Monique van Genderen at Happy Lion

I have been a couple of times now to see Monique van Genderen’s new paintings at Happy Lion Gallery in Chinatown, and I still don’t know what to think about them. I am seduced and repelled at the same time: the paintings’ slick, shiny surfaces and bright colors beckon but are ultimately inscrutable, like a tagged-up wall.

The 6’x4’ panels march around the gallery walls in lock-step, with flower forms, rainbow arches, and blocky areas of color flowing from one to the next. I kind of want to lick them (flavors like Tutti Fruitti and Daquiri Ice—Baskin Robbins circa 1985—come to mind), and I also want to wrap them around giant gift baskets for my girlfriends, like cellophane. The gallery space feels like a haute-couture fete. But in my jeans and t-shirt with fingers smelling like the egg roll I just ate, I am the frumpy girl at this party; I can’t untangle the refined language, perfect manners, and manicured surfaces of these abstractions.

After reading back over what I just wrote, I see that my interpretation of these paintings could be called feminine, as I have described them in the language of Vogue or the late Domino. I get the feeling from her artist statement that van Genderen would be okay with that. She describes her work thusly:

“Paint hangs on the surface, exposing the structure of the panel, not unlike the various states of dress a model for couture might display, showing contour and line through bone beneath the fabric.”

She goes on:

“Let’s say they have nothing to do with the figure at all, it is at least true that the works were made by a feminine hand, trying to carve out theoretical space in this world. For weaponry I resort to scale and boldness of color in order to cast about my subjectivity. Abstraction and materiality are the indicators and the language for what lies beneath.”

Subjective experience, beauty and meaning in pattern, idealization of feminine difference: aren’t these hallmarks of Feminist art? So maybe I was right after all to picture myself in a room full of beauty queens who are preening for my gaze yet are aloof from the need for my regard at the same time. I am still left not knowing what to think, but I really want to join the dance, all the same.

Van Genderen's work is on view through July 11. Image is an installation shot from the gallery's website.

Beyond Words (long ramble ahead...)

Last week I was catching up on some podcast listening while I worked on some fabric pieces in my living room (sewing is easier when you have a soft, well-lit place to park your backside). Episode 191 (4/26/09) of the Bad at Sports podcast featured an interview with art historian James Elkins about a growing international trend in art education: the PhD in Art.

During the discussion, Elkins pointed out many of the problems created by forging ahead with this new degree, such as lack of standard agreement on what should constitute the Art PhD or the regular old MFA; and the class-like split that might occur between MFAs (makers) and PhDs (thinkers). He also outlined the different approaches to this degree that he has encountered at various institutions. One sounds a lot like an MFA: intense studio time and critique that results in a body of work and a dissertation-length artist statement. The second approach is more philosophical or critical, asking degree candidates to focus their research in a discipline that may lie outside of art (anthropology, sociology, computer science, etc.), and to produce a dissertation in that field while also producing a body of studio work.

Elkins advocated for the second approach, at least in cases where an artist’s work necessitates expertise in an outside field (he mentioned Mary Kelly as an example). But the greater questions he seemed to be struggling with were these: what is the role of research in art? Can the production of visual art be considered research, that is, productive of new knowledge?

A lot of this questioning seemed to center around the key component of the PhD: the dissertation. And this got me to thinking about my own thesis (a mere 20 pages) and the role of language in the visual arts. I keep this blog because I want to exercise my writing skills and give the wordy part of my brain new thoughts to chew on, such as expressing connections like what I am doing now or trying to articulate my thoughts about an art show I have just seen.

However, when I am working in the studio I am not using that wordy part of my brain. Sometimes when I am working I realize later that I have been thinking with a different part of my brain, one that doesn’t put its thoughts into words in the same way that the part of my brain that worries about the laundry piling up or the unpaid bill on my desk does. This part of my brain thinks in pigments and marks, it tells me what to do next by showing me a picture of how things could be. These pictures are dark and fuzzy around the edges, so that I can only see a step or two ahead of myself at a time. I must rely on intuition to follow through on the ideas from this part of my brain, trusting myself to figure things out as I go along.

I have lately been thinking that we make art in order to express ideas that are outside language. We create sculptures or symphonies because we want to share thoughts that are hard to put into words, that come from this pigment/mark/intuition part of our brains. But does this count as research? Does relying on my intuition to put red next to gray create new knowledge? And how can a dissertation on DNA sequencing lead to a PhD in Art? Why not a PhD in Biology instead?