The Brooklyn Rail

A few weeks after our first studio visit in December 2022, I received an accidental text message from Hannah Beerman containing a photograph of a handwritten note that read “I am in love with painting. I wish it could have sex with me.” A fortunate accident, as it gave me the kind of intimate glimpse into Beerman’s mind that I had not yet quite earned at that early point in our acquaintance—like winning a prize without having enrolled in the competition. At the same time, a part of me believes I was in part the intended recipient of the message, that Beerman wanted to share this personal desire with me, that perhaps she had written the note with me—as an art critic—in mind. Plenty of people, of course, are “in love” with painting, love being a terribly over-exhausted term that is paradoxically expected to hold a great amount of significance in our society. Yet it is Beerman’s wish that painting could have sex with her that is truly intriguing. Studying the artist’s new body of paintings on view at Kapp Kapp gallery, my mind kept returning to this assertion of desire.

Characterized by gestural brushstrokes, vibrant colors, and found objects attached directly to the canvas, Beerman’s paintings occupy the realm of collage while quietly flirting with full-blown assemblage. Ranging from relatively flat materials such as paper clippings, glitter, and fabric to hefty items including a dog bed and an umbrella, the objects adorning Beerman’s paintings are largely sourced from her everyday surroundings—deeply personal and mundane. Working in the lineage of Robert Rauschenberg, whose Combines similarly manifested a messy application of paint paired with seemingly random objects, Beerman’s aesthetic decisions strike a harmonious chord of visual clamor—something queer artists achieve particularly well (surely it has something to do with camp). Her unrestrained palette sprawls across the canvas, smearing and staining the surface with vivid hues.

Bold brushstrokes of blues, pinks, and whites swirl around a red focal point in just between us (2023). Affixed to the canvas are clusters of cocktail picks, a jar of paprika, and a rendering of the big dipper. The clunky yet smooth paint is reminiscent of toothpaste, with glitter garnishing several parts of the surface. In her application of paint in particular, Beerman reminds me of lesbian painters such as Louise Fishman and Joan Snyder, unapologetic in their exuberant, painterly sensibility and unrestrained in their rage at being eclipsed by the Ab Ex boys club. In i’ll kiss your underarms (2023), a semi-pattern of rhombuses painted in pink, red, and lilac forms the ground onto which a yellow wig has been stuck, along with a printed image of Auguste Rodin’s The Three Nymphs (a gesture reminiscent of the British artist Sarah Rapson, who incorporates printed art historical references in her sculptures and paintings), three pastel crayon sticks in dark pink, and an ambiguous unfolded piece of cardboard. There are some yellow stains of paint in there too, as if leaking from the wig. A larger canvas, showponies and underbellies (2023) reads like a landscape; the foreground a generous horizontal stroke of pink, the sky a wet ultramarine blue that leaks and drips down onto the middle ground, which consists largely of soaks and patches in faded blues and greens. A dried flower is attached to the middle ground, as well as an upside-down reusable blue shopping bag, standing upright like a mailbox. Another cluster of glitter unfolds in a horizontal line like a brushstroke, and two small circular paper cutouts are glued to the canvas; one is an image of the moon, the other is indiscernible because covered in glitter. My favorite painting features a Lamb Chop plush dog toy, whose bottoms have been painted turquoise seemingly reaching for an elastic band that could serve as its leash (long side, 2023). Both lamb and leash are affixed to a canvas soaked in saturated hues of greens, yellows and pinks, the brush barely visible.

Writing about Rauschenberg, Helen Molesworth once observed that his was an art of the lower body. “Anality is less a matter of actual feces than of the fantasies surrounding them—their production and disposal,” Molesworth writes, continuing to argue that “[…] Rauschenberg radically reinserts the lower body into art. He desublimates the hand of the artist, allowing it to smear and rub, press and glue, privileging tactility over sight.”¹ This observation resonated in my thinking around Beerman, whose canvases sometimes even consist of stretched bedsheets containing menstrual stains. Yet Beerman’s work is endlessly more transgressive than Rauschenberg’s, not only because the female lower body has been deemed considerably dirtier by phallocentric patriarchy, but because her work ultimately alludes to the entire body, not just the lower half, as the producer of stains and smears. Those who have visited Beerman’s studio know that her art materials move far beyond the canvas, or the palette, or the paint-tube, or whatever the hell it is that’s meant to contain them. Instead, Beerman’s materials wander across her room, covering her floor, her bedsheets, and pretty much every surface of the artist’s apartment, including her own body—which is often dismissed of clothes when painting. One canvas features a photograph of Beerman nude and on all fours (a position that, according to literary critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, has been used in literature to emphasize women’s madness) on the floor, her tongue slightly sticking out as if imitating a dog’s eager expression (going went had had will be, 2023). Across all the paintings, there are ambiguous smudges and spatters, occasional hairs and threads, faint imprints—indeed, the critical mystique of Beerman’s painting is that you never know what—if anything—made it onto the canvas by accident; control often fails in moments of ecstatic excitement.

What does it mean to wish for painting—both as a noun and a verb—to have sex with you? Beerman’s wish is specifically for painting to have sex with her, because she is already having sex with painting—it is the reciprocity that she desires. Painting cohabits Beerman’s living environment as if it were a lover, exchanging fluids and sharing the mess that the process of living entails. Like the great writer Kathy Acker, whose work the artist admires, Beerman operates from an inherently erotic space even if the work is not erotic per se. It is non-narrative painting underpinned by sexual politics, akin to Acker’s pursuit of non-narrative prose around this theme. Languishing in desire, Beerman’s work arises from a carnal urge to create, which sounds like a romantic cliché but—as anyone who has met the artist will attest—it holds true for Hannah Beerman.

Ultimately, of course, Beerman knows that painting cannot have sex with her—she only wishes it could. Sadly enough, painting cannot literally be the active agent in a sexual act; at best, it could be used as a sex toy. And this is the devastating agony that drives an insatiably romantic heart.

Endnotes

1. Helen Molesworth, “Before Bed,” in: October, Winter, 1993, Vol. 63 (Winter, 1993), p. 81.