Brenda Goodman
by Lynn CrawfordPaul Kotula Projects, Detroit, Michigan March 1 – April 5, 2008

Gertrude Stein’s line that there is “no / repetition / only insistence” means we can revisit but never duplicate an experience, and suggests the extraordinary range of responses such revisits can generate. Among them: soothing (simple rhythms of lullabies and nursery rhymes); dull (the endless acts of sex and violence detailed in the novels of Marquis de Sade); communal (holiday and religious traditions); torment (the question, according to Freud, plaguing the obsessive compulsive’s hand washing, counting, retracing steps is: am I dead or alive?); exhilaration (the detective solving a case by returning again and again to the same facts and, at last, learning new ways to view the material). Brenda Goodman’s paintings, bold combinations of upheaval and discipline, contain some of all of the above. They function as a sort of visual anaphora (carrying back) to loaded past events, or scenes, and evoke a complex string of emotion-laden verbs such as hound, harass, console, hide, expose, hurt, want.
I first saw her work in the 80’s and was struck by paintings like “Jungle Flute,” with its harmonies of shapes and fall colors (auburn, yellow, red). They evoked, for me, witchy Halloween marches, Mardi Gras, midnight Carnival (Fasching) processions so popular in European cities like Basel, Switzerland. At the time I was reading Monique Wittig’s novel, Les Guerillas, which is, among other things, a call for women to detach from existing categories and construct new forms of identity and language. I had underlined these words in the book, “Let those who call for a new language first learn violence.” I went home from Goodman’s studio and penciled her name next to the previously marked sentence.
Violence has been a consistent element of Goodman’s work, including the self-portraits she is best known for, with their ghostly blend of bulk and delicacy. Her renderings of large ungainly bodies, small heads, thin fragile-looking arms and small graceful hands against her trademark textured and kinetic backgrounds unflinchingly, surgically, detail elements that register as deeply personal. They mesmerize. Goodman can be horrific and breathtakingly lovely at the same time.
She makes much of the fact that her works are reality-based. In a recent interview she asserts, “My work is about reality not irony…I do everything I can not to distance myself from the work.” She references the strong technical training she received at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, known for its emphasis on technique (which helps account for her skill with paint), and she incorporates elements of her life as a gay woman, born in Detroit, into her work: a childhood accident resulting in hearing loss; a move to New York in her 30’s; coming home for a time, watching her mother die a terrible death, wanting to physically touch her, her deep regret at not touching her.
The newest paintings suggest less interest in documenting the past, and seem to head in a different direction. Their depictions of emotional release (or scenes where release can be enacted) include a number of portraits of women with open mouths. These mouths are not like Goya’s (emoting, chewing, guzzling) or Bacon’s screaming orifices. These mouths are portals for pure tonal discharge: ringing hymns, chants, or ballads. Other new works are nearly void of figures (they might contain one little tiny body) and seem like set designs for a play, opera, or dream sequence: sites where packed-down emotional baggage can be expressed, acted out; sites where wounds can start to scab over, if not completely heal. Goodman seems, at this point in her long, stellar career, to address the potential of dramatic exercise, recreation, song—albeit somber forms of them—as a way to face pain. This is a good thing; she owes it to herself to let loose.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

SADE: Artists Under the Influence
by Mary Ann CawsMAY 2018 | ArtSeen
Saying that the divine Marquis had something to do with eroticism is a bit like saying Donald Trump has a little something not to do with truth. Beloved for every brick literally there in the face of Man Ray’s imaginary portrait of 1970 with his baleful and fleshy stare, the Marquis de Sade has haunted every subsequent surrealist discoverer of his works and perpetually-imprisoned self.

Acts of Art and Rebuttal in 1971
by Pac PobricNOV 2018 | ArtSeen
Perhaps, as Singerman suggests in the catalogue, the curator disliked her works “because he saw himself portrayed in them”—as (in the words of Michele Wallace) “white, old, decadent, empty and dead.” This is largely speculation. But there is no such thing as pristine vision, as Acts of Art and Rebuttal in 1971 makes so clear.

Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts
by Swagato ChakravortyFEB 2019 | ArtSeen
Some artists and exhibitions can be summarized into a set of statements, the fundamentals of the work distilled. Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts is not among those.

PASCALE MARTHINE TAYOU:
Colorful Line
by Osman Can Yerebakan
JUL-AUG 2018 | ArtSeen
Tens of branches sprout out of a large white wall, each with a colored plastic bag hung to it at the entrance to Colorful Line, Pascale Marthine Tayou’s first exhibition in New York in over a decade.