In Terms Of

Tag: Portraiture

  • Sublime Leftovers

    This week the College Art Association is holding its 104th Annual Conference in Washington, DC. In recognition of the event, In Terms Of is republishing four reviews of sessions from CAA’s 1979 conference, which also took place in the nation’s capital, on topics still relevant to the art world today.

    Folk Art and Neo-Folk Art
    Tuesday, January 30, 1979
    Women’s Caucus for Art Conference, Embassy Row Hotel, Washington, DC

    The topic of folk art appears on a College Art [Association] panel, apparently for the first time. Original research provides a scholarly framework for talk that also pieces in craft, feminism, history, decoration—and “femmage.”

    Moderator: Judith Stein, University of Pennsylvania

    Panelists: Betty MacDowell, Michigan State University; Rachel Maines, Center for the History of American Needlework, Pittsburgh; Pat Ferraro, San Francisco State University; Miriam Schapiro, Amherst College; and Melissa Meyer, New York City

    Barbara Aubin, “Folk Art and Neo-Folk Art” Women Artists News 4, no. 9 (March 1979): 12

    “Folk Art and Neo-Folk Art” was both exhilarating and illuminating. Panelists touched on important points of original research, while much new territory was explored. However, a cloud of doubt may still linger as to where and when folk art and naïveté give way to professionalism. Betty MacDowell and Rachel Maines asserted that training is the key, but their fellow panelists freely interspersed untrained artists’ work without distinctions. One was left to make one’s own deductions.

    In her introduction, Judith Stein said folk art was “discovered” in the 1920s, but that this panel was the first on the topic for either College Art or the Women’s Caucus [for Art]. She suggested this might be because art historians have trouble dealing with folk art as art. Now feminism makes us aware that women have long studied, collected, and documented (primarily for themselves and their families) artifacts and objects of folk art by other women. Then again, much of this art is made with relatively cheap materials and/or discards, so perhaps art historians really had difficulty understanding and appraising it. Now there appears to be a growing revolution in taste allowing us to begin, at last, to evaluate and document the work.

    Betty MacDowell, whose new book is Artists and Aprons, pointed out that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women’s folk art was shaped by American culture. Rigid roles in marriage and parenthood meant that women’s lives were filled with domestic responsibility. Their education stressed needlework, penmanship, and watercolor, along with the “social graces.” Entering the “fine” arts was discouraged for women, who were not allowed to study the live male nude, so they channeled their creativity into the domestic scene. Portraiture was popular, because familiar and available faces of family and friends could be done quickly in pastels or watercolors, between chores. Women also took the scissors of domesticity to cut paper profiles. MacDowell said repeatedly that the art had to fit into accepted patterns of a woman’s life; it rarely even approached a full-time activity.

    By the mid-1800s, with the advent of the camera, demand for portraits by self-taught artists lessened. People preferred the likeness of photographs for recording friends and family, and the naïve artist began to disappear.

    Rachel Maines, author of “The Designer and Artisan: The Ancient Contract,” traced these professional relationships. Little has been written about the division of labor between the creator of an idea and the maker-constructor, a division that in Europe and America may be made according to class and sex, with the designer reigning over the technician. Mechanization of textile-making reduced the artisan’s role to mere machine tender and began the producer-consumer division.

    In early times, embroiderers often had a higher status. In wealthy households, the designer was part of the staff and devised patterns for linens, curtains, rugs, and furniture, besides intricate details of clothing. Folk embroidery, however, borrowed and combined motifs freely from many sources. Samplers, the work of students learning stitchery, held even more incongruities.

    The earliest commercial needlepoint used hand-painted charts. Later they were printed, when thread and yarn manufacturers hired women to draft patterns derived from popular magazines and pamphlets. After 1870, charts were available for beadwork, filet lace, crochet, and counted cross-stitch. Various forms of these are still available in the hobby or home craft market, but needle workers and textile artisans often want concept and design wed together.

    Pat Ferrero … traced the life transitions of women folk artists through their quilts. Baby quilts could be utilitarian or elaborate or both. Quilting skills were passed from generation to generation, women teaching young children. The engagement party was often the occasion for quilting, while the “masterpiece” was usually the wedding quilt—carefully conceived and painstakingly rendered during the engagement. The widow’s quilt drew on a rich store of memories. Ferrero showed a quilt made from a Victorian mourning coat which had been opened up to become ground for both quilting and embroidery. A coffin in the center was surrounded by vignettes of the quilter’s life.

    Several of Ferrero’s slides showed Grace Earl, a transplanted Chicagoan now working in San Francisco, with an incredible array of patterned fabrics which she pieces into intricate coverlets of exquisite skill and conception in her crowded one-room apartment. (Ferrero has also made a film on Earl.)

    Mimi Schapiro and Melissa Meyer distributed a document to the audience with their definitions of collage, assemblage, découpage, and photomontage as background for their jointly coined phrase, “femmage.” Their premise is that “leftovers” are essential to a woman’s experience. Schapiro pointed out that most of the classic written works on collage refer to male artists. She and Meyer developed “femmage” to mean the form made solely by women.

    Meyer and Schapiro listed several criteria for “femmage” but were careful to state that not every one need appear in each object. But for the work to be “appreciated” as “femmage” at least half the criteria must be met. These include being made by a woman, recycling of scraps, saving and collecting, themes related to life contexts, covert imagery, diaristic nature, celebration of private or public events, expectation of an intimate audience, drawing or handwriting “sewn” in, silhouetted images fixed on other material, inclusion of photographs or printed matter, recognizable images in narrative sequence, abstract pattern elements, and the possibility of a functional, as well as an aesthetic, life for the work.

    In Terms Of count: unknown

    Read

    Norma Broude, “Womens Caucus Report,” Art Journal 38, no. 4 (Summer, 1979), 283–85.

    Source

    Written by Barbara Aubin, “Sublime Leftovers” was originally published in Women Artists News 4, no. 9 (March 1979): 12; and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 115–16. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • The Still Life

    Eric Banks
    Wednesday, December 2, 2015
    Creative Writing Program
    New School, Klein Conference Room, Alvin Johnson/J. M. Kaplan Hall, New York

    Eric Banks (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    In academic art history, the single-author, single-subject monograph—an extended study on an individual artist, a group of artists, or a chronological or geographic range—is typically considered the pinnacle of scholarly achievement. A parallel to it in the hierarchy of subject matter in Western art would be history painting, a large work that addresses a biblical, historical, or mythological subject. To continue the analogy, a coauthored or edited book is comparable to a portrait, and an essay in a book is a genre scene. The article published in a peer-reviewed journal would be the landscape. The lowest form is the book review—the still life of academic writing.

    “I’m a book reviewer,” said Eric Banks, director of the New York Institute of the Humanities at New York University since 2013, to about thirty attendees of a talk at the New School. No kidding—he has assessed hundreds of books on a wide range of subjects (art, literature, nonfiction) over the last twenty years for the New York Times Book Review, New York Review of Books, Chicago Tribune, Slate, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Financial Times, to name a few. Despite this hierarchy established in the opening, the book review and its parent form, the critical essay, allow for a high amount of creative liberty for its author, as demonstrated every week in “The Critics” section of the New Yorker. “Writing about books,” Banks said, is “a springboard to talk about so many other things in culture.”

    The critical essay is the hardest thing to write, said Honor Moore, nonfiction coordinator of the Creative Writing Program at the New School, who introduced the speaker. Where do you begin? Who are you when you write one? How do you manage a voice that is neither an encyclopedia entry nor a bad sermon? All good questions. What seemed to concern Banks the most, when reviewing books, is to avoid writing that’s too “plotty.”

    Banks admitted that he misunderstood the initial invitation to speak and became preoccupied with preparing a talk on the autodidact as critic, or on what it means to be self-taught in the internet age. Another possible topic could have contrasted the work of a critic with that of an academic scholar or a writer of personal interest. (Is that a semiprofessional blogger or a contributor to Amazon or Yelp?) He could have kicked around a “praise of digression” but instead read his work and talked about it—a strategy Moore had suggested.

    The cover of Artforum in October 1997

    Before reading three of his own short critical essays from the past few years, Banks gave us a brief professional biography. In the mid-1990s, he found himself in a senior-editor seat at Artforum, his first real job out of graduate school. At the time, he said, voices in the magazine came from the belletristic tradition of poets and novelists, from people interested in film, photography, and fashion (“fashion was an extremely important thing around 1995”), and from art historians and graduate students. Art criticism is always tied to higher education, Banks remarked, but book reviewers for the types of publications in which he publishes (journalistic and cultural outlets covering literature and nonfiction) don’t interact with the academy. A good essay on art achieves good formal description, which Banks said comprises 90 percent of the text. “Students are really trained—and they’re trained very well by their professors—to be able to look at something and describe it. You can’t write a critical essay unless you really describe in form[al] terms, in descriptive terms, the object you’re writing about.”

    I beg to differ. First, I would put that figure at no more than 50 percent, because subject matter, biography, history, and cultural context are crucial topics. And this rigorous training of graduate students? A few years ago, while editing the first sixty pages of a doctoral student’s dissertation, I was astonished by the inability of the author to describe works of art: her words hardly corresponded with the accompanying illustrations. Then again Banks, as an editor for Artforum and Bookforum—two of the top publications of criticism of any kind—probably saw only the best stuff from the brightest academics.

    Twenty years ago, Banks observed, writers on art didn’t need to explain a lot in their criticism because their readership was small and dedicated. Now the art world has a wider audience that may not share the same knowledge base. When he took over the editorship of Bookforum from Andrew Hultkrans in 2003, and with the publication’s relaunch later that year, Banks said he wanted swagger from his writers.1 He led the bimonthly journal for five years before replacing Lawrence Weschler at the New York Institute of the Humanities.

    The covers of three books on horse racing from the collection of Eric Banks

    The first text Banks that read tonight, “Pony Up,” came from the April/May 2012 issue of Bookforum. The piece grew, he disclosed, from evolved from avoiding a book review (Patricia Meyer Spacks’s On Rereading from 2011) to a musing on his longtime obsession, horse racing, and in particular, his collection of “ridiculous books” on the subject (from pulp novels to betting tips). Banks eventually shoehorned the book review into the piece, in the fourth of seven paragraphs, but the essay was truly his own thoughts—delightfully self-indulgent, if not somewhat neglectful of the author.

    Banks said his stuff is good when it hits both high and low culture. He also identified the pitfalls of the middle-ranged piece, which plagues many writers of short-form criticism:

    People have written a lot of short reviews, reviews in the fifteen-hundred-word range, which are just long enough to take you forever [to write], and to involve a lot of work and … thought about how to structure an essay, but just short enough that you really can’t get into great depth into the kinds of things you’d like to get into. It’s eye opening, because you frequently will go back and read something you’ve written and think, “I have no idea what I was trying to say with this sentence. I have no idea why I reviewed this book. I don’t even remember reviewing this book.”

    Some reviewers, he said, don’t even remember reading the book.

    Banks apologized in advance for the scatological passages from the Franz West catalogue essay he read, saying he is uncomfortable with colorful language.2 The piece was structured into three sections: Twinkies, roses, and sausages. Banks read from the sausages passage, telling us how the artist’s studio often ate at a Chinese restaurant nearby and sourced their own lentils to accompany the brown rice, and how West’s body was deteriorating because of illness, looking not unlike Ichabod Crane, bad teeth, still smoking cigarettes and marijuana. In West’s work on paper, “sausage equals dick equals turd equals sausage.” Banks described a handful of sculptures and drawings, how the artist’s work was autobiographical despite the collaborators in his studio, and how his audience-engaged pieces differ from that of Relational Aesthetics (they are private).

    Eric Banks reads from three review essays (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    “Public Anomie,” his review of Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, recently translated from French to English, was freshly published by Bookforum. It was difficult to avoid thinking about the November terrorist attacks in Paris, Banks mentioned, which took place after he wrote the review. Banks remarked how both his essay and a New York Times review of Submission compared Houellebecq to Lars von Trier, which Banks thought was his observation was a special discovery. Sometimes things are in the air. The plague of modern life, Banks said, borrowing a term from Benedict Anderson, is short-lived communities we form. Those which surround books (and their reviews) still engender “magic conversation.”

    Moore moderated the event’s Q&A, first addressing the solitude of book reviewing. Banks thinks about voice a lot, and he writes, rewrites, and rewrites. Moore concurred, “One has to keep rewriting to find out what you think.” Banks replied, “You’re always writing criticism in your head. You’re constantly taking notes in your head for essays that will never be written.” Yet “When you finally arrive at something, it’s almost like the smelling salts have been broken open, and you’re really alert to what you’re thinking about, reading about, what you’ve read [already].” Critical writing, he implied, sharpens your perception of the world. “There’s something about the critical essay, it makes you more attuned to … a lot of things. Somehow your senses are shot into another level of awareness. It’s the cocaine of writing, or something.” Yet he worries if a piece be embarrassing in a year—not unlike many people’s regret, the next day, about their behavior on the illegal stimulant.

    Banks wished he was more daring in certain areas. Born and raised in Louisiana, he feels he needs a weird Southern high-brow persona yet cannot write a history of the South. Nor could he write a book on smoking cigarettes (he once was a smoker) and the invention of obscenity in the Middle Ages. The questions I didn’t ask were: Is it harder to write about art than about books? How important is the editor, and what is it like writing and publishing without one?

    In Terms Of count: 3.

    1 Banks’s career path was chronicled in Cynthia Cotts, “Banks Knows His Books,” Village Voice, July 1, 2003.

    2 Rachel Harrison and Eric Banks, “Hostess with the Mostess,” in Darsie Alexander, ed., Franz West: To Build a House You Start with the Roof (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).

  • The Body, Unrestrained

    This essay was completed and published during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

    Art Talk: Clarity Haynes
    Tuesday, October 13, 2015
    Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

    Willem de Kooning, Two Women in the Country, oil, enamel, and charcoal on canvas, 46⅛ x 40¾ in. (artwork © Willem de Kooning Foundation)

    It was Willem de Kooning who once remarked, “Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.”1 For artists from Peter Paul Rubens to Jenny Saville, this assertion is incontestable—there is no better way to portray human skin in the medium. De Kooning also said that “beauty becomes petulant to me. I like the grotesque. It’s more joyous.”2 The visual thrashing ones sees in the Abstract Expressionist’s midcentury paintings of women is not what the New York–based artist Clarity Haynes has in mind for her Breast Portrait Project, an ongoing series of paintings of women’s torsos that take the genres of both portraiture and the female nude in new and unexpected directions. Her view is more sympathetic to the women she paints, though the works still make some viewers uncomfortable, including me.

    Over the past few years, Haynes has invited women from the New York LGBTQ community—typically her age or older—into her studio to pose. The smooth surface of her paintings, which have minimized brushstrokes that give off an airbrushed quality, belie the jagged topography of the people she portrays. The women are often large in size and in courage. Some bear surgical scars—such as those from mastectomy—and many have sagging skin, plump rolls, and stretch marks, conveying how the weathered body unravels after decades of living.

    Pinar Yolaçan, Boro, 2009, Lambda print, 20 x 18 in. (artwork © Pinar Yolaçan)

    Haynes gave an artist’s talk at Trestle Gallery in Brooklyn, focusing on the Breast Portrait Project, setting aside other types of work she does. The event was held in the context of Body Utopia, a group exhibition of six artists at Trestle Gallery, which comprised color photographs by Chitra Ganesh and Pinar Yolaçan, three framed charcoal drawings by Riva Lehrer, two videos by Sondra Perry, a sculpture by Constantina Zavitsanos, and a painting by Haynes. Body Utopia was a judicious selection of expertly installed works in diverse media by an intergenerational group of artists, all focused on “bodies of color, queer bodies, bodies with disabilities, [and] bodies that don’t conform to societal norms and conventions,” as described by Priscilla Frank in the Huffington Post. It was Haynes’s first outing as a curator, and the first time she contextualized her art with that of her contemporaries. For the catalogue she wrote, “The making of art is, for some artists, the making of a utopia, because it posits an alternative space, medium, and reality through which to explore our subjectivities and our bodies. In other words, we get to call the shots.”3

    During her talk, Haynes described the Breast Portrait Project and articulated her connections to feminism and to art history. She dates the project to the late 1990s, when she was regularly attending women-only music and cultural festivals like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and Where Womyn Gather.4 After making a self-portrait of her torso (and later of several friends), Haynes decided to change her practice, which at the time was social action, studying film, doing murals, and “having every kind of job you could imagine—most of which involved wearing some sort of costume.” Anything but painting. At the festivals, which usually offered some sort of art activities, she would spend one to three hours, under a tent, drawing pastels of the exposed torsos of her fellow festival goers. Haynes would then give the finished work to the commissioning subject, but not before documenting it, and the person depicted, with a photograph and a written statement by the sitter. While the drawing left the artist’s possession immediately, Haynes has stayed in touch with several women from the festivals via Facebook, even though she may have only met them in person once or twice.

    Sarah Goodridge, Beauty Revealed, 1828, watercolor on ivory, 2⅝ x 3⅛ in. (artwork in the public domain)

    While the origins of the Breast Portrait Project lay in 1990s alternative culture, it has personal precedents from art history, which Haynes articulated. In particular she cited two works in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Sarah Goodridge’s Beauty Revealed, a miniature 1828 self-portrait of her bare breasts, intended only for the eyes of the American politician Daniel Webster; and a lover’s eye painting from the eighteenth century. Both pieces offer a fragmented part of the body and emphasize privacy and intimacy. The oversized scale of the figures in Haynes’s recent paintings correspond to the Buddha Mahavairocana (Dainichi Nyorai), a larger-than-life wooden statue from the twelfth century housed in its own room at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. When the artist revamped the Breast Portrait Project in 2009, she said, “I wanted to make feminist bodies that could be super large, super powerful.” These works, averaging five feet in height, were shown in 2011 at a solo exhibition at Tabla Rasa Gallery in Brooklyn, under the title Radical Acceptance.5

    Carlo Pittore, Portrait of Steve Nusser with Artist, 1983, oil on linen, 24 x 18 in. (artwork © Carlo Pittore Foundation)

    Haynes had decided to become an artist at age sixteen, and her lifelong interest in skin and detail is evident in a watercolor self-portrait from 1987. An early supporter of her resolution was Carlo Pittore, a New York figurative painter who had moved to Maine in the 1980s. It was Pittore who, over a summer they spent together and many visits after, encouraged her to have a strong work ethic, and to paint from life, as he did.

    When she was younger Haynes admired the early work of Lucien Freud and Jenny Saville, but she now looks to Ellen Altfest, Rackstraw Downes, Catherine Murphy, and Josephine Halvorson, painters whom she said “record the facts.” A turning point for Haynes happened during a lecture by Altfest at the New York Studio School in December 2012, where Altfest described the long process for making her detailed paintings. After this talk, Haynes let herself develop a single painting for one to three years. Because she works from life, she gets to know not only the bodies she depicts but also the person inside them, like the trans bodybuilder Roxanne, whom she finished painting in 2012. “I really enjoy the long process of slowly getting to know the body,” Haynes said, “the specific body.” She continued, “It’s emotional when it ends, because you’re not going to have that regular time of seeing each other.” The relationships continue outside the studio: Leonora, whose breast portrait was hanging in the Trestle Gallery show, was in the audience tonight.

    The general form of the Breast Portrait Project—frontal view, centered composition, neutral background, and a body cropped at the neck and waist—remains consistent. What varies is the shape, color, and texture of the woman, and also things like necklaces and clothing (pants). The artist realized the importance of such accoutrements after a year’s worth of comments by visitors to her studio.6 In each work Haynes includes a body’s changes over time, but she retains temporary details that she likes. “With Leonora’s tan lines, I was really having a hard time letting that go, because I really like those tan lines,” she said. “And there were times in the winter when they were not there, to the same extent.” Haynes’s subjects are sometimes solicited randomly: she found Leonora in a coffee shop, approaching the older, butch lesbian out of the blue. “Recently I met Dilma in the restroom of a doctor’s office. She was singing in the bathroom.”

    Clarity Haynes, Leonora, 2015, oil on linen, 58 x 79 in. (artwork © Clarity Haynes)

    A triptych Haynes made as a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts depicted three classic stages of life: youth, middle, and elderly. “I … think a lot about age in my work,” Haynes said. “I think about how old women are portrayed in art history,” through tropes like the maiden, mother, and crone. The art historian Svetlana Alpers, Haynes said, “pointed out that there’s a history of gendered distrust of detail in art.” Michelangelo disparaged Flemish painting as inferior to the Italian, tempera-based variety, writing a long paragraph about how Northern painters paint and to whom it appeals (“It will appeal to women, especially to the very old and the very young…”). If he spent all that time negating detail, Haynes remarked, it must have really bugged him.

    One of the Body Utopia artists, Riva Leher, who was visiting from Chicago, offered additional observations about how Haynes’s work relates to art history. Northern Renaissance art has “the sense of a luminous, permanent present,” Leher said. And about Haynes’s work she observed, “There’s an inner luminosity in how you’re painting the body…. There’s a slow sense that the painter is telling you that the person you’re looking at is utterly worth your attention, is worth your quiet attention.” In Lucien Freud’s bravado painting, “there’s always a scrim between you and the subject,” which Leher likened to the British artist’s inner struggle and his dialogue with art history. We don’t see “his desire to bring you the pure presence of another human being, unmediated.” While all art is mediated in some way—including the apparently transparent qualities of even  trompe l’oeil painting—such realism plays a significant role in Haynes’s work. The subjects of the Breast Portrait Project are older bodies that are neglected, if not unseen entirely, in not just contemporary art but also our culture at large.

    Installation view of two paintings by Clarity Haynes in a 2015 exhibition at the New Bedford Art Museum called A Collective Body: Uncovered and Illuminated; the sculpture in the foreground is by Stacy Latt Savage

    Leher observed that Haynes’s work lacks blood, trauma, and other qualities that cause people to flinch. The artist agreed: “When people see a disabled body they see pain, and they will not [have] any other reading—they will see pain. I often find that if they see a scar, they see pain, and that’s not my intention, so it’s sometimes kind of frustrating. Because what I feel like I’ve learned … over time is that a trauma may or may not have been a physical trauma, depending on how people reacted, what the memory is.” For Haynes’s friend, a scar from open-heart surgery as a child was a good memory—everyone at the hospital treated her like a princess. Lehrer said that our society doesn’t have the language to approach scarring apart from the wounded warrior. During the last fifteen or so minutes of the talk, the artist and the audience had a good discussion about trauma, healing, and reclamation, about scars, intimacy, and body acceptance, and about gender and gender expression.

    With a self-identified affinity for women’s spirituality and body-image consciousness of the 1970s, Haynes offers work with a striking balance between social and aesthetic issues—hitting the mark in every way possible.

    In Terms Of count: 1.

    1 Willem de Kooning, quoted in Marcia Brennan, Modernism’s Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 72.

    2 De Kooning, quoted in John Elderfield, “Woman to Landscape,” in de Kooning, a Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011), 277. Some sources give the quote as “Flesh was the reason why oil paint was invented.”

    3 Clarity Haynes, “Visionary Bodies,” Body Utopia (Brooklyn: Trestle Gallery, 2015), 3.

    4 Haynes projected a photograph of a 1994 protest march with Riki Wilchins, the author of Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender (1997), and the transgender activist Leslie Feinberg when MichFest articulated an informal policy about only welcoming attendees who were born female biologically. The conversation touched on the tension between respecting the pioneers of the feminist movement and pushing against their resistance to trans issues.

    5 Haynes’s work has been chosen for the next Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. In addition, Stout Projects in Brooklyn will host a solo show of her work in February 2016. Haynes is also scheduled to speak at the New York Studio School on December 8, 2015.

    6 I visited Haynes’s studio on April 14, 2014.

  • I’ll Be Your Mirror

    Matthew Miller Artist Talk
    Saturday, November 15, 2014
    Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden Pocket Utopia, New York

    Matthew Miller, Untitled, 2014, oil on wood panel, 48 x 32 in. (artwork © Matthew Miller)

    Matthew Miller’s work for the past five years has primarily involved naturalistic representations of his own unusually shaped, closely shaved head, usually with a neutral, enigmatic expression on his face. The Brooklyn–based artist talked about his paintings—oils on wooden panels executed in a painstaking old-master style—in front of a tight crowd at a gallery with a long, unwieldy name, Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden Pocket Utopia.

    Miller stated that Can’t You See It, I Am One, his solo exhibition that is on view through December 21, was his first opportunity to do a show as a unit. This presentation, he said, has four propositions; they take the form of five untitled paintings from 2014 (one proposition comprises two highly similar works) that hang from the eastern wall of the gallery. He read from a short statement about the subject of his work, written a few years ago for the magazine Comment, that got the conversation rolling:

    He isn’t looking at you. He’s looking at the picture-plane, the site of the methodological drama and the working space of painting. He is obligated to the spectatorial pretense of the portrait. The “black of portraiture” takes up the rest of the frame and, with its fact-of-the-surface application (a sign-painter’s), competes for presence. However, this black is cousin to the cinematic green-screen, or like the enchanting blackness of an open barn door at midday.1

    “Oddly enough, I still stand by most of that,” Miller said.

    El Greco, Portrait of a Sculptor, 1576–78, oil on canvas, 37 x 34 in. (artwork in the public domain)

    For this gallery talk he directed the audience’s attention to the largest work in the show, which shows the head and shirtless torso of a Caucasian man (Miller himself) standing next to a wooden beam, which has been chipped away by the chisel dangling from his right hand. The gallery’s press release compared the work to El Greco’s painting Portrait of a Sculptor (1576–78), which is said to depict Pompeo Leoni. A similar painting is Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Juan Martinez Montañés (ca. 1635), and you can probably find other canvases with a similar pose and conceit. It’s classic art history. (Similarly, another Miller work shows the artist with brush in hand, not unlike Judith Leyster’s famous self-portrait , one by Vincent van Gogh, and many others throughout the ages—only here Miller doesn’t actually depict himself painting anything.)

    Unlike many old masters, Miller wasn’t commissioned to paint his works. Rather he made them on spec for gallery display, not unlike most contemporary artists. It makes you wonder why he would labor for so long to make something depicting himself, rather than what might be pleasing to an art collector. “I do this with a great sense of self-awareness,” Miller said of his practice “not just show you that”—meaning, I think, the representational aspects of the image—but also to “take apart components of self-portraiture.” What is his relationship to the painted subject? “It’s a me-and-it thing,” he said. “He’s always the artist.”

    Surprisingly, Miller does not use a mirror while in the studio. “I just know how to paint this guy’s face,” he said, and tries not to stylize him. But because the facial expression is neutral, the artist said, it is “less legible” and “more complicated.” Indeed, it’s difficult to read the subject’s face, other than by eliminating expressions of affect—such as happiness, anger, or disgust—that are perceptibly implausible.

    Matthew Miller on the level (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Miller aspires for a “painted plausibility” across his oeuvre, he said, and aims to sustain a persona, an idea a few audience members expanded on, tossing out descriptions such as iconic and archetypal. It might be more interesting, however, to think of the figure in Miller’s paintings not as elevated or ideal but rather as anonymous, a characteristic that makes the portrait specific or singular but unknown. After all, if you didn’t know these were self-portraits, you’d wonder why the artist produced five paintings of the same peculiar-looking person. When and how does Miller become less the artist and more just a guy in a picture?

    Likeness and fidelity are important to Miller but not explicitly the point. For instance, the artist always leaves out the large, horseshoes-shaped scar on the right side of his actual head. Moreover, while comparing the five works at Pocket Utopia to images of earlier paintings, you plainly see how his treatment of the head and face changes from year to year, and not necessarily in a way that depicts the process or effects of aging. A Miller from 2014 differs from a Miller from 2012 or 2010.

    Miller explained the painting’s background: he had set out to sculpt a self-portrait but failed. After making forty drawings of the abandoned carving, which was on view in the gallery, he embarked on the painting. Miller called the wood piece a “philosophical object,” describing it in the same way someone would describe a scholar’s rock.

    Matthew Miller, Untitled, 2014, oil on wood panel, 24 x 16 in. each (artworks © Matthew Miller)

    An audience member asked about the “chiseled male body” in the image, comparing the human body to the carving, shaping, and molding of sculpture. Miller said there are “types that are empirically me” in his art but admitted that his younger brother modeled for the torso—the artist was uneasy about his own body for the painting. Later, while looking closely at the work, I noticed that the treatment of the chest is gauzy, while the hand and face are more naturalistically detailed. The block of wood is somewhere in between. The levels of verisimilitude vary and therefore are not evenly distributed in a composition, which is perhaps what Miller meant by his self-reflexive approach to self-portraiture.

    The talk and discussion lasted about a half hour, during which Miller gave away few secrets. One intriguing statement he made concerned the sturdy black background in most of his works, an opaque but reflective darkness that he identified as theoretical, metaphorical, and symbolic space. That black background fluctuates between an airless space to infinite depth, introducing substantial mystery into his work and raising a screen onto which a viewer’s ideas can be projected.

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    1 Matthew Miller, “Untitled,” Comment, April 21, 2011.