Pey to Play
November 6th, 2009
“Male beauty is a more free area of beauty,” she declared, mildly.
Yes, it is! Male beauty is more expansive than female beauty. It is an undeveloped and wide range of “types,” numbering much higher than the constricted fjords of female beauty and its “types.” Which is unfair. Maybe male beauty is liberated because it isn’t as codified.
“Women’s beauty is more cliché somehow,” she continued, hesitantly.
Hm, okay, well, I guess you mean that the standards of female beauty are outmoded. But whose standards? Botticelli’s Venus is nothing like Agyness Deyn, this decade’s Twiggy, who looked like a boy, which…returns us to male beauty.
“There’s something about men finding their individuality as an object,” she concluded, quizzically.
As an object? Is that all I am to you?
Superstar Elizabeth Peyton selflessly accepted SVA’s invitation to do a Distinguished Alumni Lecture – open to the public – an act as generous as the a$tounding donations she’s made to SVA Alumni Benefit Auctions. As an alum, I was excited; and I can’t even fathom how thrilled the throngs of undergrads must have felt to see a mid-career titan open up about her work, collected in depth by MoMA.
Looking neatly coiffed, rosily passionate, and unambiguously lovely, the artist had envisioned a slideshow, with iTunes accompaniment, of paintings and photographs of her numerous, numinous friends; instead of delivering the stream of penetrating insight the audience might have anticipated. The playlist is below. Was this a good idea?
-What’s that adage? ”Something-something-something…don’t say anything at all?” It censors me here, but doesn’t explain her muteness there. I learned that her eclectic taste in music spans generations and subcultures; and that she paints the musicians she listens to, or maybe listens to the musicians she paints. For example, Brandon Flowers of the The Killers pops up in her jukebox and in her work. Same with Julian Casablancas, who in his own words, canonized an avoidance tactic unlike that quoted above, which applied to the individuals filing out early: “So I walked out/ Oh, baby, don’t care no more, I know this for sure, I’m walkin’ out that door.”
In life, Elizabeth Peyton paints exquisite, secular icons that exhale intimacy while bursting with bold gesture. Her work would stir Ingres, who once wrote, “A painter is perfectly right to be preoccupied with finesse, but to that he should add force, which does not exclude finesse – far from it. The whole of painting resides in drawing that is at once strong and delicate. Let anyone say what he will, painting is a matter of drawing that is firm, proud, and well characterized…”
Emitting phenomenal glow, her paintings are beacons to guide me through the torrents of soulless painting, and they draw me near, like a maternal whisper. Her idols are poised like royalty and wistful like poets, and they shimmer with splendid, nectarous colors that make my mouth water. I love them. The subjects and the objects. My senses cheer in their presence, just as my organs thrive with vitamins. In his lyrics, Julian Casablancas wants to “steal your innocence,” but in her paintings, Elizabeth Peyton wants to preserve it forever, making each of her dreamy subjects a “container and record of their time.” Just look at her Sid Vicious: merely a bad boy too big for his britches, not a dirty needle-addled butcher.
But do the paintings speak for themselves? What do I know? ”This amphitheatre is really nice,” I heard someone say.
The Peyton playlist (“Peylist?”), note that the linked versions aren’t nec. those played tonight:::::
1. Led Zeppelin – Over the Hills and Far Away
2. The Notorious B.I.G. – Everyday Struggle
5. Nirvana – Rape Me (Acoustic)
6. David Bowie – Lady Stardust
7. LCD Soundsystem – Someone Great
8. Arctic Monkeys – Cornerstone
9. The Killers – Mr. Brightside
11. Julian Casablancas – 11th Dimension