Jacqueline Humphries, Inset, 2000, oil on linen, 90" x 102". Courtesy of Greene Naftali Gallery
ART: EDITOR’S CHOICE
BOMB 76, Summer 2001
Jacqueline Humphries: New Paintings

The painter Jacqueline Humphries might find it odd that NBC uses an editing process called the “tease and squeeze”: compressing the closing credits into one-third of the screen, while outtakes and other brief clips of “promotainment” roll on the remaining two-thirds. Stranger still is the widespread television network editing practice of removing “the blacks,” those millisecond fade-outs between features and commercials, designed to prevent the anxious viewer from hitting the remote. Even Sony outfits its Discman with a function that erases pauses between songs, in effect, turning the average De La Soul disc into one continuous skit. Humphries would either cringe or smile at this, since she stages her paintings precisely within this liminal, staticky zone between main events.

Considering that issues of converging vanishing points in painting haven’t been pertinent for over four centuries, it makes sense to eradicate the horizon line altogether and treat the resulting flat screen as more than just a stage showcasing one’s technical bravura. Narrative, as the saying goes, commences while abstraction is enacted. But in this case, the enactment focuses on removing framing devices (and, consequently, boundary metaphors) to highlight a series of planes, superimposed upon each other—in effect, dismissing Greenberg’s classic insistence on a single, terminally flat plane. The large black monochrome fields that Humphries begins with do not suggest the infinite depth, wormholes, and dimensional portals popular in recent sci-fi paintings. Rather, she evokes a dialectic of zenith and nadir, the void not as transmission to another space-time continuum, but an attempt to break free from earth’s gravity altogether.

Virilio described this as “an alternation of terrestrial space and its extraterrestrial absence.” Gestures, whether rigid orthogonals or scattered drips, have a tendency to fall upward in Humphries paintings. Moreover, these firm bars and faint, staccato flourishes—always placed at elegant intervals—seem to communicate with each other, to be setting up an infinite relay akin to a typical interface sequence: server request, script application, data request, Flash animation, and back again through the channel router. Languid protocols on a new operating system. The effect is like living inside a scratched contact lens, or a Movado watch whose few remaining moving parts have jettisoned all the friction.

David Hunt
Shahzia Sikander, Elusive Realities, 2000, vegetable color, dry pigment, watercolor, tea on handmade wasli paper, 11 x 38 inches. Courtesy of Deitch Projects
ART: ARTISTS ON ARTISTS
BOMB 76, Summer 2001
Shazia Sikander

First, a disclosure (or at least a helpful caveat): if you’re tuning in for your monthly update on the state of the cultural exotic, postcolonial other, new developments in “glocal” style, or the center’s inexorable yield to the periphery, you might do well to turn the page. Sure, the painter Shahzia Sikander, born and raised in Pakistan, manages to flip the script on the whole history of Indian miniatures, but to position her as an artist throwing off the oppressive yoke of male patriarchy, Islamic censorship, or the pervasive Western fantasy of South Asian culture as simply some kind of prohibitive version of Footloose does a disservice to her work.

Sikander doesn’t need a tight-lipped, bespectacled chaperone watching over her at the dance; her veiled princesses in formfitting patterned leotards display more pelvic articulation than Alvin Ailey’s principal dancers. The kids are alright, she seems to be saying, despite Rushdie’s fatwa and the Taliban’s policy of zero-tolerance for the display of female skin. Sikander’s pleasures, in other words—be it the calligraphic strokes of the Mughal tradition framing her painting, or a whirling concentric mandala superimposed on a stop-motion silhouette—don’t come at a price. That is, frissons—exotic or otherwise—are more likely inspired by a pinwheel formation of cowboy boots tricked out like a cosmic sundial, or a flying gryphon hovering over rolling green fields, than the notion that a shy, unassuming girl from Lahore could turn her back on the Old Country, enroll in painting classes at RISD, and a few short years later design a MoMA banner that juxtaposes a milky white nymph from Bronzino’s An Allegory with Venus and Cupid with a 12th-century Indian sculpture of a celestial dancing figure in—true to its roots—a darker shade of pale.

The charge we get from looking at a Sikander painting, whether in miniature form or displayed as a cascading collage covering the gallery wall, is akin to the thrill of gazing at a buxom Lisa Yuskavage nude, or the Old Masterish distortions of John Currin’s female cherubs: quite simply, it’s the ordered sensation of elegant rendering, well-paced intervals, or, in this case, a balance between ’80s style palimpsests and the hard-edged contours of late ’90s graphic design and architectural rendering. The truth is in the paint, not the antiseptic ideology surrounding it. This gut level reaction makes claims of a “transgressive” charge, or any pious reading that incorporates the artist’s personal sacrifice, or the risky revealing of—what else?—cultural difference, somehow hard to swallow. Political agendas tend to become moot in the face of visual poetry.

Multiplicity, hybridity, and the fraying of borders may be buzzwords at the moment, or a way of marketing an artist as the next, or the newest, or simply just more than his or her predecessors, but this quantitative reading tends to buckle under the weight of its own hyperbole. Doubtless, Sikander’s paintings are loaded with pastoral landscapes, pattern and design motifs, Persian arabesques, variations on the lotus position, trickster monkeys dangling poison fruit from a tree, and all manner of multi-limbed goddesses of sword-wielding destruction. But is this the grand metaphor of displacement I’ve been hearing so much about? The pitched battle between East and West? Well, not exactly. 

Sikander traffics in themes of displacement, but she avoids the maudlin cliché of tragic exile and focuses on our universal desire for fictive transport—not from the dominant paradigm (whatever that is in this slippery moment), but from the more personalized sense of alienation that clings to each of us.

David Hunt