Long lines to see at Mark Grotjahn’s Nine Faces at Anton Kern Gallery.  They are lines but they aren’t “lined.”  Rather than ruling an edge or tracing an arc, Mark Grotjahn strings along atomic, individual kisses from the brush. The punctual daub, the incipient line.  Each line, like a bow or branch mingles with others until forming a thicket.  Thickets group into a bramble.

The line widths, parallel tendencies, and tubular volume could derive from the corrugated cardboard beneath them.  But what about the emergent faces, from which Grotjahn supposedly derives his paintings?  Perhaps the process is to reconcile the ribbed plane of the cardboard ground with the transverse arcs of the face.  Ten-line highway meets frog.  Grotjahn’s lines are fortified with overlapping segments of impasto paint.  Where the brush pulled away from the surface, the paint rises in low relief with tantalizing, glistening rivulets, each delicious like an oiled Brazilian rockclimber blowing kisses from the granite cliff he climbs.  Over and over again, from edge to edge.

MG, "Untitled (Lotus Paul Signac Face 41.31)," 2010 (detail)

Halved, Ohm

“The radiating, ricocheting lines never submit; the flaring planes never emerge,” writes Roberta Smith on Mark Grotjahn’s Nine Faces.  Irresistible force meets immovable object.  “The faces hold their own, if just barely, to affirm in staunchly contemporary terms the human presence behind all art.”

Mindy Shapero, "almost every color and silver leaf ghosthead guide that will bring you to the ghosthead god, you can only visualize the guide when you have entered a monsterhead, and you first have to be serene enough to be able to even see the monsterheads before you can wear one.," 2006

Like narrating a nature documentary, she’s poetically, rightfully comparing to interspecies struggle – overwhelming predators versus resistant prey – the formal trials underway in Mark Grotjahn’s larger-than-life-sized, oil on cardboard on linen paintings.

"Untitled (Geo Abstract Reveal Face 41.61)," 2011

It doesn’t end with self-indicating dots and dashes, but it also doesn’t continue toward connecting the dots and dashes into conclusive images.  Microscopically parsing his fundamental markmaking, she plants Grotjahn in the Abstraction Jungle, but gazing, perhaps condescendingly, at Figuration City.

detail

She’s also describing Mark Grotjahn’s straddling stance between modernism and the art of today. He is beyond subjective markmaking but short of the framework unto objective imagery – or back from it.

"Untitled (Lotus Paul Signac Face 41.31)," 2010

-The perplexing state that he is in; her puzzling writing on the wall.  First, how can one be staunch while still being contemporary?  “Staunch” is the folded forearms of modernism, the tight lips of rigid history.   And doesn’t this look like painting you might have found 60 years ago hanging in carpeted galleries on the Upper East Side?

Faceless: Philip Guston's "Painting", 1954

But if it is staunchly contemporary, than what is it staunch against?  “Staunchly” invokes refusal, steadfastness, Ironclad.  What does the Contemporary refuse?  Maybe the facelessness of abstract expressionism, where a lot of individualism went into the work, but a lot of monolithic masks were the closest we got to faces?  Maybe the adventitiously illustrative digressions of the academic masters before that?  Then, how would the Contemporary feel about surrealist and AbEx face-friendlies like Miró, or facebreakers like Picasso?

Page 32, Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud

Half Dome Harry, by me

Grotjahn turns his back on the signifying nothing of “pure” abstraction and the gratuitous striptease of imagery and its overpopulation.  He’s back in the jungle, but he remembers the city.

Henri Rousseau, "Two Monkeys in the Jungle," 1909

Les Edwards, album artwork for The Prodigy - "Music for the Jilted Generation" LP, 1994

Paul Cadmus, The Fleet's In (1933-4)

“There are more than a dozen figures in the painting, but in one section a sailor is depicted accepting a cigarette from a man in a suit. The civilian wears a red tie, one of the quiet sartorial signals that gay men used to identify one another prior to the gay liberation movement of the 1960s; it was a time when nearly all gay men remained “in the closet” for fear of social or professional ostracism.” (Like the kind legislated in Tennessee as of this week.)

Charles LeDray, Us (2009-10)

Cranberry Beret

Because a gay man was flicking his Bic for a sailor, the Navy angrily demanded that the Corcoran Museum remove the painting from exhibition, almost 80 years before The Smithsonian’s G. Wayne Clough bent to The Catholic League’s infantile panic over David Wojnarowicz.  Now that smoking is illegal in NYC parks, the Navy can rest easy; all Bic-flicking will happen in cars and apartments.

Dasha Shishkin, Dark Angel of Projective Vomiting, 2011

Desaparecido at Zach Feuer is Dasha Shishkin’s fourth solo show in New York, where she restores her drawings toward uniform seriality and connective imagery.  As if diagramming the tenuous distinction between “drawing” and “painting,” she works on both sides of translucent Mylar, often (though not exclusively) drawing on one side and painting on the other, dry and wet facing opposite compass points.

That misleadingly makes it sound like formalist abstraction.  Demure about its perversity, the imagery throughout the 20 or so works includes densely composed congregations of malnourished sociopaths, prison surveillance vantage points, and floor plans so fragmented that they buckle into cracked vignettes.  Occupying institution-scaled interiors resembling spas/baths and restaurants/cafeterias, the 100% women inhabitants leisurely chat with each other while smoking cigarettes, while others indifferently dismember selected sisters, who themselves are fully conscious and conversing till the cleaver makes its final chop.  Faces are sparsely articulated, as wan as Hergé’s Tintin on painkillers, though emotive engagement wriggles forth from the posture of the wasted bodies.

"Form: it is the foundation and the condition of all things; smoke itself should be rendered by a line." -J.A.D. Ingres

This society of deranged women – cool, not hysteric; industrious, not degenerate – has achieved the gyno-topia: communal living independent of males.  Simultaneously, it has regressed to the savage disorder of cannibalism, harnessing and directing members’ consuming drives inward.  All regulated and disbursed from the kitchen: due to no evident desperation, the women slice, dice, and butcher each other; but they do it with bureaucratic ardor and calm. What should be gory bloodbath seems as innocuous as mutual grooming.  And where it isn’t explicitly illustrated, the carnage is implicitly pervasive.  Food prep haunts each fetishistic protuberance, and each act of grasping, cutting, pinching, tugging, and other treatment of matter, itself subsumed as flesh.

To Serve Man.  In steaming piles, like mussels or dim sum.

(But then, what does it mean when these piles contain stray phalluses?)

Dasha’s handiwork encompasses the neurotic dissonance of the factory barbarism (barbarism begins at home).  She boldly streaks her garish palette in haphazard curtains, indiscriminately permeating the figures, though brakes for patterns, dutifully “painting in” wireframe chairs and the tiled floors.  Her decisive lines do not flinch as they confidently delineate contours and appendages, yet they seem blinking and twitchy, like a nervous teen or outback tweaker.

Meat is Murder