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Acting Out
Complex Collisions Excerpts Carter Ratcliff: I think the narrative, is the narrative of putting on the paint. Which is one way of reading this kind of painting. There’s such a strong sense of gesture and gesture responding to gesture, and of course, this has to take place over time. And there’s a kind of narrative about one’s own narrative of seeing, seeing how it works that implies the prior narrative. It’s part of a heritage and even people who don’t pay all that much attention to art can approach it. Phoebe Hoban: Julie’s images tap into an energy where there’s a lot of different forces working at once - lots of things are appealing or attractive or erotic. Whatever Julie does in her choice of colors and the way she has the paint swirling and sort of bringing you into a vortex of what seem to be lots of different activities converging. I think that Julie in her choice of colors, has a deliberate reference to kitsch and there’s a kind of, Hello Kitty, Barbie Doll, Brittney Spears, pop culture. Julie’s paintings are presented more as artifacts because she’s chosen to paint the side of the canvas, which is taking it one step further. If you look at the side you suddenly think; are they paintings, are they flat sculptures, are they artifacts, are they consumer items almost? They’ve taken some of what’s the common currency of pop culture and played with it in a light that’s pleasing. Lisa Corinne Davis: Looking at Julie’s paintings you think of pop culture, you think of pop art and you think of the originators of that in England and there was a whole sense of or side of pop art that was about the paint becoming the object, like when you think of Jasper Johns’ flag, for example. And I think that’s an interesting notion given what Julie thinks about these paintings as kind of makeup or accouterments of decorating the body. And how the application of the paint in traditional pop art becomes the object, it becomes the thing itself. I like that thought and thinking when it comes to these paintings. John Bowman: In Julie’s paintings I get a sense of the interior of the body. But I get this embodied sense out of this work, not only that connection to candies and cakes and confections but also to the workings of our bodies. Recorded on December 11, 2003
Acting Out Just as the historical perspective shows us how different things once were, and that things will not always be as they are now, the paintings of Julie Durkin demonstrate how participatory and interactive the common culture has been with the historical record. Her art expands with a payload of historical references, of her individual choosing, that are relevant to current cultural conditions, and artistic discourse of today.
Durkin is a restless talent, who grapples with the various currents of thought that are sweeping through the world during her lifetime. Projecting her own inner tumult, her art searches for self-actualization through the morass of relevant histories and contemporary flux. Through her erotic abstract oil paintings we understand that art can help us identify ourselves, and find the touchstones we need for coping with social change. Individuality is extruded, in this case, from a set of cultural peculiarities contrived by the fashion industry, where the exploited consumer is a traumatic example of the individual who is both captive audience and cash cow.
Durkin’s disposition simultaneously embraces the refined tastes of haute couture, shows respect for the interactive nature of popular culture, and supplies criticism of the craze industry. In this situation, her art subsists on the individual’s inability to resolve the conflicting desire for independence and community. The aspiration of both, and of this art, is to resist the fate of the person reduced to a one-dimensional wonder, bloated on consumer ideology, blinded to social responsibility, brainless to intellectual history, and benign as a political force.
Durkin’s art endeavors to overcome the influences of the communities that both enable it and defame it. It is a byproduct of the repression of prior dogmas, which both serve and imperil it in a Hegelian intrigue. Her inclination to stake out new territory is one aspiring to an originality that exploits rejection of a credo which is no longer avant-garde. This art is of a nature where the ideological present devours both the inheritance of the Abstract Expressionist past and an assertion of an evolved and liberated condition. Abstract Expressionism and its coupling with reductionism and the notion that all thought and consciousness can be compressed to a pure essence of prescribed behavior, is a poignant object of transgression here.
Crushed utopian fantasies are superseded by Durkin’s unorthodox dexterity, and inventive miscegenation. With its elasticity of form, and insouciance of spirit, her art offers a greater awareness of the quirky realities of the extant world. This breed of art wants to annex the grandeur and complexity of life, while affirming the importance of excellence and integrity. It suggests more ways of engaging with the real world than does modernism’s self-proclaimed purity. It endorses fashion’s erotic appeal, but chides its frivolity. The result is an eccentric baroque opera loaded with authentic human drama.
Durkin’s paintings are performances, of a young woman acting out gender roles. With gesture and color she incorporates the paraphernalia and rituals of consumerist glamour. The work is clearly far removed from the ambiance of 10th Street and the Cedar Tavern bohemia. It is 21 Century chic, where artist’s homes and studios are not drab bohemian pads, but glamorous lofts featured in fashion magazines like Vogue and Vanity Fair. This shifted condition of aesthetic culture could not be more advantageous for Durkin’s art. The Abstract Expressionists along with "the Beats were the first bohemian movement born under the eye of mass media, the first to get really famous, the first to be distorted into a pop-culture caricature - "the Beaknick." (1) The Abstract Expressionists and the Beats had fashion, and like every ostentation they had to fit the expectations of their audience in order to be taken seriously. In this light, it may be useful and enlightening to see Durkin’s proposition as "Post-Andy Warhol Superstardom Abstract Expressionism." At Warhol’s Factory, the superstars who populated his peculiar world parodied Hollywood, with their own brand of divas and sex symbols. Although accompanied with the tenets of extemporaneous expression, Durkin’s art takes Warhol's Pop in a reprogrammed yet familial direction. This step affirms the embrace of the fashionable as an emblem of interactive culture.
Durkin insists, as a postmodernist tactic, that these paintings represent the eroticized painted body. In this milieu every image is representational, abstracted, and recoded, by the gaze. Consistent with this advance, she handles her paint as though it were makeup. The vividly saturated high key colors are assimilated as glossy and glittery layered oil paint. They are inspired by the fashion industry’s choices for lipstick, eye shadow, and fingernail polish. It is applied with dry brush, and loaded brush, as well as poured, slashed, splattered, ripped through, removed, and smeared. The large-scale paintings are loud and bold, where as the smaller paintings relate more directly to the small table size mess one makes when engaged in the process of applying beautification veneer.
As still a young woman, Julie Durkin’s art signals a shift from the usual art practices of post-adolescent zaniness and perpetual youth rebellion, by connecting it to an attitude that is more sophisticated, reality based, and grown up. Because popular culture is participatory and interactive, all persons help to transfigure it. Her art is, in this way, a responsive phenomenon, in which she is a natural (human) participant, within the culture of her lifetime.
"(1) "Rebel Scholar" by C. Carr, Village Voice, April 15, 1997, p.38.
Copyright © Howard McCalebb, 2003 |
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