NUDE NATURE

La MaMa La Galleria, NYC, June 17 - 27, 1999

• Introduction
  
• About Daniel Lee
  
• About Nude Nature
  
• About Dieter Hall
  
• About Marianne Lévai
  
• Conclusion

A working description of the process of understanding anything must entirely rely, without exception, on the skillful employment of metaphorical language. Whereas the successful description of such activities as, say, dicing an onion, milking a cow or drafting a sublessor head-lease agreement can ultimately be accomplished without the linguistic involvement of surrogate symbolism, a step-by-step description of each individual's experience of the mental procedures involved in the above-mentioned (or for that matter any other) human activity mandates the use of metaphor.

The operative metaphorical constructs conaturally governing the process by which we attempt to understand things, from the banalities of the lowest and simplest of functional tasks to the abstract profundities of philosophical inquiry, might be aptly expressed in various ways. One might say, for instance, that the act of understanding is a process of eliminating that which one has proven to be false. Or that it's a way of removing misleading obstructions. Or a process of pulling away the layered veils that disguise or distort or obfuscate the actual shape of naked reality. But it would, in fact, seem that every attempt to describe our discovery of any little byte of real information concerning the indisputable laws of the world that contains us contains at its core the notion that every hard-won conclusion we might idealistically compartmentalize as the plain truth appears to us first as something wrapped in falsehood, shrouded in deception and necessitating our carefully measured participation in stripping it bare.

In Vedantic tradition, the many layers of illusion that disguise the truth are designated by a concept known as Maya. According to the late august Indologist, Heinrich Zimmer, in his classic work, Philosophies of India, "Maya denotes the unsubstantial, phenomenal characteristics of the observed and manipulated world, as well as the mind itself ­ the conscious and even subconscious stratifications and powers of the personality," extended to embrace both the quest for mundane knowledge (which Zimmer fleshes out as "the illusion superimposed upon reality as an effect of ignorance; for example: ignorant of the nature of a rope seen lying on the road, one may perceive a snake"), as well as any attempt to comprehend the greater cosmic picture (an undertaking which Zimmer warns is bound to be booby-trapped with "illusions superimposed upon true being by man's deceitful senses and unilluminated mind"). Maya, Zimmer further explains, "is a concept that holds a key position in Vedantic thought and teaching, and, if misunderstood, may lead the pupil to the conclusion that the external world and his ego are devoid of all reality whatsoever," a conclusion, having many parallels in Judeo-Christian thought, which often has resulted in all manner of social restriction, body hatred, pleasure denial and sensory deprivation.

It appears no accident to me that the waves of cultural upheaval that have characterized our century (informed, on the one hand, by the light of modern science, the unmasking of religious hypocrisy, the exposure of bogus apocrypha and the lifting of taboo, and on the other, by a growing selective pop-cultural assimilation of certain essential aspects of Eastern thought), have been ever more frequently punctuated with a mounting and near-maniacal cross-cultural obsession with the mysteries of sexuality, in general, and a sudden budding love affair with the actual shapes and forms and the potential forms of strength of the naked human body, in particular.

It's as if the concept of nudity, worn like a badge during the counter-cultural explosions of the sixties and seventies, has come down to us in the nineties as a relic and symbol of our recent close encounter with whatever it was we lost again, when, in the throes of a collective cowardly panic attack, we slammed the Gates of Eden one more time. The unselfconscious nudism and sexual openness of our short-lived wild years are survived only by pathetically misunderstood, misshapen and self-despising ghosts of those same impulses today. The Maya of mad mass-consumerism has transformed visions of naked consciousness accelerating its own evolution through the abandonment of social disguises into a waking giddy nightmare of pornographic fetishism and Victorian-style deviance, contributing at least as much to the continued mystification of our search for identity as have tens of thousands of years of sexual restriction. We have always had a hard time of it . . . being animals, that is.

 

Computer imagist Daniel Lee tackles the animal inside the human being head-on in an eerily disconcerting series of digital ink-jet prints with an accompanying related computer animation currently at O.K. Harris Works of Art. Origin, 1999, as both the prints and the animation display are titled, offers a wholly original take on the tradition of nude studies in art that repels by attracting and confounds with the sheer dazzle of the fabulous immaculate conception of its Hollywood blockbuster-caliber counterfeit clarity. In many ways, this work is purely a cheap shot. Flashy. Snazzy. Show-offy one-joke gimmickry. Another sterling example of the Spielbergification of all that has not been successfully Disneyfied. The subjects of this series just might very well occupy the same universe where living dinosaurs are recreated from frozen specimens of ancient dinosaur blood. It's high-concept carnival imagery designed for instant impact, built on the promise of a built-in thrill, which, I must admit, it certainly delivers. Something here smacks of the impeccably executed miracle-making of clever advertising wizards and vapid top-forty videographers.

But in spite of my being half turned-off by the feeling of slick ironic vulgarity that permeates both style and attitude in Lee's eccentric brand of pop sensationalism, or maybe actually because of it, I find myself somehow uncomfortably drawn right into the familiarly alien reality that the lonely freakish subjects of these oddly haunted prints inhabit. And while superficially exhibiting every earmark of that variety of overpolished technological virtuosity that would ordinarily make me feel my buttons are being pushed and programmed to produce an automatic "Wow! Isn't this a trip!" response, on a deeper level, it becomes obvious that the state-of-the-art, up-to-the-minute illusionist proficiency Lee's work employs is a means to a very different end than its high-tech sci-fi flavor would suggest.

Origin consists of eleven large black-and-white images, created through computer manipulations based on photographic information. Installed in a specific sequence that gracefully describes an instantly comprehensible narrative, Origin depicts a hypothetically playful ten stages of evolution from fish to man, as conceived in the darkly humorous imagination of its fiercely articulate author.

Like the monochromatic biological abnormalities that frolicked and oozed across the murky picture planes of painter Darryl Trivieri in the 1980s, which possessed a power to stir the viewer to Lovecraftian heights of cosmic paranoia, the near-perfect impersonation of physical fact by the vividly imagined missing links of Daniel Lee stimulates a creepy kind of unnerving faux-recognition, a breathless chilly flush of déjà vu and a stabbing flash of that anxiety-drenched brand of dream hysteria best described as identity confusion.

The animation, a five-minute moving slo-mo-morph of the same evolutionary progression, though lacking the glow and the crisp resolution of the ink-jet prints, does much to enhance the virtual palpability of Lee's whole concept by adding the dimension of time to the imagined reality being conveyed. It's not entirely clear if the prints were created from isolated moments selected from the animated transmutation sequence, or if perhaps the still images were designed first and strung together later as a seamless moving whole. What does seem clear, however, is that the use of two closely related but distinctly different technical formats to express the same imagery and concept has winningly served to somehow validate the seeming authenticity of the entire preposterous vision.

The manipulative psycho-dynamics of the set-up are somewhat convoluted, to say the least. Viewers so inclined will find themselves first sucked in by the Barnumesque glitz of fecund illusionism surrounding the total work, but once hooked and pulled into Lee's very private silicon menagerie, they should not be surprised to find themselves on the midway of a very different kind of freak show. Speaking of one of his earlier series of images, Manimals, 1995, Lee remarked, "I often observe people who have particular animal traits. But when I do the images, it is important that they appear more human than animal." The real underlying illusion of the current series is that it presents itself as an act of controlled theatrical illusionism, whereas, in fact, it ends-up surprising us with its melancholy candor, its gentle wit and its lyrical purity. Ultimately anti-illusionist in nature, the ruling impulse in Lee's art could be described as a sort of spiritually informed emotional realism. The creatures in these prints visually soliloquize, bitterly revealing their roles in the larger story with a stingy eloquence ­ mythologizing their silent burden of shame and their long hard crawl from the proverbial swamps of ignorance to this most remote, last outpost of comfortable stasis, stubbornly poised against the cold inevitable, still quivering in naked fear and cowering in the shadow of all possible future enlightenment.

We are these creatures, of course. We recognize ourselves in every stage of their onerous, awesome and obscenely exquisite development. The fraudulent natural history that accounts for them has no bearing on their inherent truth-reflecting properties. Thesesinewy monsters born of Daniel Lee's virulently virile imagination reek of honesty. They are accurate portrayals of the evolution of consciousness ­ a universalized portrait of mind in space ­ an almost Blakeian space-age meditation on the structure and the nature of the naked human body in viriditous relation to the holy communion of animals from which it certainly never sprang full-blown.

 

In a provocative two-person exhibit at La MaMa La Galleria, bearing the curiously ambiguous title Nude Nature, Swiss artists Dieter Hall and Marianne Lévai offer a take on nudity that, though riddled with erudite referential subtext, has ultimately little to do with representations of the nude figure in an art-historical context. If it did, it would be tedious. The many interesting levels of meaning and inference that emerge from the works of these two talented artists individually, together with yet other ideas that become automatically imposed on the aesthetic concerns of both bodies of work as a result of the exhibition's title and stated themes, appear to address instead the protean concept of "the state of nudity" as an evolving social construct, on the one hand, and the current developmental state of "the concept of nudity" as an expanding and expansive cosmic metaphor, on the other.

Considered collectively, along with the additional visual information of their (superficially at least) mutually discordant relationship to each other, Hall's paintings and Lévai's three-dimensionals begin to define an almost Zen-like investigation into the "cloaked" or "layered" or "veiled" nature of those aspects of our lives that, only once stripped of preconception, denuded of myth and divested of self-delusion, we finally somehow manage to identify as intrinsically important puzzle pieces of that elusive abstraction that we have come to think of as the naked truth.

 

Hall's share of the exhibition consists of some fifteen life-sized portraits of men. Most are friends of the artist. Some wear clothes. Most are nude. They're rendered in oil on canvas in a distinctively kooky style that Hall has altered only incrementally throughout the twenty-odd years during which I've been aware of his work. Although formally betraying the presence of an off-beat mismatched hodgepodge of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century influences (that would include, among others, Manet, Whistler, Kirchner, Kokoschka, Degas, Klimt, Bonnard, Matisse, Marsden Hartley and Christian Bérard), Hall's art feels surprisingly contemporary. Flaunting a sort of rough cartoonish flair for the irresistibly awkward linear gesture and steaming with an unapologetically unrepentant attitude of pop primitivism, Hall's paintings, almost despite the blueprint of art-historical allusion with which they are encoded, seduce us at last with their innocence, their unsullied spirit of enthusiasm, their directness and their basic honesty.

Hall, for some years now, a familiar snarly character and constant colorful presence on the East Village scene, has remained obstinately true to his personal vision. Submersing himself in stylistic directions and psycho-conceptual foci that many would perceive as inextricably bound to the seminal experiments and general discourse of early modernism, Hall has quietly pursued his modest goals with a brand of self-possession that only steadfast perseverance can earn. This has served to energize his work with a current of assertive individualism that in turn lends the work an aspect of dignity, charged with a cheeky spirit, fully comfortable with its own inconsistencies.

This acceptance of contradiction as an inseparable component of both human and cosmic behavior is never more apparent than in Hall's pronounced tendency to simultaneously demystify and romanticize both his subjects and his craft. With barely a nod of acknowledgment to the ever-shifting trends . of the officially sanctioned art world (or, for that matter, with little more than as much to the endless conspiratorial uprisings of that world's various insurgents and malcontents) reflected in his conscientiously prolific yearly creative output, this authentically eccentric painter has fashioned a genre that merits our serious attention, if for no other reason (and certainly there are many others yet to be cited) than purely by virtue of its own self-imposed policy of aesthetic isolationism.

Although it's true that around about the time when Dieter Hall first left Switzerland in the late seventies to walk down Second Avenue for the first time, the East Village scene was already literally congested with swarming hoards of budding neo-expressionists, druggy-eyed naïve naturalists, self-taught pictorial diarists and self-declared post-modernists (all of whom of which it could be said he shared some common ground), Hall's art stood-out, even so, as somehow peculiarly out-of-sync, out-of-step and out-of-time ­ that is to say, as if it had come to us from out of another time.

But despite this odd feeling of time-warp, Hall's paintings have always steered clear of nostalgic preciousness. While reverently bowing to masters of the past referentially in his paintings, his style of drawing, his overall palette and the methods of pigment application he employs all betray exposure and allegiance to the present. Though the philosophical underpinnings from which his creative raison d'être springs have much in common with a certain popularized idea-matrix that imagines its own origins amidst the myth-enhanced garrets and salons of some romantically rain-drenched Paris of yore, both Hall's choice and treatment of subject not only firmly anchor him to the final moments of the Twentieth Century, but also reveal him as a self-appointed witness and scribe, wholly committed to his own small part in the poetic documentation of those final moments.

Hall's poetically altered portraits attempt to document not so much the appearances of specific human entities (although this too is often accomplished with a surprising degree of accuracy, considering the rough-and-ready sketchiness of Hall's style of rendering), but rather something more like their souls or their psyches . . . their auras or their essences . . . their histories and mysteries. The success of any one of these portraits is entirely dependent on things that have very little to do with the precise representation of the precisely observed physical subject. Their success hinges instead on their maker's intuitively guided ability to see through the flesh-and-blood trappings his subjects come wrapped in, removing veil after fleshy veil in such a way as to reveal the strange uniqueness of each finally unclothed secret identity ­ a sort of metaphysical microscopy designed to illuminate not smaller realms of space but, rather, deeper realms of time and consciousness. Unlike the microbe hunter seeking measurable descriptions of tiny forms of life, Hall's style of seeing seeks instead to describe the immensurable scope of the living mind, which perceives itself, within the solitary confinement of its own corporeal manifestation, as infinitely small, and yet, at times, dares to imagine itself as vast enough as it would have to be to conceal and to control and to contain its own complete conception of the universe and more.

Hall's crudely executed portraits clearly demonstrate that ocular data can be decoded into more than one kind of comprehensible hieroglyphic. The only details ofocular data that Hall has any interest in reproducing for us are those that effectively pantomime the way in which each individual captive identity expresses itself by altering the biological mass that traps and restrains it. Anatomical verisimilitude is of little interest here. The figures are reasonable facsimiles of the human form and nothing has been intentionally distorted. But various, subtly understated distortions tend to regularly occur in all of Hall's work, anyway, often as a result of some of the more heavily pronounced expressive gestures that dominate each canvas and command the viewer's focus.

Having loosely allied himself with a small, late nineteenth century movement known as Intimism (an approach that recommended that a potential subject be securely locked-up in a comfortable room and made to feel warm and safe from the dangers of the world outside), Hall had for years been entranced and intrigued by a painting by Bonnard entitled L'Indolente (The Indolent), 1899, which is a well-known example of that movement's approach. The Indolent features a nude woman sprawled across a bed, vulnerably exposed with her thighs spread wide, and reclining in an attitude of relaxed fatigue. Exhibiting neither shame nor seductive invitation, the painting's now-famous heroine caused quite a stir at the time. In her unselfconscious guilt-free state of nakedness and with her groggy disposition of sexual nonchalance, she broke some unarticulated behavioral blue law and got some people very nervous. Such art sparked widespread controversies that began to throw some light on the very nature of programmed repression, the role it plays in the sublimation of creative activity and the triangle of co-dependency formed by sexual restriction, bourgeois productivity and the modern work ethic.

In his Indolent Series, 1998­99, consisting of eleven large portraits of men without clothes, Hall attempts to emulate the Intimist ideals of the celebrated Bonnard masterwork, while breathing brand-new life into the concept by substituting male nudes. Although male nudes have long been a staple of Gay-identified art, they are usually of the biologically-perfect-specimen-presented-as-tastefully-sexless-natural-object-against-background-of-driftwood-and-sand variety. Beyond that, there is only pornography. It sort of roughly corresponds to the Madonna/Whore construct and might be thought of as the Jesus/Mister Drummer contest. But Hall is having none of it. With a stubborn resolution to just refuse and resist, Hall's Indolent portraits almost impishly reject the dreary limitations of the flaccid/hard convention. The men in these paintings have ordinary bodies, with scant stylistic attention paid by the painter to ensure them a future in Calvin Klein print ads. But they're sexual beings with sexual essences, appearing content in a comfortable room, warm and safe from the dangers of the world outside and seeming all the more naked because of it.

The inclusion of several portraits of fully clothed men contributes a contrapuntal sub-theme to the exhibition as a whole and, at the same time, offers us a window into the artist's immediate past that helps to explain the issues and concerns of the more recent portraits of naked men. In many ways the non-naked portraits, being in the minority, demand more attention than the nudes and more than they would probably receive without the presence of the nudes.

Largely the likenesses of the artist's friends, the clothed works include notable portraits of Swiss filmmaker Daniel Schmid and painter/performer Bill Rice. These paintings have an intimate, unguarded, very private, almost claustrophobic feel, reminding me that, in some ways, the subjects of these works have been delivered to the picture plane without a stitch of self-concealment and are every last bit as butt-naked as the spread-eagled boys of the unclothed portraits. And, in many ways, the goals that Hall set for himself in the Indolent Series are just a natural extension of the very same ground rules and priorities that have governed his working aesthetic all along.

 

In pronounced contrast to the glowing human warmth of Hall's lovingly recreated Intimist boudoirs, and his corresponding fix on capturing the image of a fundamental nudity of spirit, the wholly abstract ceramic and cast iron sculpture of Marianne Lévai bristles with the limpid chill of things long dead and resonates with the tuneless nostalgia of bald and naked desert landscapes ­ of things come undone and dreams unraveled ­ of flesh scraped raw and bones picked clean ­ conditions of infinite nudity.

Employing this exhibit's conceptual hook to predispose the viewer to regard her work as a minimalist investigation into the denudated nature of all that survives us, Lévai has conceived objects that look more like time-worn ancient artifacts possessing a mundane familiarity that nonetheless defies functional identification, invites metaphor and inspires surrealist fantasy. But Lévai is no maker of tools and vessels. Neither is she any kind of symbolist or surrealist. For her, these works are pure abstractions; she makes shapes in space and uses the kiln to simulate the effects of time and cosmic events upon her shapes. And I think even she would concede that, although her work takes no tangible subject as its object, the actual subject and object on which it is predicated and to which it is dedicated is time.

Bolted to slabs of steel on the wall or skewered at the top of metal rods extending from the floor in clusters, Lévai's objects, thus assembled, resemble installations of archaic implements on display at some museum of cultural anthropology. The peeled textures, burnt finishes, metal oxides and molten crackle glazes she favors as surfaces tell a tale of how time always gets its way in the end. The cluster of vaguely phallic artifacts mounted on rods, each so confounding in the unfathomably novel specificities of its peculiar design, appears, at first, as an obvious sampling of spears and clubs and weapons of war. And then, just as certainly, these same objects suddenly identify themselves as flutes and pipes and rattles, or maybe just misplaced parts of ancient plumbing or arms of furniture. Or kitchen utensils, spatulas and such. Or objects of sexual pleasure or genital torture or hog beating.

In the end, our inability to assign a functional identity to any of Lévai's faux artifacts consigns them to a purgatory of objects out of time and imbues them with a nonspecific sadness that is central to their arid brand of beauty. The denudation motif in Lévai's work reveals time as the great undresser of life, undressing petals from flowers, leaves from trees, flesh from muscle and muscle from bone.

 

I remember a movie I saw when I was young. It was called The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, and it starred Ray Milland. It was all about this doctor or chemist or, anyway, some kind of scientist, played by Milland, who invented a drug that gave you X-ray vision. Now the first time the scientist decides to become his own private clinical trial,everything works out just fine. He goes to this swanky party where everybody's all decked out in Carnaby Street clothes and doing the twist. Only because he's just taken this drug, he's seeing everybody as they'd look stark naked. Now, of course, the next time he takes the drug, he doubles the dosage, and now he's seeing straight through human skin and everyone looks like a walking anatomy chart. He ups the dosage again, and everyone's a dancing skeleton.

Now you would think that there'd be nowhere left to go from here, but this is just where the movie gets interesting. Although it never shows us exactly what he's seeing, it's clear that Milland just can't seem to get enough. He goes through all sorts of drug fiend-like personality changes. He ruins his life. Ends up on the lam. Changes his name. And wanders about wanton in the desert. The implication, practically surrealist in nature, is that he's penetrating deeper and deeper levels of reality, lifting the veils of Isis, tearing away the fabric of Maya . . . seeing the whole world for the first time with the naked eye ­ a condition which, I contend, would need to be both paramount to, and synonymous with, the creation of anything one could reasonably expect the world at large to label as a work of art.

The entire odyssey of the Milland character in this marvelous creaky old exploitation flick, in fact, sets up an almost perfect allegorical paradigm for those who swear allegiance to the mission of art or, for that matter, for anyone and everyone who chooses "the [path] less traveled by" just to tell the world all about it. It was often said of Artaud, the popularly mythologized surrealist madman, that he permitted himself to "go places" the rest of us could not. The idea of "going places" here should be understood as achieving states of consciousness intentionally altered by, perhaps, narcotic substances or sleep deprivation or starvation or deliberate social alienation or self-mutilation or marathons of both isolated self-repugnance and self-aggrandizement or, ultimately and above all else, intentionally altered by simply allowing himself to think the sort of thoughts that most of us refuse to think in the name of self-preservation. Artaud allowed himself to go for broke to record for us the mysteries of life on the other side of going broke or getting locked out or going blind or going insane.All three of the artists discussed here refuse to be told what to think, what to see and what to call art. Each boasts his or her own unique variety of X-ray vision, which permits us, should we let ourselves, to "go places."

"Don't go there," we all say, meaning "don't open that can of worms," "don't say anything you might regret," "don't reveal any more," or "please just keep your clothes on and shut your mouth." Lee, Lévai and Hall didn't and wouldn't. They do and will . . . "go there." Each conducts a strip-search of some facet of cognizable earthly phenomena, revealing certain aspects of our everyday reality laid suddenly bare and stinging with the blush and burn of everything secret once exposed in the naked light of day.

Nude Nature: Dieter Hall and Marianne Lévai at La MaMa La Galleria runs through June 27

Daniel Lee: Origin at O.K. Harris Works of Art runs through July 2.