All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.
― Federico Fellini
An hour before closing on Sunday, I enter through glass doors to the inner sanctum of Marilyn Minter’s retrospective Pretty/Dirty. Hard to resist such an alluring title. Her lush paintings, glossy photographs and videos confront our relationship with the power of desire. Accompanied by a sliding soundtrack of chimes, the seductive images and videos entice and repulse. The exhibition opens with black and white photos of her disillusioned mother gazing in the mirror and expands into large-scale images in vibrant colors – lips and eyes with heavy make up, nails with dirty green polish, grungy designer shoes, jewels, and glittery body parts dripping with translucent liquid. With wry humor, Minter positions the viewer as voyeur to challenge the lure of beauty and the female body, the distinction between art and pornography.
A week before, I braved the 95+-degree freeway heat to view Robert Mapplethorpe’s two Museum retrospective The Perfect Medium – the evolution of an artist “obsessed with beauty.” A master of form and flesh Mapplethorpe seduces the viewer – whether a stark black and white portrait of an artist friend, an erotic still life in color, or an underground expose. Like Minter, his elegant but confrontational photographs disturb and captivate. Mapplethorpe died of AIDS at the age of 42.
To take it to another level, I ascended the stairs to view the canvases of Agnes Martin, Canadian born abstract expressionist and minimalist. The antitheses of the controversial work of Minter and Mapplethorpe, her paintings echo an unsettled but contemplative life. An established NY artist at the time of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Ellsworth Kelly, she renounced art in the summer heat of 1967, left her studio with cathedral ceilings on South St. and disappeared. A year later, having driven across the country in a pick up truck, she showed up in a remote mesa in New Mexico where she built a log cabin from trees she felled with a chainsaw. For 30 years she lived off the main line of the art world. In solitude and silence she developed her mature non-representational work, leaving behind the meticulous grids drawn with a pencil and ruler that came to her as visions. With horizontal and vertical stripes in pale colors Martin created a new language. Believing in the expressive power of art, she lived to be 92.
My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.
– Agnes Martin
No, I didn’t set out to write an art review, I have wandered to find my way. Inspired by the novels of Sri Lankan now Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje, I immerse myself in the compressed narratives of The Cinnamon Peeler, a collection of poems. With lyrical language, Ondaatje weaves a tapestry of passion and personal history with clarity and precision. I intended to write a poem for this piece, but as you can see I’m as disciplined as a monk at meandering.
The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town.
– Michael Ondaatje
I don’t always want to get to town – more often I have the urge to get out of town. But either way, my creative urges accompany me. My fictional friends (those who claim they write pure fiction, paint, sculpt or film) deny any connection to autobiographical influences claiming they make it all up. In a vacuum? Parking your car qualifies as autobiographical, never mind how you express yourself creatively – the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography. Your fingerprints are all over it. If Agnes Martin hadn’t believed her silent mother hated her, she might not have disappeared into the desert. And we might not have the legacy of her mystic vision. In the work of Minter and Mapplethorpe, the autobiographical underpinnings and obsessions clearly fuel their investigation.
During the course of meandering in this piece, the only poem I created turns out to be the visual one above. But connections I didn’t see revealed themselves. Not just the obvious migrating Canadian artists, lipstick, leather and a pick up truck. But ghosts. A maternal name and a string of pearls. Beauty, desire and gifts from under the sea carved with love. Mirrors, magic – and the art of disappearing! I can fill you in sometime – if you like. Pearls.
Love this post, Martha. Yes, sometime I'd love to be filled in.
I appreciate the concept of "meandering, " to experience the world as you come upon it rather than as you expect it to be. The artist interprets society and his or her life in his or her own way, and if we are fortunate, we are allowed to share their experiences and interpretation of meanings in life.
As always – what's unsaid but visible if one bothers to look- speaks louder than the obvious.
Loving the concept of getting lost to find yourself. I also agree that artistic creations speak more about the artist than what might otherwise be perceived.
Martha, your posts are always pearls….
I love how your embrace every part of life. The beautiful, provocative, sensational, repulsive. No judgment. What it takes to create the whole picture. I always learn from you. Thank you!