-tinted portraits of twentysomethings in T-shirts. Internationally, an uncharacteristically warm photo by German artist Loretta Lux of a young girl lying on a bucolic ground lends an Alice in Wonderland subtext to a potentially bathetic image. A wall-sized Thomas Ruff print from MONA's Biennale––a porno image pulled off the Internet and distorted––makes a reappearance, as does a Sam Taylor-Wood piece; and a photo series addressing the definition of madness runs through the exhibition. Those are just a few examples; the photographs extend throughout MONA's labyrinthine space, and director Jef Borgeau reduced the show to avoid salon-style exhibition. (Works not on the walls are represented in a photomontage on various video screens.) Probably for as long as it's been around, but particularly since its return to Pontiac in April, MONA has encountered its share of criticism, due primarily to its simulative practices (the exhibition of printed email images as proxies for the genuine articles). It's worth noting that funding, above all, has prompted the practice. A non-profit organization, MONA remains the area's foremost barometer of current art. And as art merges increasingly with theory, principles are easily made obsolete. Pictures are always worth looking at, though. From This Day Forward...Painting Is Dead runs through August 7. For more information, call 248.210.7560 or visit www.detroitmona.com. THE STORY IS OLD, I KNOW Internationalism in art is fraught with illusion, if only because it represents an invisible art community, and Painting Is Dead exemplifies it. Belle Isle: Speramus Meliora. Resurget Cineribus., an exhibition of photography by David Lewinski at Ferndale's Xhedos Café, inverts this dynamic by metamorphosing Belle Isle into an illusion. Lewinski's photographs- black-and-white and color studies of the island's architecture and vegetation- are otherworldly only in as much as his subject matter allows them to be; there's no manipulation in the process. Nonetheless, there is a utopian thread throughout the series, as if Belle Isle had never deteriorated and, moreover, had never really been of this world. That side of the illusion springs from Lewinski's technique, which (primarily in the color photographs) exploits natural light for a lush, unspoiled haze that casts flowers and sculptures as ethereal, impossibly lovely creatures. To that end, the images share the reality-as-fantasy quality of more prominent contemporary photographers like Justine Kurland or Beate Gutschow. Lewinski is more straightforward, though; his black-and-white pieces- in particular, two stunning conservatory studies- apply the same technique through a strict Bauhaus filter; utopia is measured not by nature, but by visual efficiency. The "truth," which the medium of photography has ostensibly promoted, is more than a cipher- as it always has been. Even a family is solipsistic. Lewinski's work is more complex than debunking a naïve notion. As literal representation, it promotes another notion: That truth itself is an illusion. And nothing can debunk that anymore. Belle Isle: Speramus Meliora. Resurget Cineribus. runs through August 18. For more information, call 248.399.3946. BUT IT GOES ON As of July 28, the "Stage & Canvas" column will be assumed by a new writer; I'll be pursuing a postgraduate degree in art history. It's been a pleasure to write this column for nearly four years and cover art and theater in Detroit for Real Detroit Weekly. Thanks to those who have read it, and the artists, actors and others who have inspired the writing. Keep reading; it never ends. | RDW So long. Nat. Thanks for the memories. Email Natalieahaddad@yahoo.com
