Images as the Symptoms of Painting

Images as the Symptoms of Painting: The Antitotalitarianism of Mary HeilmannAuthor(s): Martin PrinzhornSource: Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry, Issue 5 (2002), pp. 46-57Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Central Saint Martins College of Art andDesign, University of the Arts LondonStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20711458 .

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Joan of Arc, 54"x30" oil on canvas, 1986

MARY HEILMANN Martin Prinzhorn Images as the

Symptoms of Painting: The Antitotalitarianism of

Mary Heilmann

A good joke about art is indistinguishable from a good work of art.

Analytical or artistic ideas and humour have moments of complete identity. This is most clearly visible when it becomes impossible to make a joke about a good work of art because it already is - apart from its many serious facets - a joke about itself. A good joke about art does not simply belittle its victims, or maybe better said its targets, but rather it works

alongside them with a sense of playful intelligence and concurrent

sympathy. The complex levels of representation of an artwork merge with the ambiguity of the joke at this moment and become one.

Seen in this light, it is not contradictory to stand in front of one of Mary Heilmann's paintings and simultaneously sense a certain cheekiness, an

intelligent comment and a painterly, often almost nostalgic, history. The

paintings can never be reduced to a straightforward concept or a programmatic solution, nor does the artist seem concerned with isolated works that 'stand for themselves' in the monumental sense of abstract modernism. When she gave a lecture on her work at an art school in Vienna a few years ago, the whole

presentation turned into a kind of performance. Her slide show mixed up her artistic ideas and biographical musings in the same way a swirling DJ might mix a set, interweaving different levels and references. It seems clear that the idea of crossover is crucial to her approach, not only in connection to her painting.

On first glance, however, Heilmann's paintings seem to point in a

completely different direction. They appear to move within the tradition of

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Blue & White Squares, 50"x40" oil on canvas,

American abstract painting - a tradition that understands itself in an almost

evolutionary sense as a historical development towards the absolute reductivism of pure autonomous painting. While today such a triumphant display of strength seems almost incomprehensible, the ultimate aim of this movement was to conquer the summit of painting and modernism. From this summit, the construction of the image was supposed to achieve a clear view beyond the mere object and its representation.

European painting mostly had an adversive reaction to this attitude and

responded with a return to the expressive, but in America it remained

largely unresolved and the myth of abstract purity was either perpetuated or replaced by uncontradictory figurative approaches. Even Minimalism,

though it was very influential on Heilmann, was, at least in terms of

painting, no real alternative to Abstract Expressionism. Minimalist paintings were simply not as psychologically chargeable as minimalist sculpture, nor did they want to be. Factors including chance and the arbitrary were

important in the paintings as knowing elements working against any artistic intention. The aim was not only to remove representation from painting but also anything symbolic that might enter into the image through such intentions. As Frank Stella said 'I wanted to get the paint out of the can and

onto the canvas... I tried to keep the paint as good as it was in the can.'

Modernist and minimalist forms and attitudes are already a departure point for Heilmann in her early works from the 70s. Even at this stage though, they

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Music of the Spheres, 29 7/8"x46 1/8',' oil on

canvas, 2001

never remain untouched and are deconstructed eclectically and robbed of their masculine-mythical narrative. The title of her colleague Phillip Taaffe's

painting We Are Not Afraid could be a statement about her work in general as, for instance, with a work made in the 80s transforming Barnett Newman's red, yellow and blue stripes into light, dancing curvaceous forms. However, Heilmann's painting is not just about an answer to modernist (or minimalist) abstraction. It cannot be about flexing alternative painterly muscles because she almost excessively re-uses the traditional abstract vocabulary and she does not disclaim modernist means and quotations in her potentially postmodern paintings. The formal similarities only disappear on second

glance as what used to be concentration and reduction now becomes only a

quotation. She does not align herself with the history of modernist painting but instead creates a concurrence between it and the contemporary where her access to this history is unlimited. She uses a delicacy of means to alienate the modernist programme and thereby analyses it at the same time - a tactic that makes her one of the most explicit representatives of new, postmodern painting. A small gesture, a visible brushstroke or some drops of

paint in places where our normal historically distinctive perception would not

permit it, create a great distance to modernism. Such alterations seem to let the air escape from an overblown, self-assured attitude. Geometric figures lose their weight and use their newly discovered lightness to become affectionate memories of a modernism already passed into history.

Even the sculptures made in the late 60s cannot be pinned down to any particular formal language. They carry remnants of geometric organisation

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but at the same time they are organisms that seem to grow out of the gallery space

- they have already made the transition from minimalist sculpture to

installation. Her abstract painting in the 70s takes on unexpected forms and a

layering of content straight away. The colours and their combinations point towards a Pop Art that is not taken up by the rest of the painting and does not correspond to our first impression of a geo-like organisation of the space. This organisation again contradicts the small painterly details like drips and loose brushstrokes that would normally refer to the materiality of the image and the artist's subjective gestures. Independent from all these factors are

the titles of the works that seem to consist of a mixture of art-historical references and personal discoveries. If the paintings extend outside their

rectangular shape they do not especially do so in the way that Frank Stella, for instance, might have used shape to support the form and content of the

painting's elements. Instead, they appear as trivial extensions of a given structure, or just another level for new and randomly playful combinations.

There are many examples in non-representational painting of artists who examine specific aspects of visual perception such as edge detection, structure, colour or three dimensionality. This kind of restriction is

impossible to find in Heilmann's painting and would contradict her whole

philosophy of concurrence and opposition. In her mixture of independent visual aspects, she is able to create tensions that not only refuse to

correspond to the visual memory of non-representational modernist

painting but also turn the whole visual order upside down as defined by certain functional rules and a reductionist logic. Yet again however, it has to be underlined that she uses this strategy in order to keep things moving, her whole approach rejecting the idea of a possible final stage.

Returning to her early acrylic paintings, we see that they have a

watercolour-like quality, more reminiscent of landscape than geometric squares. It first becomes apparent here how strongly motifs like these

geometric shapes are coded within art and how their ideology is tightly bound to formal conditions. Geometry is clearly something artificial and artistic that defines itself with clear lines, whereby even only slight variations in colour can introduce new rules for composition and set itself

apart from old practices still rooted in the natural and representational. Certainly Heilmann resists this kind of logic of geometry but rather than

attempt to create new spaces and alternatives, she appears to follow the old canon while departing from it by accumulating in each work small, almost unnoticeable, contradictory details.

Mary Heilmann's brand of 'postmodernist-affirming modernism' does not

call for the end of history but continues to write a different, non

evolutionary story that takes pleasure in playing and mixing. Her paintings are traces of painting's past and allow us to establish a necessary analytical distance to this past as a historically directed process without actually losing contact with it. Heilmann's painting does not get stuck in its analytic commentary nor does it persist only as a speculative theoretical attitude. Her paintings always reveal a space where painterly surprises, personal memories and emotions can co-exist. While an overwhelming desire to

control each corner of the painting is often present within geometrical painting, Mary Heilmann's casual approach allows an openness that makes this striving for security look somehow ridiculous. Before something can

collapse in the top corner, the artist has already found a new rhythm which lets the collapse appear simply as the beginning of the next step.

Mary Heilmann once said that she stopped making the sculpture that marked the beginning of her career because in the 70s this field was too dominated

by strong men. This statement is not without irony. Even today, painting is a

predominantly male terrain that still deals with strongman acts, although they may now take place on a metaphorical level. Yet Mary Heilmann did not

develop the kind of painting that could be described as a female. Far from it, as she is the one female American painter who has freed the medium of its

arrogant masculine character by embracing it with affection combined with a

sharp criticism and deadly wit all at the same time.

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Neo Noir, 190.8x153cm, oil on canvas, 1998

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Photograph of Mary Heilmann's house

Photo: Mary Heilmann



Installation view Galerie Hauser& Wirth, *

Zurich: Side Snow Bob, 127x102cm, oil on

;,:;.:,_? canvas, 2001; Music from the Big Pink,

128x101.5cm, oil on canvas, 2001; Green

Cirque, 61 x46cm, oil on canvas, 2000 .



3



Pacific Ocean, 3 parts, each 137.8x91.5cm, oil



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Images as the Symptoms of Painting

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