[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: December 22, 2008]
One way to re-balance your sensibility if you over-indulge in seasonal cheer, is to devote a quiet hour to Marlene Dumas's sombre two-part show at MOMA.
Ms Dumas has exhibited a number of times in New York, notably at the NMCA in 2002, and a good part of the MOMA show - especially the works on paper - were familiar to me. Very roughly speaking, the MOMA show divides into drawings and water-colors on the third floor and oils on the fifth. I hadn't seen any of the larger works in oil before.
The artist was born and raised in South Africa, but has been a Dutch resident for many years. The title of the show, "Measuring Your Own Grave", rightly elicits expectations of a long, hard gaze at the skull beneath the skin. Like Gerhard Richter among her contemporaries, and Francis Bacon, Dumas works primarily from photographs, and these include photographs of difficult and unsettling subjects. Certainly the dead return in this show, and in numbers.
Sometimes one knows the story instantly - the saddening, intrusive portrait of Marilyn Monroe's face post-autopsy; often one doesn't - the series of paintings of children who have been hanged. Often one is left wondering whether the subject of a painting is living or dead: "The Kiss", for example, where lips brush the floor, whether in an act of passion or simple unconsciousness is unclear. In "Waiting for Meaning", the long, naked body of a woman is bent backwards, as if in sensual supplication. But in its twin, "Losing her Meaning", a naked woman is face down in water, presumably drowned. That painting reminded me of "Landing Area", Jeremy Prynne's poem about a death on an operating table:
He was calm itself and/ central to a scheme of virtue, not absent nor/ wincing but his eye was as dry as the sky/ was wet. And the sun set.
The act of looking at death with one's own eyes is an entirely valid artistic project; indeed it has a long history. But the statement that we are mortal, and that many deaths are untimely and violent, is in itself a thin statement. What makes Dumas's artistic investigation of the facts of the case compelling is, of course, the pictorial values she wrings from the material. Like Richter, her palette is cool, her painting never lush. Her gift, it seems to me, lies in the apparently casual way the application of paint, and especially water-colors, give paradoxical vitality to the human face and the human figure. Rather than moulding volumes and providing the illusion of the weight of the flesh, Dumas's swift, elegant lines and washes produce a sense of movement - or, in the case of her corpses, a sense of real bodily collapse.
This is the reason her critically titled portraits of women in poses associated with sex workers - "Leather Boots", for example, or "How Low Can You Go?" - are actually erotic. The arching of a neck, the full bend from the hips, are entirely convincing.
When she paints faces, known and anonymous, which she does constantly (there are walls of them), she captures attention by allowing the wash of color to tend toward distortion. I state that cautiously, because she stops short of a Bacon-like mutilation of the features; mouths and jaws are just allowed to lurch out of realistic shape. She also uses contrasting colors tellingly - the dab of black on the mouth of a pink-faced baby, the blue on the mouth of Moshekwa (a portrait of the South African artist Moshekwa Langa). The faces are never more than a breath away from being bruised, squeezed, slapped. Warm, bruised, earnest faces - Dumas shows people at their most vulnerable. The extreme vulnerability of the human condition is her subject, in short, but her gaze (unlike Bacon's, say) is not cruel.
Not that the show is entirely bleak. The drawing of Rembrandt's "pissing woman" always cracks a smile, and there's pointed political humor in her "Black Mickey Mouse" or the picture of a praying mantis picking at the continent of Africa as if it were an apple. But the smile fades fast, as do all things.
When you are feeling strong, see this important show - at MOMA through February 16. More information at the website.
