2000

The Love Mechanics, New Feminist Art

for Flash Art by Michael Cohen

A retooled form of feminist art has begun to roll into the art world's consciousness. Unexplored thematic combinations are emerging through out this work, from relationships between woman, to female voyeurism and the addition of viscerally to allure. However, these artists-Sue DeBeer and Laura Parnes, Marlene McCarty, Marilyn Minter, Dana Hoey and Patty Chang- are too diverse in approach to resemble a movement. Working independently, these practitioners. Whose ages and backgrounds vary widely, are largely unaware of each other. Each artist has a complex relationship to feminism although it deeply informs their work.

The complications arise from the artist's ambivalence towards being relegated to the cultural margins, and from their break with, or update of the earlier precepts of feminist art. They draw on a variety of sources from fashion ads, crime reports and TV shows like Xena, Warrior Princess, to theorists like Luce Irigary for inspiration.
For these artists, models for empowerment are found in every area of the culture, not just the fringes.

Inspired by such diverse influences, the most important element linking the artists' work lies in their tinkering with the mechanics of love between woman. Mother/daughter relations, fusion, competition, and multiple erotic patterns are forgrounded over previous confrontations with media and patriarchy. They also recoup the grand motifs associated with femininity, such as sexuality and dejection, which have been co-opted by the art world, and other media.

SISTERHOOD
Pulsing with the murky horror and red-light glow of cult films like Liquid Sky and Videodrome, Sue de Beer and Laura Parnes's video Heidi 2 has been one of the most inspired works of art to arrive in New York this season.

The sequel recasts Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy's epic tape as a surreal after-school special about a pigtailed Heidi who gives birth to a younger version of herself. The pair's daily life gradually moves from mirroring and sexual play to technologized degradation in which Parnes and DeBeer convincingly reclaim patriarchal abjection. The haunting scene where Heidi floats over a building and sees her daughter's image, a second self, reflected back in a shimmering pool below, crystallizes the film's main concern: the aggression and confusion of boundaries in mother/daughter relations. This most fully emerges in the climactic tour-de-force where Heidi 2 surgically implants a TV set into her abdomen with mom's help. The TN. contains a live feed of her-self. The cold Cronenberg-esque silences distill the horror of transmitted self-consciousness, of always being watched and watching yourself. The TV set, like a baby, invokes the self-violence and alienation bequeathed through the too-close mediations of the filial bond.

CHERRY BOMB
Marlene McCarty ës monumental ballpoint pen portraits depict real-life teen-age girls who murdered their mothers. The six foot high figures on oversized white paper are drawn from researched newspaper accounts which reveal a plethora of motives: puberty, sexual con-fusion, conflict and abuse. But while the young women's faces are based on actual photos, McCarty has overtly sexualized their bodies, rendering their clothing translucent. The series' subversive aura descends from the way McCarty unveils the hidden allure behind the girls' violent expressions of their budding sexuality.

Each drawing is finely rendered with multiple pen strokes, speaking of McCarty's obsession with these youthful outcasts. But her interest goes beyond the details of how the girls killed their relatives. McCarty's compulsive identification with these dejects forges a perverse new female voyeurship. Her drawings celebrate the teen-age murderers because their explosive sexual charge forges a bond well beyond any limits set by the law.

A WORLD OF THEIR OWN
Dana Hoey's all-female tableaux document a secret world of veiled linkages and tensions between women. The photographs range from middle-aged women caressed by sunlit grass and golden light, to confrontations in the girls-bathroom stall. While many of the interactions appear friendly or caring, the women's averted eyes and obscured faces consistently reveal rivalry and estrangement.

Hoey's photos parody media-constructions by obliquely recreating emotionally significant vignettes from advertising and TV The warm tea-times and bonding sessions are underlined in the photos by a frosty austerity, which translates as a false unreality. The air of fraudulence hints at an invisible dynamic where girls undermine each other with thwarted ambitions and turn everyday tasks into power struggles. Perhaps these silent dramas are fought over the prize of greatest desirability or maternal prestige. Hoey's photos of blue-blood group walks and cat-fights reject such values, as their all-female scenarios are representationaly separatist at the core.

MONEY SHOTS
The shiny, hyper-real enamel on aluminum paintings by Marilyn Minter depict uncanny close-ups of beautiful women, and those who imitate them. Minter's approach mimics adult movies, zeroing in on specific parts of the body to magnify their fetishistic qualities. In one of her most visually hypnotic paintings, Shiner, we close in on an eye covered with sparkling make-up and mascara. The dark layer under the glitter makes one wonder what bruises lie beneath glamour's surface.

Within this universe of feral lips and elongated necks, Minter brings intimacy to the uncanny. The close parallels her images create between the manufacture of beauty and violence turns what's sexy or familiar, into the alien instead. Her paint becomes like makeup, a cover-up of the indefatigable, a mask for the void. The paintings' meticulous hand-work disturbs and distorts pop culture's glossy surface intimating a feminine pleasure in viewing instead.

SHORT CUTS
Whether engorging her legs by filling her pantyhose with broken eggs, or lapping at her image in a bowl of water until it disappears, Patty Chang's performance stills recast the lines around race, body image, and memory. Her erotic endurance tests re-call Gina Pane, Chris Burden, and Hannah Wilke, but are more visceral than her female forebearers and more vulnerable than previous performance-work by men.

Chang ës suturing of her flesh, secretarial wear and food to perverse contraptions, explores how social norms infiltrate one's body and soul. Her slick productions utilize the values of Madison Avenue but heighten the fetishistic effects. In Melons (At a Loss) the artists slices through the cup of her over-sized bra which holds a cantaloupe and spoons the pulp into her mouth. The video powerfully evokes self-objectification, but renders it more sensual for the participant and unpalatable to the viewer. Chang re-tools the business suits and proper Asian manners which signify social obedience by turning them into props which generate life's darker pleasures.

NEW DIRECTIONS
These artists' work provides a new feminist paradigm in their shared exploration of seduction, bonding, cultural theft, and female voyeurism. For those who see art as interpenetrating, rather then obedient to, the surrounding culture, this model allows art's critical side to re-enter the picture in a fresh mix. The reintroduction of feminism that all five artists take part in is a brave act which demands further exploration.

MICHAEL COHEN