Heroic Painting
By Fred Camper
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Bo Bartlett in Civil War (1995) attempts to create new kinds of heroes, showing two women mourning fallen soldiers. The wife of a Confederate soldier is in the background, while the center is occupied by a white woman cradling a bare-chested black Union soldier in a pieta pose. Her body rises centered against the sky, and together with her reflection in some water and a large patch of snow, her head and torso make a crucifix shape. But the fact that Bartlett doesn’t paint these figures very well undercuts his effort to ennoble them: their bodies display none of the rhythmic verve one might find in a Renaissance religious scene, and his colors are flat and stale, with none of the depth and complexity of a Corot or Courbet, whose compositions Bartlett dimly recalls. Though Civil War is interesting for its content, as a painting it’s a dud. Here the failure of the heroic stems from a simple lack of skill–but this isn’t quite as accidental as it sounds. Painters today are rarely trained as they were in earlier centuries; “heroic” artistic skill itself is little admired. In our readymade world, any old appropriator can be an artist.
Three painters with greater skill offer parodies of traditional heroic paintings, but unfortunately it’s not easy to tell they’re parodies. Collaborators Komar and Melamid in Lenin Proclaims the Victory of the Revolution (After the First Version by V. Serov) (1982) give us the oft-seen poses of Soviet art: Lenin’s frown and outstretched hand emphasize his iron forcefulness, while Stalin is horrifyingly avuncular in light of subsequent history. The painting’s very presence in a U.S. fine art exhibit is provocative: like a readymade, it’s out of place, and its tongue-in-cheek title adds to the irony. But I wondered if the painting wouldn’t have passed unnoticed in a Soviet gallery.
Though Heffernan’s multiple narratives undercut the idea of the hero and his singular story, she paints the central figure with the same subtlety and richness as the background landscape: the old masters are her models. And though there’s irony in her historical references, her nude also stands proudly in the present, a fount from which all the other images seem to spring. “Embedded in any creative act is an implication of heroism,” Heffernan told me, and indeed her work seems to revel in the imaginative triumph of multiple images and stories. This artist replaces such linchpins of patriarchy as the single equestrian hero with her own multivalent creations–an approach in which each of us can be a hero.
The images he does create are faint, variable, often almost decayed looking. Clear Sky/Garden Addition shows the side of a house so nondescript it could be anywhere. Since the graphite seems to have been applied irregularly, there are lighter and darker areas and variable textures that dominate the image’s wood siding. White blotches at two edges look like water damage. Several flowers in the foreground of Clear Sky/Flower recall Warhol’s flower paintings–and Gerber cites childhood exposure to pop art as an important early influence. But he offers an antifetishistic alternative to Warhol’s sensuous fetishization of color and paint. The graphite is so irregularly applied that in itself it’s hardly a subject. Some flowers are bright, some dark, and some seem almost lost in smudgy gray powder. This extreme variation makes the viewer aware of the accidental nature of all representation, the result of local conditions at the moment of creation. (In fact, one influence Gerber cites is On Kawara, who paints blank fields except for a clearly lettered date–the date each was painted–replacing the “externality” of color-field painting with the specificity of a single day.)
