For those fascinated by chronology, it's a happy coincidence that John Currin was born in 1962. In that year, Roy Lichtenstein had his 1st one-man show at the Leo Castelli Gallery, and to the horor of all sensitive, art-loving people, set forth a new vision of what might be called "American Grotesque". He found his sources in the oceans of un-looked at visual trash that hurt eyes of refined spectators, and disclosed, among other shocks in our image world, how strange, to the point of being hideous, the American idea of female beauty could be.Culled from lowbudget ads & comic strips, these ripe young girls when enlarged and presented as oil paintings for close-up scruntiny, turned out to be monsters, belying their original purpose of seducing the vast unwashed american public into spending $$$ on holiday resorts, soap opera and kitchen appliances. The faces of this artificial race were discovered to have paralyzed masklike perfection; the limbs and torsos of their warped, steam-rolled bodies were entirely depleted of bone, joints, and muscle, so that their fluid contours could expand and contract at the artist's will. But of course the shock eventually wore off, and now these paintings look not like their commercial soources but like vintage, museum-worthy Lichtensteins, as much as the nudes of Boucher or Canova, Ingres or Renoir. And on a less exalted, american wavelength, moving closer in time to Currin's grass roots heritage, I might mention the pinups of George Petty and his successor Albreto Vargras, whose silk-smoothed, pneumatic fantansies of rounded and elongated female flesh established their own race of sex goddesses. From the 103os to the 1960s, these shared erotic dreams kept arosing heterosexual subscribers to Esquire or Playboyand surely helped to inspire the pinup nudes that, in the early 1960s, also became the satirical focus of many works by Lichtestien's pop contemporaties Tom Wesselmann and Mel Ramos. Today, of course these mid-century objectsof desire seem remotely artificial and unsexy as japanese erotica, havinglong ago become nostalgic documents of another era far less likely to prompt contemporary lust than to provide a field day for students of gender roles in american culture.
All of this may offer some preparation for looking at Currin's ever-expanding population of American humanoids, a completely original update of works by 1960s pioneers who were excited by the aesthetic potential lurking in the eeriness of contemporary america. One might begin, as Currin did, with the commonplace of portrait photographs, like those preserved in the highschool year books people remember from thier even more distant youths. From 1989 on, thos egalitarian format haunted him; and with a bias as predictable as Renoir's, he focused exclusively on the girls in the class
to be continued...... |
