Phyllis Bramson: Cosmic Disorder
By Fred Camper
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At first Bramson’s works seem truly a vision of “cosmic disorder,” to quote her title for the show. Yet most have discernible themes and sly hints of narrative. Backward Looking Thoughts includes images of six women or girls, mostly looking away from us into the picture’s ambiguous blue background. Bramson suggests that these women have inner lives and seem to see things we can’t, even as she denies the voyeur’s wish to see much of the women themselves, since their backs are to us. But we are permitted a vicarious “viewing experience”: in the painting’s top center is a lamb in a field of flowers apparently looking at a painting of a colorful landscape hovering just above the field. Multiple interpretations are possible, but perhaps the most obvious is something like “These women have a right to privacy, so I’m not going to show you what they’re seeing. But here’s what this lamb sees.” These women are definitely not objects of the viewer’s gaze, and Bramson refuses to reveal the complexity of their own gazes.
James Elkins in his helpful catalog essay gives a detailed reading of the ironically titled Decorum, suggesting that “a sentence-like arrangement of pictures” across the middle of the canvas might be interpreted as “an open-ended love story.” In Bramson’s reply in the catalog she says that her paintings “[hover] between the nonsensical and the profoundly meaningful.” Certainly the relationships among the elements of her pictures are ambiguous; often placed against solid colors, her vignettes hang in space like miniature theater scenes adrift in a void. Indeed she counts theater as a major influence, and each object seems to have its own “stage” and be ready to take a bow. As a result, each also competes with the others, as if trying to tear the viewer’s attention away from them.
Margaret Wharton’s work has many subjects, but orgasm doesn’t seem to be one of them. Getting crazy sometimes is. In Life of the Party a pair of elongated wooden legs supports a lamp-shade head. The “figure” has a certain insouciance, but as in much of her work here, Wharton adds complicating elements. Hanging from the lamp shade is a fringe of tiny lead sinkers, the wooden legs end in buckets that appear to be filled with concrete, and the “light” inside the shade is actually a bug zapper. This dancing drunken guy (well, I think of him as a guy) is weighed down with objects signifying “masculine” aggression against nature–bug zapper, fishing sinkers–though in the case of the fringe the form is “feminine.”
