The Brooklyn Rail

Jay DeFeo (1929–1989) and Bruce Conner (1933–2008) had that kind of telephone talk marathon where a listener feels present, despite time and place making such an experience impossible. It endures in its strangeness, having been inspired by Conner’s sending DeFeo his telephone dial, to which DeFeo responded by creating a collage of a reproduction of one of his body photograms with the dial stuck on, about which he writes: “I had become the telephone.” But we hear it, savor it, and applaud Bruce Conner for memorializing it five years after her death. We should all be so lucky in our many interchanges, and of course, in our accomplishments. The photo—and much of the two volumes I am going to talk about, however briefly, has to do with photography—of Jay DeFeo taken by Conner on the forklift when her great, indomitable, and totally unforgettable The Rose was being removed from 2322 Filmore Street on November 9, 1965, reproduced on page two in the catalogue to BRUCE CONNER & JAY DEFEO (“we are not what we seem”), 2021. Somehow, this image strikes the perfect balance between excitement and peculiarity. The truck awaits with its belly open, a passerby glances up in astonishment, and we feel privileged to witness the event.

Now straight off I must declare my interest in the naming of this massive two-ton object built up over an eight-year span (1958-1966), originally labeled Deathrose, then The White Rose, and finally, just the stripped-down essential “The Rose.” An image of an actual rose reappears here and there in DeFeo’s photographs, sometimes white, sometimes colored blue, always recognizable, somehow endearing. She had written to a friend that she had wanted to live in her art. How not? The artist Walead Beshty observed that DeFeo’s works post-Rose, in the 1970s (for she paused in her work between 1966 for four years, understandably after that monument) were “as light as The Rose was heavy, as quick as The Rose was slow, as playful as The Rose was stoic.” Pretty perfect summation, methinks.

Given the power of sight leading to insight, the striking image of one eye only on page 37 of the Conner/DeFeo volume, followed by the extraordinary and unforgettable 1958 The Eyes on page 39 of the same volume, and now in the Whitney—in graphite pencil on paper—with a vertical downward streak for a nose, echoed on the left side, is so momentous that it would supply outstanding book covers where images are concerned.

Now let’s consider Jay DeFeo: Photographic Work. It’s chock-a-block with images perhaps a bit glitzy at times, but always welcome: given the expanse of the imagination into the visual from the verbal or the other way. Let me begin, not entirely perversely, with the final essay in the massive monograph, for the many essential details about that haunting and immense sculpture/painting for which DeFeo is generally known are included here, some of course taken up in the other pieces. Judith Delfiner focuses on “Close-Ups,” reminding us (should we have forgotten) that the iconic The Rose (1958–66) completely filled her bay window at 2322 Filmore Street studio and was circulated in its early phases through a few reproductions. Walter Hopps hired a moving company to remove it, the event Bruce Conner immortalized in his 1967 film THE WHITE ROSE. That monumental and significant flower was covered and concealed for the next 21 years (during which the artist said no one had ever heard of her.) Delfiner reminds us “the profusion of repetitions, duplications and multiples that populate DeFeo’s early photographic prints in the forms of drop shadows, shake effects, double exposures and superimpositions can all be interpreted as spectral manifestations of The Rose.” She needed breathing space, as she wrote in her journal, and Delfiner sees this as a sense of confinement, as in Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings which had so impressed the artist.

The lead-in essay, Corey Keller’s “Found in Translation: Jay DeFeo and Photography,” points out that the artist was mostly engaged with photography from 1970–1975. She used a Hasselblad camera purchased with funds from an NEA grant, calling it (how not?) her most precious possession. She found the photography a “necessary complementary expression to my painting.” Deliberately taking her own approach, she turned to chemigrams, exposing to light the photographic paper and pouring certain chemicals for developing and fixing over the surface, with unpredictable results. Such exposure to chance adapted perfectly her tribute to Salvador Dali’s Birthday Party (May 11, 1973). She was especially entranced with curvaceous forms including the telephone, so that her long conversations with Conner fit perfectly in their form, function, and friendship. She practiced drawing circles and photographed various objects as artifacts, including her hands and teeth, as if obsessing with her body and its parts and their uses: her hands for photo and holding on, and her teeth for retaining her life’s nourishment. To this reader and observer, it all coheres with a surrealist viewpoint and vision, as does the story of her life in art.

Her 1970 seashell image, like an ear, appropriately called After Image, marks in some sense her transition from the rose image the flower will reappear from time to time, black and white and once in a particularly beautiful blue) toward such groups as the Loop System, particular and peculiar curves such as those in the paper towels she appropriated to mask her canvases while spray-painting. We could see as her ongoing motto the statement “The lens really taught me how to see and to really see.”

In her wonderfully entitled essay “Constructing Ideas,” Catherine Wagner, whom DeFeo knew at Mills College, expresses her admiration for Jay’s “incisive, analytical, and observational eye.” She traces the early “Beat” works of the 1950s to her experimental photos of the 1970s, invoking the Japanese notion of kokoro or intellectual response, an emotional reaction to describe DeFeo’s evolution. Again, the artist’s motif of teeth appears, leading the essayist to reflect on DeFeo‘s premature loss of her own teeth, that loss always haunting her imagination.

Justine Kurland makes a “Traveling Portrait” of the airy weight of DeFeo’s small photos of “member objects” shot at close range. She emphasizes the performance aspect of the work, often posing in front of The Rose “as it morphed from the sharp geometry of Deathrose to the frosted gills of The White Rose and to its final state, arriving at equilibrium between the organic and the crystalline as The Rose.” She felt, as is frequently remarked, she was living inside what she photographed, and the process of making it she felt as a birthing. Chewing the ends of her paintbrushes may have been responsible for her gum disease, where the roots were giving out at the same time The Rose was removed from her studio. Photographing her teeth inside a clamshell (a vagina dentata), she also collaged them atop a photographic detail of The Rose. Remarkable as that seems, for me her drawing of a seven-foot-long picture of her disembodied eyes takes the prize for peculiarity.

Dana Miller’s “Pull Back the Lens: Situating Jay DeFeo’s Photographs” compares her residing “in this little nucleus of a world that is especially mine” to the photographic venture of Picasso’s mistress Dora Maar and her photographing his Guernica about whom DeFeo might have heard in a course at Berkeley. Adding irony to photography, while I was writing this review the New York Times announced the lifting of the ban on photographing Guernica in the Reina Sofia. How well I remember the many New Yorkers who—including myself—made a melancholy farewell sendoff to that iconic painting which had resided with us as Picasso understandably desired, during Franco’s lifetime in the Spain he had so loved. DeFeo kept an inverse photograph of Guernica in its progress by Dora Maar celebrating its strength. Miller tells us of the artist’s placing her palm on the photographic paper—clearly, the hand as tool and mark of making is never forgotten by DeFeo, nor is the idea of inventing, somehow attached to the photographic tripod, which she dressed and undressed like a mannequin, having saluted Dora Maar’s prizing of the mannequin “for its ability to incite the uncanny and the marvelous.” It all fits.

Now Hilton Als writes “An Open Letter to My Students (for Jay DeFeo)”, assuring us that we cannot expect to “get” DeFeo’s images, for her pictures are “too disjunctive, often within a single frame.” Now I do indeed feel reassured for not getting whatever story the photos are (perhaps) meant to convey. So, he ends, in a perfect summation: “Let us enter her pictures subtly and swiftly together and take from them what we will, freely, as we revel in the eye of DeFeo the beholder. Behold.”

Flaunting the accidental, all the flaws and breaks reminded DeFeo of the jazz she so loved, and an exhibition she had seen on Man Ray inspired her to be experimental, welcoming “visionary accidents” and everything unpredictable, while the always remarked upon imprint of her own hands emphasized the haptic dimension. What I love the most of all is DeFeo’s treasuring her collection of kneaded erasers, a talisman as “testimony to my mistakes.”