Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [148]
LONGO: THE CITY AS CINEMA. American artist Robert Longo (b. 1953) calls himself “the anti-Christ of media, coming back at the culture that created me.” A leading image-appropriator, he transforms commercial and cinematic images into high-impact, billboard-sized paintings that project the menace and violence of the city at night. Longo’s huge, powerful, mixed-media works seethe with intensity, using high-contrast, mass-media style to manipulate audience response. “I want the viewer to look at something that is both beautiful and horrifying,” Longo said. “I am looking for a positive force in negative imagery.”
Longo, “Cindy,” 1984, Whitney, NY. Longo draws on cinematic and commercial imagery to project a sense of menacing urban life.
NARRATIVE ART: STORY TIME. Art in the ’80s saw the rebirth of the painting as an accessible form of story-telling. Mark Tansey’s monochrome canvases portrayed an imaginary version of history, such as the occupation of SoHo by German troops (a sly dig at the takeover of art by German Neo-Expressionists). Faith Ringgold combines text and imagery in her patchwork quilts recounting the life of black women. Sue Coe’s feminist paintings memorialize events like “Woman Walks into Bar — Is Raped by 4 Men on the Pool Table — While 20 Men Watch.” Leon Golub’s overtly political paintings protest war and the abuse of power. For Golub, art is not comfortable or pleasurable but unsettling: “The work should have an edge.” Others who use recognizable imagery to convey autobiographical concerns are David Hockney (with his California pools, palms, and photomontages), Jennifer Bartlett (who explores multiple facets of a scene in serial images), Susan Rothenberg (in her feathery paintings of dancers), and Elizabeth Murray (who fragments domestic objects into mysterious, detonated puzzles).
FISCHL: SUBURBAN PSYCHODRAMA. New York painter Eric Fischl (b. 1948) burst into notoriety with “Sleepwalker” in 1979, a painting in which a surly teenage boy masturbated in a backyard wading pool. Critics hailed his disturbing images as exposes of the failure of the American dream. Like John Cheever short stories, on the surface his paintings portrayed ordinary suburbanites, but their subtext reeked loneliness, desperation, and dread. Sexually loaded, Fischl’s images of middle-class life have “What’s wrong with this picture?” undertones. The stories alluded to on canvas require viewer participation to resolve their ambiguities.
After envisioning Levittown as Gomorrah, Fischl turned to exotic locales, setting his lushly painted scenes in the Caribbean, Morocco, India, and the Riviera. Despite the mock-travelogue gloss, the same danger and enigma lurk. “The new paintings are about me in the world; the other was about the world in me,” Fischl said. “They’re equally terrifying. ”
“A Visit To/A Visit From/The Island,” for instance, contrasts indolent, affluent tourists basking in ignorance of the violent world that threatens the black working class. What links the two halves of the diptych is the storm cloud gathering over the frolicking white vacationers, a storm that brings death to the vulnerable natives. In Fischl’s words: “I try to create the effect of something unsaid.”
Fischl, “A Visit To/A Visit From/The Island,” 1983, Whitney, NY. Fischl’s narrative paintings — psychologically tense and emotionally complex — require viewer participation to decipher their meaning.
GRAFFITI ART. Based on the Italian word for “scratch,” graffiti are scribbled words or doodles on walls. Even found in ancient Egyptian tombs, graffiti first appeared in the artist’s studio with American painter Cy Twombly, Frenchman Jean Dubuffet, and the Spaniard Antoni Tàpies. Real graffiti art is an art of the streets. Armed with felt-tip markers and aerosol spray cans, in the 1970s and ’80s hundreds of graffiti “bombers” made their mark on the urban scene,