The Brooklyn Rail

The title of the Susan Weil retrospective at the Shirley Fiterman Art Center at Borough of Manhattan Community College not only suggests the belated recognition of the ninety-five-year-old’s work, but also speaks to the question of “aboutness.” How do content and form meet in the term “about,” particularly when one attempts to describe work as widely variegated in style throughout a career as long as Weil’s? While “aboutness” has been rightly critiqued by figures such as theorist Kandice Chuh for narrowing and corralling more expansive possibilities, it also buttresses claims of abstract art being more than the most vacuous kind of formalism. As Abstract Expressionists Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko wrote in a letter to the editor of the New York Times, “There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing.”¹ If the precise location of “aboutness” is difficult to pinpoint in an exhibition encompassing the entirety of Weil’s ongoing career, what is readily discernible is a set of preoccupations: the fragmentation and, more importantly, reconstruction of the body; repetition with difference; the conjunction of word and image, both in text-based compositions and artist’s books, with special attention to the canonical works of literary modernism such as those of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein; and the relationship between two and three dimensions.

Weil’s approach is exploratory and freewheeling, characterized by turns and returns. After all, she has been making art for over seventy-five years, and time lends space for experimentation. Part of me craved chronological organization, if only to organize my own reeling thoughts. One of the earliest, Flower Figure from 1951, seems to owe something to the work of Joan Miró. It was my returning to it after looking at Weil’s artist’s books for the works of James Joyce that proved an epiphany. I was at once reminded of the opening lines of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” With a hole cut where the face of the figure would be, flower petals framing it, and two more holes in place of breasts, the “self” as separate from the flower has ceased to be. The figure holds flowers and is a flower.

While there are fragmented male body parts in the show, their presence seems ludic, and it is women who make up most of the cut-up figures. In one remarkable work, Collage Figure (1966), composed of acrylic and collage on Plexiglas, a small image of a woman bisects an array of color. She is nude, her head tilted down as if to fit herself into the composition, and her legs fragmented. Her one giant breast is plastic-like, materially akin to the synthetic acrylic and the Plexiglas. In interviews, Weil has spoken of the importance of the women’s liberation movement of the sixties and seventies to her career, and this object, to my mind, is the most political in the show—the most damning of practices of the fragmentation of women’s bodies that otherwise seem liberating to the artist.

But if the self is evacuated in Flower Figure, lost to the holes in the canvas, and if a woman is at risk of being reduced to parts, hope remains. A video on display shows the artist at work. She draws a figure and speaks to the painful nature of cutting it up, but in doing so, explains, she “activates” the figure, giving it “liveliness.” Such liveliness is perhaps most evident in a work such as Musical Chairs (1999) in which the imagined frenetic movement around disappearing seats is rendered through the fragmentation and reconstruction of the human figures and the chairs themselves. Breasts, hands, and necks abut topsy-turvy chair backs and seats, stasis giving way to motion. In another recent exhibition of Weil’s work, the curators remarked on the importance of the photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies to Weil; that influence is palpable here, down to the grayscale palette Weil employs.

Muybridge’s photographic animations rely on repetition with a difference to create the illusion of motion. Weil makes frequent use of crumpling supports to literalize a similar idea of variation—variation that creates dimensionality and dynamism in a way that reflects change, even metamorphosis. Weil often achieves this through a series of pictures or objects in different states of dimensionality, in works such as 4 Part Painting (1979), where four sheets of inked paper move from flatness to something increasingly sculptural. If the ultimate end of sculpture is Pygmalion-style animation, perhaps the more modest dream of paper is to achieve the status of sculpture itself.

Susan Weil has spoken of the joy she feels in the act of creation, a joy that continues to sustain her practice as a nonagenarian. In the presence of her works, one feels the glee of the maker. The exuberance of experimentations still underway pulses.