It was a delight to see the drawings by Dawn Clements in the Whitney Biennial this year. Clement’s extenuated and rambling series of papers takes fragments of imagery that form together an interior and the entirety of the piece. Her fixation on Hollywood melodramas of the 40s and 50s becomes our fixation; in which the viewer watches as lens pans through a dimly lit room dappled in sunlight. The artist has taken the emotions, both within the film and within the viewer of the film, and cut a new reel. This is made doubly interesting by the work’s filmic inspiration; ‘My Reputation’ 1946. The drawing crawls across the wall as the visualisation builds. The line-work is slightly schizophrenic; here focusing and ruminating for a while; there lacing loosely over unknown matter. And all the while the paper accommodates as required. For me the work alluded to a poetry between motion(that provided by the camera and the actors), desire, subjectivism and vulnerability.
Many other works in the show failed to hold my attention. Perhaps this was due to a sense of dissociation, detachment and what I might describe as hollow affectation. Broadly speaking they felt lacking in any real personal content or emotionally honest response; deliberately so for various reasons. Stephanie Sinclair‘s photojournalism documenting female self-immolation was a shock, and an exception of course; a harrowing insight that is burned into my brain, and I’m sure everyone’s who has seen the work, and rightly so. The Whitney site has some great links discussing it further. I’ll touch on it enough to say that her work broaches various great divides, not least the divide between journalism and art.
Overall, and excluding the works I mention here, there is something in The Time’s estimation of the show; that it was “tweak-intensive …, abstraction’s old content — utopian ideals, personal expression — is squeezed out. What’s left? Décor? Expensive busywork? The catalog refers to such painting as “personal” modernism, though the opposite seems to be true. It’s plain old product, and proud.” And for those of us with a foot in the commercial world it left us wondering why? Why, when you have a chance to pour your guts out without a commercial reality staring you in the face, would you not take the opportunity to connect to internals, be raw and, above all, be at the least a little bit wild and brave. Alternatively we have yet another commodity here that is suffering from current economics.
Substance again, to bring up the rear, could be found in Pae White’s simple but delightful textile work of cotton tapestry (above) pretending to be smoke; “cotton’s dream of becoming something other than itself”.