ArtSeen
Amy Pleasant: Tight Shot
Jeff Bailey Gallery February 11 – March 14, 2009
In her recent exhibition at Jeff Bailey Gallery, Amy Pleasant considers: “How does the act of drawing function in my work? Does the intimacy of the imagery come from the image itself, the scale, or both?” After viewing the work, I would add something about how the image is executed in relation to its scale. The wide variety of mark-making and scale changes in Tight Shot amount to Pleasant’s two-cents in the historical debate over the “what” and the “how”—in other words, form and content—in evoking an emotional response from the viewer.

While Pleasant’s inquiry into form and content is unassuming enough, it recalls a more heated chapter in the complicated history of vanguard art. There was a time when Bertolt Brecht and other cultural theorists denounced what they saw as Georgy Lukács’ reactionary support of realism in the service of the worldwide class struggle. Brecht saw the development of form, of how one paints or draws, as the kind of innovation needed to outflank the conservatism of the controlling elite. Issues now as benign as “abstraction” and “realism” were politicized and fervently fought over. Pleasant’s fight at Jeff Bailey is more congenial, unmotivated by ideology or social revolution, though her interest in the argument underscores its evolution and endurance into the contemporary milieu.
Her investigation is also more personal, motivated by a need to resolve competing forces in her own work: the dialectical energy between painting and drawing; large and small scale; object and idea. The lynchpin of Tight Shot is “Sleeping Head,” a large (13’ x 18’) wall drawing, which depicts the back of a head with a bit of Raymond Pettibon’s agitated graphic sensibility. As a result, the subject’s identity stalls between the generalization of a cartoon and the specificity of a portrait. In each of the show’s works, Pleasant successfully marshals this ambiguity to investigate the single act of a kiss between a couple from a number of physical and psychological angles. These perspectives serve as metaphors of her formal inquiries. The somber palette and atmospheric forms in “The Kiss II” evokes the dreaminess and sadness of a parting kiss of an embracing couple in abstract terms; the colors and the marks feel plaintive even if they don’t literally read that way. Narrative competes with abstraction, metaphor with metonym, toward the eventual consummation of painting and drawing in a single composition.
In “The Shower,” a large painting in the gallery’s office, the equilibrium of the embrace, and its treatment, is broken. Bailey, who has an eye for such details, smartly sets this painting apart from the others. Rain falls on a crouching male figure while the feet of another dangle from a dark, gray cloudlike mass of pigment above. Dashes of oil paint represent rain rather than depict it. Unlike the “Kiss” canvases, “The Shower” privileges drawing and the literal over abstraction. For a moment, “what” takes the lead from “how.” Still, one gets the feeling that Pleasant enjoys a close match too much to keep it that way.
So, is it “what” one paints or “how” one paints that gives a painting meaning? Pleasant would say that this is an oversimplified binary, and that it is in the struggle for resolution that art derives its energy; that art is a manifestation of an investigative process, not a tool to extract a concrete answer. Looking back at Brecht and Lukács, it is hard to believe that the very argument that once set in stone the guidelines for a visual revolution has also, paradoxically, led to Pleasant’s omnivorous artistic explorations.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Sarah Charlesworth: Image Language
By Robert C. MorganMAY 2020 | ArtSeen
The majority of what is presented at the Printed Matter exhibition is drawn from Charlesworth’s seemingly infinite collection of photographic imagery, taken from various sources in various working contexts. This exhibition represents the systemic basis of Charlesworths research and highlights the fundamental archival elements that define her life’s work.

Looking Back, and Forward, as Ma-Yi Celebrates 30 Years of Innovative Work
By Billy McEnteeMAR 2020 | Theater
The Obie and Lucille Lortel award-winning theater company started out in 1989 producing solely the work of Filipino American writers; while that has evolved, so has the theaters definition of what a Ma-Yi play is. And thats a strength: in a company whose ethos and blessings are fortified by its creators, each new playwright brings with themto Ma-Yis numerous productions and artistic programstheir own world and experiences to expand and delight the companys evolving landscape of thought-provoking, envelope-pushing American plays.
The frame that suffocates the image
By Amy Knight PowellOCT 2020 | Critics Page
On one of the prints he designed in support of the 1968 student protests in France, Asger Jorn scrawled: break the frame that suffocates the image.
Grace Notes: Pam Tanowitz and Simone Dinnerstein’s New Work for Goldberg Variations
By Rachel StoneFEB 2020 | Dance
The ushers at the New York City premiere of choreographer Pam Tanowitz and pianist Simone Dinnersteins New Work for Goldberg Variations at The Joyce Theater warn me that the program is 75 minutes75 minutes!with no intermission. Its possible they have to tell me this, but either way, the length of Bachs Goldberg Variations (which, apocrypha alleges, he composed in 1741 as an anti-Scheherazade to help an insomniac count finally sleep) intimidates.