"EMERGING, AFTER ALL THESE YEARS" By Jerry Saltz

EMERGING, AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

The gallery gold rush has allowed artists who've
spent decades on the fringes to grab at the prize.

By Jerry Saltz

Published Jan 24, 2008

One of the good things about the supposedly evil
art boom-setting aside for the moment the notion
that it may be destabilizing right now- is that
underknown mid-career artists are getting second
chances at recognition. In November, Mary
Heilmann, who is 67 and whose work has always
been respected but never A-listed, scored the
covers of Artforum and Art in America
simultaneously. Today, she's the subject of a
traveling retrospective, selling paintings for
upwards of $200,000. Amy Sillman, 52, made the
cover of Artforum last February, and her prices
have reached $85,000. After decades of neglect,
Marilyn Minter, now 59, not only ended up in the
last Whitney Biennial; her work was featured on
the cover of that show's catalogue, and her
paintings now sell for more than $130,000. Recent
seasons have seen the reemergence of Robert
Bechtle, Olivier Mosset, and Michael Smith, all
of whom, along with Heilmann, will be in this
spring's Whitney Biennial.

Joyce Pensato is the latest overlooked artist
getting a shot at the limelight. For more than
three decades, this Brooklyn artist has made
demonic black-and-white (or black-and-silver)
enamel paintings of cartoon characters. In her
Easter Island-meets-Disney-de Kooning-and-Warhol
portraits of Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, Mickey
Mouse, and others, Pensato combines the
gesturalism of action painting, the painterliness
of Abstract Expressionism, the blatancy of Pop,
and the wild style of graffiti. Warhol gave us
Double Elvis; Pensato paints a diabolical Double
Mickey. De Kooning destroyed the female form to
make his Woman paintings; Pensato destroys
preconceptions of cuteness and innocence. An
older woman is using Expressionistic male angst
to make these buggy subjects while pointing out a
disturbing racism inherent in many of our most
loved cartoon characters.

Pensato spikes her mix with the black-and-white
starkness of Christopher Wool and the defiant
abjection of Joan Jett's "I Hate Myself for
Loving You." To this she adds discredited strains
of East Village Expressionism, the stuff typical
of painters like Rick Prol and Richard Hamilton,
who spilled splattered paint at random. I also
see the garish bravado of near-forgotten German
neo-Expressionists like Rainer Fetting and Helmut
Middendorf. Her work even evinces traces of
nineteenth-century academic figuration.

In her gnarly Petzel show (open through this
Saturday), Pensato gives us a rogues' gallery of
raving, debased, pop-eyed beings-a pale
fright-mask Homer Simpson, a psychotic-looking
Felix the Cat, a slaphappy Daisy Duck, South
Park's Stan Marsh looking like a Warlock out of
H. G. Wells's The Time Machine. A few of
Pensato's new works are as voracious and haunting
as anything she's ever made. In fact, I would've
liked to see representative samples of the rest
of her art: Because all the works are paintings
of around the same size, depict similar subjects,
and display consistent surfaces and palette, the
show gets repetitious. Pensato is an
extraordinarily versatile artist who also makes
amazingly physical wall drawings and lush works
on paper, and, had she included a few of these
wonderful monstrosities, she might not need
another show after this one to prove her point.

Why all the newfound interest? For almost twenty
years the art world has been fixated on the
artists of the sixties and seventies as a kind of
"greatest generation." It goes without saying
that Nauman, Serra, Morris, et al. are fine
artists, but really, that's a misleading term.
"Greatest" means different things to different
people in different places at different times,
and every generation elects its own defining
artists. Nowadays, artists aren't automatically
rejecting isms, approaches, and styles that until
recently were deemed tainted. For the first time
in years, I know students who appreciate Julian
Schnabel and Anselm Kiefer unironically. Serious
mid-careerists such as Marlene Dumas or William
Kentridge or Huma Bhabha all employ types of
physicality, surface, and gesturalism, as well as
cut-and-paste assemblage-collage methods, that
are widely held to be dumpy eighties leftovers.
They are not, strictly speaking, part of the
preapproved, much cooler conceptual lineage that
still dominates galleries.

One artist who combines cool-school cerebralness
and assemblage is 53-year-old John Miller. Not
exactly undiscovered, Miller, who lives in Berlin
and New York, has been represented by Metro
Pictures Gallery for decades. In addition to
being a talented critic, he's known for a series
of wall works made of junk that has been painted
all brown. In the eighties and nineties, these
things were excellent analogs for the
intersection of abstraction, scatology, commodity
art, and the rise and fall of the art market.
These ugly-beautiful puddings made him into a
brown version of Yves Klein, he of the all-blue
monochrome paintings. Then Miller stopped making
them and produced over-ironic installations and
paintings involving game shows.

He's back to making monochrome paintings. Only
now they're gold. This makes them perfect
metaphors for the fusion of new money and new
art. On view at Petzel through Saturday (along
with another show at Metro, through February 9),
Miller's gaudy gold-leaf bas-reliefs look
simultaneously like Schnabel plate paintings, the
ocean floor, ersatz architectural artifacts,
kitschy bling, and modern-day Dutch still lifes
touched by Midas. They play a snarky,
Quasimodo-like American cousin to Damien Hirst's
$100 million death's-head bauble. But where Hirst
goes with diamonds and death, Miller gives us
soda cans, sunglasses, belts, and bras, in effect
putting a clown nose on Hirst's skull.

It's not just nice that the market is allowing
dealers to take a flyer on artists who haven't
had enough chances. Artists like Miller and
Pensato are gaining relevance, as the art world
consciously looks for ways to not attack the
market as evil but try to comment on the system
from within, without playing directly into the
hands of commerce. (He doesn't need to sell
designer objets, for example, the way Takashi
Murakami does.) Miller's gewgaws can be seen as
modern equivalents to Warhol's dollar-sign
paintings and Daniel Buren's stripes-fetishes
that have no inherent value in themselves but
that externalize unconsciousness, destabilize our
relationship to art, and are vivid symbols for
their own status as placeholders for the rich.
These paintings could easily be labeled stylish
crap. Still, they're ornery and raffish and show
an artist being served by the market's excess,
our uneasy awareness of it, and artists grown
tired of greatest-generationalism.

Pics <http://joycepensato.com/>

<http://www.metropicturesgallery.com/index.php?mode=current&object_id=269>

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