How To Be Postmodern

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Much of the “canonical” art made since the late 1970s (or at least that you see in museums) has labels like “Pluralist,” “Retrospective,” “Poststructuralist,” or “Postmodern.” These terms attempt to describe art that mixes earlier art movements – abstract, representational, Modernist, Expressionist, Minimalist, Pop, Conceptual – into an ironic stew. In theory there is something exciting about this postmodernist approach: Anything is possible, the playing field is open, and creativity should abound. The truth, as the Elizabeth Murray retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art demonstrates, is that referencing, rehashing, and mocking the art of the past makes for glib, academic fare.


Ms. Murray (b. 1940) has created a bells-and-whistles body of work in which everything is acknowledged yet nothing is embraced. A painter-sculptor with little feeling for color, drawing, or form, she has embraced the dogma of postmodernism – borrowing and belittling the vocabularies of other visual artists – without embracing the language that allows those artists to create form, music, and poetry.


MoMA’s chronological show of roughly 80 paintings and drawings, which opens on Sunday, presents Ms. Murray as the epitome of the postmodern artist. Her brash, undulating, bas relief pictures are big and shaped and thrown across the wall in archipelago groupings of ill-fitting puzzle pieces. Her abrasively muddy or electric pop color – often mixed with white, black, or yellow – is harsh, dirty, and acidic. Her many-pieced, canvas-covered constructions, overwrought and undeveloped, scream for attention. Their cartoony shapes resemble Dr. Seussian horns or human organs and orifices.


Ms. Murray’s subjects and forms, sometimes viscerally violent, sometimes pure pop, nod to the banal inventions of Keith Haring, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein; to Edvard Munch and de Kooning; and to the inventive constructions of Lee Bontecou. The clean lines and biomorphic shapes loosely recall the purist, hard-edged forms of Arp, Miro, and even late Kandinsky. Often underpinning those forms are a painterly, abstract expressionist mess of marks. Like a badge of honor, they suggest that the artist can fling paint just as well as the big bad AbEx cowboys of yore.


But her allusions to other artists are often as tiresome as they are insulting. Ms. Murray’s organization of elements often nods to Constructivist or Cubist collage. As proof, seemingly, that the artist can do it as well as Braque and Picasso, there’s the small Cubist-derived picture “Beer Glass at Noon” (1971), a muddy mess of browns that has only a superficial relation to Cubism. To prove that she likes (or likes to knock) Cezanne, we are offered the ridiculous “Madame Cezanne in Rocking Chair” (1972), a blue cinematic grid of 36 line drawings of a woman, showered by yellow dots, sitting in, being thrown from, or falling out of a rocking chair. Ms. Murray makes clear that it is easier to challenge, deride, or nod to tradition than to extend it.


The most recent (post-1999) graphic works resemble toys or props – hot-colored arrows, lightning bolts, cartoon exclamations (%@$#*!!), thought balloons, bubblegum clouds, or giant lips and fingers – from a children’s theater set, all stuck to the wall with glue. Throughout, you’ll find Ms. Murray’s recognizable signature “things” such as images of coffee cups, threatening tendrils, and beds, as well as figures, animals, and clown shoes that ground her abstractions in representation.


Most of the works from the 1980s and 1990s resemble large abstract set designs from haunted houses. Their broken forms and crazy iconography fail to convince us with any internal logic. “Dis Pair” (1989-90), a pair of giant blue clown shoes that sport smokestacks and keyholes and zany orange laces, is ridiculously clumsy. “What Is Love” (1995), a flattened bed in which the pillow and sheets transform into what looks like a cartoon cat, is as silly and childish as it sounds. “More Than You Know” (1983) looks like a splayed table that has been flattened by a falling safe or a steamroller. The diptych “Join” (1980), a cross between a valentine and a billboard, looks like a large broken heart. These are confused artworks that, though clearly of their time, are without vision and originality; pictures that, like so many of the popular styles of the 1970s and 1980s – platform shoes, disco, stirrup pants, spiked hair – simply seem dated.


MoMA would like you to believe otherwise, for they have mounted two coinciding shows: “Focus: Elizabeth Murray,” which features a group of prints from 1980 to the present, and “Between Representation and Abstraction,” a rather lovely print show from their permanent collection of approximately 80 works by such artists as Jean Arp, Robert Delaunay, Picasso, El Lissitsky, and Andre Masson. Hung next to one another in the prints and drawings gallery, the joined exhibitions attempt to establish a relation between Ms. Murray and the other artists – to canonize her. This is as absurd as it is ironically sad. For she is being championed for mocking what those artists held dear.


In granting shows to contemporary women artists like Elizabeth Murray, the Museum of Modern Art thinks it is redressing the sexism of the male-dominated art world. Yet if MoMA really wanted to embrace and support women artists, we would also see retrospectives of such ignored Modernist masters as Sophie Tauber-Arp and Sonia Delaunay, or contemporaries such as Pat Adams, Shirley Jaffe, or Joan Snyder. These are artists who embrace and extend the canon rather than play games with it. MoMA is not supporting women artists with the Elizabeth Murray retrospective. MoMA is supporting anti-Modernist Postmodernism.


October 23 to January 9 (53 W. 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 212-708-9400).


The New York Sun

© 2024 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

or
By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use