Karin Davie: From a Different Place
Karin Davie: From a Different Place
“Someone once said to me, ‘Oh, you are that painter who makes the wavy stripe paintings of contorted eyes, lips, cheeks and butts’—they couldn’t have put it better.”
—Karen Davie
THE EXUBERANT ABSTRACTION of the Canadian-born artist Karin Davie took me by surprise last spring in Buffalo, where I was intent on other errands. I had driven down from Toronto that cold weekend to visit Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler’s noble, exquisite Guaranty Building (1894), and to see dim Lackawanna, desolated by the closure of the steel mills that had long sustained the Buffalo suburb. (Each is a noteworthy item within its respective history: of the skyscraper, of the post-industrial suburb.) A visit to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery was not high on my agenda. But, as things turned out, I had time to see what Davie (who I knew to be a Toronto native but was otherwise unfamiliar to me) had on view in her first museum survey exhibition.
The paintings I discovered, or that discovered me, at the Albright-Knox on the last afternoon of my weekend trip were remarkable. As I found by thinking about them then and for days afterward, by reading the London critic Barry Schwabsky’s excellent catalogue essay on the artist’s iconography and, eventually, by talking with the artist in her studio on New York’s Lower East Side, the works I saw belonged, simultaneously, to at least two different histories, discussions, realms of engagement— both fascinating.
One was abstract painting in the United States since the Second World War. After completing her education (Queen’s University, the Rhode Island School of Design) and getting down to work in New York in 1989, Davie began an energetic conversation with stripe painting—since Jasper Johns’s Flag (1954–55) probably the most all-American American style of them all—that was to sustain her for more than a decade. Though a sympathizer, Davie was never really one of the guys (Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella, Gene Davis) who did the unforgettable, dead-straight awning or pyjama stripes in the 1960s and 1970s. Davie’s stripes of the 1990s wavered and dripped, they billowed and bulged like fabric pulled tight over a muscular thigh. But a sexy swing is not the only thing that distinguishes Davie’s art from that of her mentors. As Schwabsky shows, using illustrations provided by the artist, even Davie’s earliest work was usefully contaminated by popular imagery ranging from mattress advertisements to R. Crumb’s head comics. (Non-stripe high-art sources included Ingres, Caravaggio and Michael Snow, whose Walking Woman Davie admired at the Art Gallery of Ontario.)
These paintings also showed the wear and tear of their nativity, which took place in a weary moment in New York art. In the years around 1990, the legacy of the painterly avant-garde, including the standard stripe, seemed especially suspect and bankrupt, yet, at the same time, utterly inescapable. Philip Taaffe’s joyless pastiches of Bridget Riley’s throbbing Op-art abstractions, Sherrie Levine’s stale, flat-footed parodies of geometrical abstract painting, Ross Bleckner’s profoundly disillusioned colour-band abstracts—these were the visions that came as the 1990s dawned, and blessed Davie’s talent. They gave her visual ideas, a way with paint, an imagery. But, due surely to the grace that shelters the souls of some artists from bitterness, the barren dread expressed in art by some of her older New York contemporaries did not infect Davie’s fledgling artistic project, which remains today as clear of cynicism about painting’s capacity for communicating strong ideas—and, indeed, as free of even a tolerable measure of skepticism—as any new painting I have seen.
But the canvases I saw in Buffalo (and later, in her studio) ran on a second track, alongside and in concert with their arthistorical connections. In common with other American abstract painting of the last 20 years—and perhaps abstract painting at all times, everywhere—Davie’s canvases on show in Buffalo proposed a kind of philosophical anthropology: a plausible notion, that is, about what was formerly called the self and is now called the body.
Davie’s body, as declared with vivid force and bravura brushwork around the turn of the new century, was a funhouse mirror (the artist’s image) reflecting and playfully, boisterously distorting the rational geometries (or straight stripes) of ordinary reality. This body is all glistening surface, without psychology or secrets—the body as a matter of eyes, lips, cheeks and butt, all untied by the mirror from their correct anatomical positions and set a-swimming, perverse and sensuously hungry, in an oblong pool of pictorial space not an inch deep. Of course, these bodies have histories—in Surrealism, in the erotics of Bataille and the distortions of the nude by Picasso and André Kertész. But they also belong to their time, which is our time, in the early 21st century—these saucy Manhattan sisters and resisters against the dead hand of fundamentalism in the early Bush years, and against the new conformism and mass fear of America’s post-9/11 era.
A new kind of paintwork has emerged in the most important and convincing paintings done since 2003, and, with it, yet another and more serious imagination of the body. “The strokes are tubular, twisted, interconnected and tangled,” Davie explained on the Albright-Knox audio guide. “It is the funhouse mirror image come undone.” We recognize the strategy at once, for we know Davie’s new teachers: no longer those cool hands Davis and Stella, but now Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock and Joan Mitchell, and Philip Guston when he was still doing abstract paintings.
Yet, in Davie’s art, despite the stylistic affinities declared in the breadth of canvas and the expansive gestures, it is not the body of Abstract Expressionism we see—isolated and insolent, defiant, anxious. Rather, it is one that belongs to a newer time and character: vulnerable and resilient, urbane, diffident and uncomfortable (to frustrate, Davie says, the male gaze), lit up from within (like a night street) by incandescent bulbs and the unnatural wash of fluorescent illumination. “My studio is located in Chinatown. The lights at night are spectacular and provocative. At night an eerie mood exists—the quality of the neon lights reflecting off the buildings and onto the pavement and people is compelling.”
Such painting by a woman would have been unthinkable before feminism. Nor would it have this resonance and bold pathos without feminism, which, over the last several decades, has encouraged and energized the use of art to critique and explore the cultural constructions of the feminine, the local, the intimate. There exists in the art world, of course, a prejudice against such painting of interiority by women (though, for whatever reason, it appears to be permissible in other mediums). This bias is evidence, I take it, of an enduring (male) fear of hysterical females that, somewhat surprisingly, still has a place in the discussion of contemporary art—though the criticism of female painters who employ expressive means is by no means limited to men. Be that as it may, Davie is unapologetic about the sources and subjects of her art: they spring from “an autobiographical place,” she told me. “I just hope that the work is telling something quite personal. It’s not as though I have a narrative as such. I want to feel that my subconsciousness is in operation, and I want to allow that to drive me to places I want to go.”
Davie’s most recent art, especially, is a response to the same durable problems of contemporary culture that worried advanced New York painters 50 years ago: the narrowing and coarsening of emotional range that prevailed in both art and everyday life, the drying up of art’s living sap by critical theory, the irrelevance of art to real human struggles in time and history. In 1951, de Kooning spoke for his generation when he declared himself dismayed by the American abstract traditions he had inherited, which he found devoid of “drama, pain, anger, love.” Barnett Newman said, “the self, terrible and constant, is for me the subject matter of painting and sculpture.”
In the five decades since Abstract Expressionism returned the “terrible and constant” self to the heart of art-making, and partly because of its success in doing so, many artists and critics have been in a contrary frame of mind; and so has art. I am not suggesting that the non-painterly projects artists have undertaken during the late 20th century are any less worthy of attention or interesting than those of the Abstract Expressionists. I am suggesting, however, that, as those painters realized, something of art’s potential and urgency is thwarted when the suffering human subject is removed from the centre of art, and something else—political point-making, iconographic gaming, cultural commentary, illustrations of theory—is put in its place.
By means of beautiful and involving forms—emblematic figures of the passionate body in motion, like those of the dancer Davie once thought she might become—the artist argues against such substitution. While art cannot change the world, or change the mind or heart of one person within it, painting can and does bear witness to the body that refuses to stop responding vividly, despite prevailing conformity and cool, and to the emotional diminishment that is one damaging effect of a bureaucratic, militaristic mass society. What can art be in such historical circumstances? Polemic, surely. But it can also be what Karin Davie has undertaken in her adopted country: an intelligent and courageous dialogue with art made in a similar era of crisis, an affirmation of the contemporary body against the prevalent malaise and retreating humanism of the times.
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