Flower Ben, by Elizabeth Peyton
I have had a long relationship of ambivalence with Elizabeth Peyton’s work. And I’m not alone. As famous as she is–she is a true art world “darling”–there are many like me who cannot find their deep way into her work, to that place where you really feel connected. Sometimes a work will seduce me into engagement (like Flower Ben above), but mostly I am in between.
Some of my artist friends are big fans. But I keep asking myself, what it is about her work that usually keeps me outside of it?
It has a particular flavor of charm, to be sure. A deftness of the hand. And it presents itself as easy, accessible, light. It isn’t dark or brooding, which is its own refreshing change of pace. But I’m on the lookout for art that takes my breath away right there on the spot; the kind that I can feel deep inside, making me dizzy with feelings I can’t describe in words. Being with art you love is like having great sex: It should involve every part of your body, and the feelings should be outside the range of human language.
In the end it is highly subjective, this “like/don’t like” business. But the best part of this in between state is that you get to change your mind. Sometimes that happens all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a potentiality I love having around me.
Regardless of my yes and no regarding Peyton’s work, I did enjoy reading Sebeastian Smee’s review of her current show at the New Museum in New York. I like Smee’s writing. He isn’t afraid to be emotionally exuberant and titillated by what he sees and what he likes. Not one to stand back, he is neither cool nor detached. I find his reviews engaging and fun.
I posted the full Smee review on Slow Painting, but a few excerpts are included here, ones that can be meaningful as stand alone passages:
Elizabeth Peyton attracted attention in the mid-1990s not because her work was any good – that would take years – but because it catered to certain hankerings (for beauty, for human connection, for the rush of infatuation) that up until then the art world had grimly suppressed. People were disproportionately grateful.
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It’s almost always wonderful when artists dare to be shameless – to go ahead and paint what they want. The trouble was, little of Peyton’s early work rose above the standard of lackluster fashion illustration, or of those saccharine, on-the spot portraits made by street artists in tourist traps.
Still, we can be thankful that she was encouraged by the kind reception extended to her early work, because she has gone on to produce one of the most daring and exquisite oeuvres in contemporary art. I fell completely for Peyton as I ambled through “Live Forever,” the retrospective at the New Museum here, feeling more and more like a mopey, heart-struck teenager every minute.
Many of you will not want to give in to such feelings, deeming them indecently frivolous.
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In the end, I love the unlikeliness of Peyton’s success. Who would have thought that one of the most acclaimed and closely watched artists of our time would be a young woman who paints small, unabashedly girly portraits in oils on board – pictures that have no tough-guy conceptual underpinning to speak of?
I’m ambivalent about her too. I like the portrait she did of Jarvis Cocker, really because I like the fact that there is a Jarvis Cocker portrait at all in the world. But for me, there’s always been some sort of vacancy in her pieces, and I don’t mean the kind of vacancy you feel invited to feel and fill in. I mean a flatness, a distance, the sense that you’ll never get any closer than this. Maybe that’s a byproduct of her celebrity subjects, but I just never find much of a way in in her work.
I’m uneasy too about much of the review you posted. That last line especially: “Who would have thought that one of the most acclaimed and closely watched artists of our time would be a young woman who paints small, unabashedly girly portraits in oils on board – pictures that have no tough-guy conceptual underpinning to speak of?” Really? And this is a good thing? And this is a success we should champion? We should be proud of allowing a young female artist to fit squarely within our most narrow sense of what it means to be young and female and artist? There’s no question that this woman can paint, but what she does or doesn’t do with that painting is a whole other story for me.
I lack ambivalence here. Peyton hurts and flusters me with her success. Her work is not beautiful or well done to my eye, but inept and occasionally charming. It sickens me that she is discussed in the way that she is. There is a niche for painting well/painting lite/painting cool — it’s the niche David Hockney filled 40 years ago. If Peyton is supposed to be filling it now, I understand: the niche always belonged to Design and the Annals of Look, and not to art, so a low exemplar may fill it any year, for it is a category error. But the idea of serious painting suffers, because there is painting that is beautiful and does not read as effortful or anguished, and it doesn’t get the attention that Peyton’s extremely slight work attracts. I have to admire her success as a marketing triumph, however.
V, I like that Smee came to like Peyton’s work from not liking it at all. Willingness to change one’s mind is a good thing. I laughed when he described her work as “girly” (kind of a brave thing for him to do when you think about it), but I could also be offended as well.
You are much younger than me. I spent so many goddamn years of my youth fighting, fighting, fighting and being SO angry about everything that wasn’t right or fair. Now that I’m over 50 I find it easier to detach and just take a bemused stance to what would have driven me mad 30 years ago. I still have my passionate, “take no prisoners” causes, but I can count them on one hand.
Regarding your response to Smee’s review, I can say yes, yes and yes. But I can also find something in his manner of approaching art that I enjoy.
And to you E,
All true. But such are the vagaries of the fickle and unpredictable star making machinery of the art world.
Dare I mention the names of the two artists whose work is heralded much more than Peyton’s and who I think are much better examples of undeserved notoriety and fame? John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage leave no door open for me to engage. None. But famous? They make Peyton’s careerist successes look like bird droppings.
Maybe that’s some blatant baiting on my part since I would LOVE to hear that exemplary Elatia rhetorical brilliance and vitriol thrown out onto that particular icon of the mob of bullying taste makers. So if you are so inclined, have at it!
Fascinating that the reviewer’s response to the show is to feel like a smitten teenager. It is youth she is celebrating in a superficial, youth-oriented aesthetic. The image you posted is striking in color, repetitive in form and not something you would want to study past the first glance of pretty contrasts.
Currin and Yuskavage will have to wait, but while I hate them, I also consider their renown as anchored in an intellectual posture, not in an appreciation of what is said to be beautiful painting pure and simple. The whole post-ironic thing in the visual arts bores me sideways, but it is a chapter in the history of taste, and if lotsa folks WAY over 50 want to be strap-hangers on the hipster aesthetic train, I’m only partially offended. Soon enough, it won’t matter.
I am deeply offended, however, by painting so thin and bad it rarely rises to competence being spoken of as if it yielded almost Matisse-like rewards. That amounts to a degradation of something very important to me, and not by Thomas Kincade-heads but by serious art people. It is as incomprehensible as if Ruth Reichl went shopping at CVS around Easter, bought a 16″ high shrinkwrapped imitation chocolate bunny, and put it on the same shelf as her Valrhona stash. Or as if Martha Argerich were found lingering attentively to hear the elevator music in the Hilton. I have no answer to it, because it’s fundamentally the wrong way for things to be, when people who should know better have lost their eye for what is fresh and beautiful and will let in the blatantly ersatz.
In contrast, the marketing of head trips in the arts, even those as fabulously successful as Currin, et al., is not difficult to understand. The mind is easier to fool than the eye, in fact finds it droll to be fooled. The eye is looking for beauty, but will settle for interest. There is enough to look at that there needn’t be room for such as Peyton, when the real thing is not gone.
WOW! I just love this. E, Thank you for posting on Slow Muse. You enrich my real estate more than you can know. xoxo
I share your “long relationship of ambivalence” regarding Peyton’s work. After seeing the show at the New Museum, I am still ambivalent. But the paintings continue to make me think about a number of issues. That’s good. I also liked her use of color. Certain greens and purples were extraordinary. For me, worth the time on a quick weekend trip to the city.
Thanks for stopping by Tom. I really enjoyed visiting your site and will be back again. Your work, both written and visual, captures me.
And thanks for this feedback on the show. Greens and purples–as soon as I read that in your comment I remembered having a similar experience with her color sense.
Thanks for visiting my site and your kind comments. Color, until recently, really intimidated me in my work. Thought I had to know theory and all that. I finally just started to mix things and see what would happen. The fear melted away. Go figure. The only way to do it is to do it.
Your header is quite beautiful.
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