RECENT EXHIBITIONS 1996
Sheela Na Gig at Home, Jack Tilton Gallery / Black and The Red III, PPOW / A Cycle in Time, Sacred & Profane II, NY Kunsthalle
Sheela Na Gig at Home, Courtesy Tilton Gallery.
Nancy Spero is an artist in whom I’ve had a strong interest of late. Her work is full of drama, poignancy, bitterness, and triumph. Many emotions and politics compete for the viewer’s attention, as do the image she employs in various designs and juxtapositions. It is difficult to face up to the accomplishments of her oeuvre as a whole—it is both comprehensive and indifferent to viewers; it does not cohere as does the work of Jasper Johns or Ellsworth Kelly, or even Louise Bourgeois. This incoherence, though partly intentional, is the primary obstacle to its comprehension. In the main, Spero’s intentions have been nothing if not grandiose: the formulation of a dramatic system pf female representation for the past (women wronged, scorned, justified, and emancipated). Hers is a work of the mind and the heart as much as it is of a particular aesthetic system. She has developed her visual vocabulary into a unique idiom, the purpose of which is to replace historical stereotypes of women as silenced, bound, and separated from the vitality and action of life.
Her most recent series are concerned with matters of domesticity and the taboo against libidinous pleasure. This was most evident in her installation at Jack Tilton titled “Sheela-Na-Gig at Home” in which ropes were strung across the gallery, clotheslines holding night gowns, stockings, and underwear. These shared the space of the clothesline with large white on black and grey cutouts of the “Sheela”—the image of a woman squatting with her legs spread and her hands spreading open her pudendum to reveal a dark pit of mystery and excitement. Her eyes possess a pleased but distant look to them, as if she had glimpsed a pleasure to come, either one she awaited to fill her, or one which did not need to be filled except by her own attitude. There is an element of playfulness in the usage of this figure, and a subtle manner of exhibitionism both in Sheela’s pose and Nancy’s clothes. However, their playfulness soon seems to resemble a dogmatic indifference to anything but the Sheela’s pleasure, and littered amongst her clothing, it helps to orchestrate a commentary upon what a woman does—a woman relegated to roles of domestic slavery and social separation due to these assigned tasks—the cleaning of the home, caring for children, and making herself beautiful and acceptable not only for her husband but in advance of the censure of the greater patriarchal society.
In Jo Anna Isaak’s book Feminism and Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter (1996), she illustrates this position through Freud’s idea of Primary Narcissism, which is achieved through humor. “Humor,” Freud says,“has something liberating about it, but it also has something of grandeur and elevation in it… The grandeur in it clearly lies in the triumph of narcissism, the victorious assertion of the ego’s invulnerability. The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than the occasions for it to gain pleasure.” Spero’s work exists in the space between primary narcissism, and the other, lesser, female expressiveness, called hysteria; that the importance of laughter—or even the most subtle hint of female pleasure—as an act of signification raises. It could easily be confused with its opposite. But this is the space in which Spero chooses to work. Hers is neither is Kristevian ‘text’ not a Freudian ‘primary narcissism’ but an intertextual passage between the two (and beyond them) within the position created by their occlusion.
Black and the Red, Courtesy PPOW Gallery
Spero’s exhibition at PPOW this season was the third installment in a series titled “Black and The Red,” a panoramic scroll-style exhibition which measures some couple hundred yards long by one or two feet high. In these, various of her female symbols are juxtaposed against brightly colored backgrounds in checkered or vertically striped areas in vibrant primary colors as well as black and white. The sequence of images, when spread along one continuous horizontal area, resembles the effects by mixture and constancy of montage in film, and this particular manner of depiction proves equal parts delight and exasperation. For as the colors and interaction of forms engage the viewer, it is still difficult to keep in order the pattern of their occurrence, and one has to repeatedly retrace one’s steps. This is an activity which further complicates matters because each break in the narrative of perception disintegrates an understanding of the progress of the scroll altogether, causing a break in sensuous enjoyment instantaneous with a recontextualization as images blur into and against one another. Of the sensuous enjoyment I have carried away from the work I can say little, though a part of me refuses to deny it was there. I find myself most affected by the relationship of the specific symbols (Nefertiti; the Dildo Dancer; the leaping nude among others) with the dramatic interplay of their respective backgrounds in each section of the scroll. I was unable to evade the hypnotic effect that even a gradual viewing of the series had upon me. Consequent printings of the same image upon varied backgrounds caused me to react in a merely sensory manner, one which did indeed achieve a negation of the context of a given individual figure, and my emotional reactions were guided by the aggression and variety of different color/space/figuration juxtapositions. Jon Bird, author of a recent monograph on Spero, offers some explanationof this phenomenon.
“A heraldic term, mise en abyme, used in literary studies to mean signs that are simultaneously details and signifiers of the work as a whole, appropriately describes the structure of “Black and the Red III.” In any section we perceive both detail and totality, not as an example of an additive logic—the sum of parts—but, rather, as an episodic bricolage of meaning and reference. The directional impulse of the viewer is confounded at various stages by a counter-movement within the scroll and the invitation to retrace our steps, to move up close, to study a detail, or to retreat to consider figure/ground or color/field relationships as a whole.”
A Cycle in Time, Sacred & Profane II., Courtesy New York Kunsthalle
The third exhibition of Spero’s this season was organized at the New York Kunsthalle and titled “A Cycle in Time, Sacred & Profane II.” It was comprised of four areas in a building’s interior: the entrance vestibule; two large rooms; and a side room where a projection was running of two projects of Spero’s in recent years. The Two large room held banners made of silk and satin, with her selfsame female figures dancing, flipping, fighting, crying, or running upon a playing field. The banners fluttered in a draft and shone so brightly in house lights as to obscure any direct image upon their surface. I found them grandiose and ostentatious, undeserving of the subtlety that can be the strongest aspect of Spero’s work. However, I do see why she attempted to utilize the banners—it was another step away from the conventions of traditional work: away from the flat, white surface and the stationary vantage point, things she sees as concepts invented and maintained by men. However, my favorite part of this exhibition was less affected and more immediately intimate: her wall drawings in the vestibule of the building. The room itself is large with tall white walls which were perfect for her purpose. There is a little of a framing device in these pictures, and the dynamic and theatrical qualities which they possess in relation to each other; and as significations of a boundless and expressive feminine psyche, are best shown in her menagerie of mythical and literary (sometimes imaginary) figures which include the following scenes: two images of women, standing with shoulders arched and hands thrown up, either in praise or in evocation of a monster’s haunted pace, stand across from one another facing the viewer. One is painted yellow, and the other blue. They seem to have jumped out of the shadows, sch is the vibrance of their pose and their brightly colored bodies, which are lit from within by the vivid colors which enhance their willingness to either shock or entertain. Because of the absence of a referent for their action, it becomes obvious that they do it only for narcissistic pleasure. Another scene shows a woman hunched over in agony, her hand to her mouth, and her eyes ablaze in fear and regret as she peers in the direction of a huge and impassive soldier in the garb of a Roman Centurion. His figure is raised and his visage clouded. Hers is extreme and her body lowered so that it is obscured by where the wall and floor meet. She has sunk as low as he has risen, and we leave this scene feeling nothing but pity for her. Other figures are more ambiguous, showing only a single figure, such as a warrior astride a falcon, looking away from the viewer into the void of distance created by the vastness of the wide wall before us. There is also a long orange serpent with human heads at every point along its body, each with a long red pointed tongue splitting forth from toothy jaws.
Spero continually deals with hidden aspects of the female psyche, with the demons and angels, warriors and victims, mourners and celebrators pf an interior life. The individual images are striking enough, but when combined with either an overly colorful and abstract background, or one of pure white, like fresh snow or the void of a cloudy day, they become either active or acted upon as kinetic and lithe or dense and turgid. In all circumstances, however, these actions and reactions are seen as following the hand of the artist, herself a woman, and not that of a masculine adversary.
Throughout her career as an artist, Nancy Spero has succeeded where other important women artists have not—in the recognition of women’s issues. Her exhibitions this season show her prodigious abilities for conception and creation in a manner which has relentlessly maintained its basis in gender and the connection of gender to inspiration. The work is these shows has perhaps been her most successful, for its reveals a clear shift away from her work in the 1970’s. The emphasis is on strength and vitality, on a sort of hedonism that can only be enjoyed without reference to an opposite, an Other. It seems that Spero has finally come into her own. With this change it may lose the subversive function it possesses; it may move into the strange realm of obscurity related to the most important and recognized of artists, that of austerity. So that the questions that are always asked of an artist can be asked again.
NY SoHo Arts Magazine, January 1997