Category Archives: contemporary art

Feminist Fabric

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Byzantine Grid, 2005

Fabric is feminine. Despite the male tapestry makers of the 17th c. or the male weavers of the 19th c., fabric is associated with the feminine and the decorative (i.e. lesser) arts. Long overlooked, textiles, such as quilts and embroidery, have only recently come to prominence as an art form spurred by the acceptance of crafts as artwork and the nudge of the feminist movement.

Detail of Byzantine Grid

Byzantine Grid is a traditional brocade, except that instead of being woven, it has been painted with thousands of tiny strokes to imitate an aged piece of cloth. At 90 inches high by 180 inches wide, it’s larger than the wall of my bedroom. While it’s detail and delicacy cuaght my eye, I also like how the artist deconstructs a ‘feminine’ art and remakes it as a fine art piece.

It makes a statement as it hangs in the gallery, one about women remaking patriarchal tradition in their own, modern way to create an object that demands to be placed next to the Jackson Pollacks of the world. Friedmann deconstructs traditionally feminine crafts of lace making and fabric, even while playing into traditional ideas of the feminine. These images of Friedmann’s work are from 2003, but she has more recent work based on fabrics on her website. Check out the small works from 2005.


She Muttered, 2003

According to the artist, “I manipulate symbols that deal with ideas about femininity and the role of women in art history. I draw and paint and present these issues in an over the top gorgeous way. Among some of my interests are Spanish colonial art and Minimalism. I paint some of the things that women have been historically associated with, like flowers lace and embroidery. I monumentalize them and give them a heroic place and scale that can remind one of high macho modern art.”

Friedmann is hardly the only feminist who has reclaimed textiles as part of the fine arts. Along with many of the decorative arts, textiles have come to the forefront as ignored crafts with a visual language that has been ignored up until recently. The new Museum of Art and Design at Columbus Circle would hardly have been possible without this emergence. My posts have a bit of a feminist slant lately, but only because you see these things everywhere once you start looking. And by things, I mean beautiful and interesting objects and people.

Detail of She Muttered, 2003

Review: Marlene Dumas at MoMA

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MoMA Monday Nights gave me the opportunity to pop in after work and spend some time at their retrospective of South African painter Marlene Dumas, entitled Measuring Your Own Grave. Reviews can be good or bad, or sometimes scathing. Although Dumas’s works left a strong impression on me, I find it difficult to articulate my thoughts, good or bad. Why is her work so difficult to talk about?


Her figurative paintings focus on bodies in space: women, children, corpses, groups. In blueish hues, she suggests, sometimes quite beautifully, a face as strongly as if you had seen it in a dream. Yet the quality is contradicted by the eyes on canvas meeting yours. They are unreadable and unhappy. From explicit sexual poses to prone corpses, the subjects attempt a gritty realism that wars with the dreamlike style, especially in the her water-based works on paper. The subject challenges it’s own subject-hood through its gaze; the subject matter challenges the style and medium. Is it any wonder I find her work challenging to discuss?

Her works, which are so strong and accomplished, struggle with meaning. Except for her more political/sexual works, which are too literal and graceless for my taste, Dumas paints people whose gendered identity or ethnicity comes forward more than their individuality. As a South African, Dumas’s work offers a perspective on apartheid. As a woman painting traditionally feminine subjects of women and children, the artist provides yet another source of conflict by presenting her subjects through a traditionally male lens, both historically and sexually. The manner in which she paints forestalls her making a statement, and these people become ghost or dream people instead of portraits or symbols of social ideas.

Dumas’s people reminded me of Chagall’s, in that they are not grounded to any reality, take on shimmering skin colors, and in their simplified contours seem representative of humanity. Puzzling out both artists’ works is more imaginative than logical.

Full of verve without joy, her thinly painted, fragmented style and hallucinatory colors, Dumas’s figures toe a borderline of real and imagined that won’t quite let the viewer make comfortable assumptions, and this disquieting quality illuminates her work with a chill beauty. On view at MoMA through February 16, this accomplished exhibition then moves to The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas, from March 26 to June 21.

Seth Price at Reena Spaulings (a fake gallery)

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Contemporary Art Daily‘s post today is on Seth Price’s show at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, which I discovered was a block from my old apartment here, and half a block from my new one. Seeing it today reminded me of something I learned after attending the opening: Reena Spaulings is a fake.

It’s a real gallery…but there is no Reena or Spaulings or Reena Spaulings. Typically, galleries are named after their owners. To explain (sort of), we have the New York Times, as fine a news source on a Sunday morning as any:

“Behind the Spaulings name stands…the collective known as the Bernadette Corporation. Formed in 1994, the collective has produced films, albums, magazines and books. One of its permanent members, John Kelsey, is co-director, with Emily Sundblad, of Reena Spaulings Fine Art on the Lower East Side.”

So what the hell does that mean? “Reena Spaulings is a fictional artist, performer and art dealer,” but do we know who puts on the shows and who decides the artists. Is Seth Price a member of the collective that shows its own works? I called the gallery, but the phone just rang forever, and the only time I’ve seen a sign of life in that unremarkable doorway was at the opening.

Ah, the mysteries of the art world. Ah, the mysteries of life, which are best pondered on a fine Sunday morning on the terrace with coffee. Perhaps I’ll have more information for you after my afternoon nap.