John Currin Is the Caligula of Painting
John Currin, Sunflower, 2021.
Photo: © John Currin. Photo: Rob McKeever. Courtesy Gagosian.
John Currin is the Caligula of portray. A person whose do the job is so particularly fucked-up, perverse, shocking, visually insolent, menacing, and mesmerizing that as it places us off, it also pulls us in. Our preferences normally betray us as we find ourselves drawn to questionable matters we know are problematic. That is in which I am with Currin.
Anyone writes about his fantastic talent. But that is ridiculous. Currin has no far more or a lot less talent than any fantastic artist. To say his paintings are far better mainly because they are form of Renaissance-looking is like saying a poem is better for becoming published in Greek hexameters or a bad opera is greater for becoming generated at Bayreuth. Individually, I glaze about at all the sleek ye-olden labor-intense historical rendering that goes into his function. Bram Dijkstra termed paintings like these — visions of ladies as semi-comatose wanton succubi — “Idols of Perversity.” It’s an apt phrase: Currin provides us the warping power of the curdled straight male gaze on tradition, record, women, and even straight men them selves, twisting them — us, me — into noxious top secret agreements with one particular yet another of tittering ridicule, leering laughter, glaring impotency, and insecure contempt. No a person receives off on Currin’s pictures of gals with lute-formed faces. As an alternative we find ourselves observing a form of male loathing, thinking about distinct rotted ideals of woman elegance: the grotesques of Victoria’s Magic formula models, deviant physiognomies of inflated intercourse dolls, vacant-headed potbellied Renaissance maidens, tubercular Intimate heroines, Cubist torsos with X-shaped anuses and malformed breasts coming from each individual appendage. All male commodifications of woman sexuality and subjectivity.
This 59-calendar year-outdated mid-job artist has raised hackles due to the fact his 1992 debut. Back then, Village Voice critic Kim Levin known as for his show of previously fractious photos of girls to be boycotted. In the meantime, the New York Moments wondered if these paintings of females should even “be regarded as acceptable” at all. When he begun exhibiting his get the job done, along with his Yale colleague, Lisa Yuskavage, the artwork environment hadn’t found representational function like this in ages, if at any time. Currin blasted by means of Neo-Conceptualism, the awesome of Commodity and Pics Art, and modified what art about the body was by building it in a extended-useless, non-modern-day figuration that experienced been relegated to the ash heap of educational art history. At the exact time he scaled his work way down from the grand measurement of all that older perform he was referencing or reviving and channeled a titanic dual irony and sincerity. The way we generally sense, standing exterior ourselves, searching in, even though having legitimate experiences. The irony comes in asking yourself how he can be major about weird pictures like this? The sincerity is him earnestly pursuing this eyesight in this twisted older way of portray whilst also someway creating it feel new. This has always developed confusion and discomfort when hunting at his get the job done, generally leaving viewers on edge, uncertain of what to make of his subjects, be they his burgeoning race of contorted females or foppish fool men in ascots not able to communicate something or even aware that the environment appears to be like on them as incels and fools. What I make of them is anything nearer to the elaborate approaches that the mind processes the world when seeking to square it with fantasies, squelched wants, and undesirable ideas. In several techniques, neither we nor Currin have traveled much in regard to his imagery and the dated techniques they are painted. By now, numerous see him as just a super profitable art-world pariah producing paintings for wealthy collectors. It is not so basic.
In his to start with downtown exhibition in 12 several years, Currin is going all in on his practically-tutorial, anti-historical type, laboring like an ox over his compulsive, hyper-representational, semi-Surrealistic, neurotically freakish realism, albeit with new flourishes of unfinished painterly regions of canvas. On one particular wall of the darkened Gagosian gallery have been hung seven flickering vertical paintings of sculptures of deformed, dolphin-shaped salamander-bodied women, seemingly sexless, with out estrogen or breath, broken off from the planet, ghosts. The gallery was normally complete and normally silent. Viewers stood agape, furious, frightened, sharing glances at just one a different as if to ask, “What are these? Is it all right to like this? Really do not you detest it?”
After each individual of my gallery visits, persons stopped me both of those inside of and outside the house to communicate about these things. Most persons liked the work the types who didn’t loathed it in a way commonly reserved for Jeff Koons. But there’s been a change, no matter if from exasperation or raised consciousness. Where, when folks may possibly have disliked the do the job, they had been now also judging the artist as evil or morally reprehensible. I was essentially frightened to publish pics of his present on Instagram. When I did, most of the 700 remarks I acquired were being damaging to scathing — several from me. A lot of questioned if newspapers would even be ready to run these images.
Every single daily life-dimension painting depicts a trompe-l’œil architectural specialized niche or reliquary saturated in strident gentle, bathed in russet shade, painted in a hyper-illusionistic practically-academic outdated-learn/Gothic patois of Cranach, Pontormo, Boucher, Mannerism, Rubens, Vargas Women, Norman Rockwell, Andrew Wyeth, Odd Nerdrum, Botero, Mad Journal, and bodice-ripper illustration. Maintain in intellect that these are not, for each se, paintings of women. They are paintings of sculptures of gals or varieties cast in ash. This presents the operate an uncanny air of a little something eternal, usually with us, ways we ennoble, imprison, and manipulate the female determine. Each individual offers us 1 or far more of these captive fossilized feminine poltergeists, stripped bare, blatantly exhibited, in a shallow suffocating room. Nothing at all else can exist in these traps. We are as significantly from the heat of any human sunlight as I recall in present-day painting.
The paintings recall a lot of historical tropes: portray cycles of the seven virtues and vices, female figures carved in architecture, twisted tomb guardians, sacrificial damsels, prostrated penitents seeking salvation, Kama Sutra temple partners, sheela na gig figures of gals spreading distorted vulva, writhing Venuses, Daphnes turned into Laurel Trees to escape the male grasp, and other female colossi. In some methods, Currin’s depiction is not that distinct from all these matters we settle for and revere. Each of his figures exists in a limbo of invalidism, enervation, atrophied mythology, Arcadian dreams of bathing beauties, and all our unlimited Modernist nudes by riverbeds, in parks, beds, stripped naked facing us, or masturbating. In a person of the best a few paintings here, Sunflower, a lady sits on a shrouded seat. She is a psychically devastated corpse. 1 of her toes is deformed into a significant-heel condition, the other atrophied, neither equipped to help her bulk. These figures can’t go. Her waist is emaciated, belly distended, her intellect a silent howl of stasis. She wears sheer garter belt and sagging stockings, retains a withered pinwheel sunflower, and seems to be down from eyeless sockets. As with several of Currin’s ladies, her breasts are gargantuan, just rounded mastitis masses. Her withered experience, like a lot of the faces right here — which can toss you for a loop when you think about it — is that of Currin’s artist spouse, Rachel Feinstein.
In addition to Caryatid, an virtually Pontormo-fulfills-van-painting ballerina-Madonna-angel imprisoned in the painting, the other authentic masterpiece right here is Mantis. We see an insect-vectored anatomy of a two-headed/two-bodied taking part in-card determine with splayed anorexic legs astride an upside-down, bent-around, huge-hipped lady. She or they may possibly as very well be hippos with pincer limbs and ineffective arms. All the figures expose indented vulvas with no labial interface breasts have no nipples. Listed here are exaggerations of all our classicized, Platonic, Greek, sexualized feminine figures, the spawn of countless numbers of decades of male artists stripping females of or amplifying sexual characteristics, all without the need of company.
Currin has long gone all in on his despised eyesight. What causes the slippages in the remaining affect of the get the job done and leave it imparting pathos with out utter originality or creating particularly unforgettable visuals that stick in the mind’s eye, is that he hasn’t accompanied this with equally radical official invention. That is the place the trouble is, exactly where his artwork deliberately stands outdoors any discourse other than itself, forlorn, spectacular, insolent, but possibly caught in a metaphysical cul-de-sac. That is the monumental Achilles’ heel to this art that can make it unachievable for his foes to acknowledge. His paintings stand mighty but aloof, isolated, clownish, self-parodying Gothic monsters that develop into so inward, elaborate, cartoonish, mannered, and goading that they can go flat. They depart you an effortless way out. Compare these to artists like Marlene Dumas or Tracey Emin, who feel to vivisect their own souls and the souls of all ladies in beautifully elaborate paintings, or Carroll Dunham’s coital pics of couples in flagrante delicto or warring with 1 an additional. These artists go the distance formally and figuratively their surfaces are physical, seemingly dipped into acid baths, and fabulously tattered with quagmires of paint that established their individual optical climate techniques in movement. That is the big variance. Currin’s surfaces are satiny, easy, and not physically alive or unique. Thus, Currin is pursuing an impossible undertaking: reanimating an implicitly museological, canonical sort though making use of this exceptionally charged matter make a difference but not modifying the way these paintings were being painted. It would be like striving to revive Viennese waltzes: a variety of zombiism. In a way, then, his so-known as painterly “sins” are not his personal but all those of the fathers of this dead design and style. Envision this Currin present but with Native American, Black, Asian, or Hispanic women. You cannot.
But Currin’s distorted female nudes are as old as art. Our very first sculptural figure of a girl, Venus of Willendorf, circa 23,000 BC, has very small toes, gigantic breasts, tremendous hips, and a tiny head. Modernism picked up on all this and only created it even worse, tearing girls to jagged shapes and parts, exposing female flesh from each side at as soon as, within and out, with faces shot via with insanity. When we experience rapture more than the magnificent voluptuaries of Matisse’s dancing nudes, or Picasso’s angular sex slaves and seductresses, we are observing ladies without having labia or nipples, animalistic faces, bodies imbued only with the force of character or senseless glee and want. Now, of training course, we love this get the job done and filter these disarticulated Modernist nudes as a result of the suitable aesthetic signifiers and indicators of abstraction, high-keyed coloration, odd geometries, surrealism, squiggles, bumpy surfaces, and formalism. All of these are versions of the male gaze.
When I glance at these photos I see all that. But also, anything else. Myself, a life time of my personal male gaze that triggers with out considering, ignores the individuals I seem at, that sends me into deluded visions, silly fantasies in no way acted on, all with no private agency, at the mercy of a little something that I know is dehumanizing and cuts down me to often to seeking, seeking, emotion unseen, avoided — in a sense, rejected. An prompt right after this, the disenchanted embittered cycle of this sort of observing ignites again. In Currin’s ill photographs, I experience the condemning twangs of these magic formula truths, everyday psychological raptures from looking at the feminine variety, knowing I am distorting these sorts, that what I see are only my possess enfeebled thwarted mating phone calls. I know that currently being absorbed with this work may well be damning. However, I am absorbed, caught by some historic interior tide, emotion points that I uncover alarming but alluring, sensations with short term God-like presences of nevertheless other sorts of attractiveness, adopted by rejection and decline that will be the very same the day after tomorrow as they have been the day ahead of yesterday. In this uninterrupted personal abbey and idolatrous palace, eradicated from existence, enthralled to a little something past myself, normally signaling the slightest shades of adjust, I feel the pull of an nearly cosmically outdated bio-evolutionary optical-chemical drive and pressure.
