Allegories of Painting

David Salle, Dosso Dossi, Julião Sarmento,
and David Wojnarowicz

As I picked up the Friday Times, I could already taste the weekend. I had settled in for slow, easy days away from hard work and the harsh winter sun. And you know, the arts had the same idea. Only some Postmodern critics call their leisure time allegory.

Before I explain that one, I had best tell you about how real commercial packagers handle an expensive weekend. Come. Check out Friday with me.

Away for the weekend

Somehow everything demanded a getaway from meaning. The paper's "Weekend" section took me to Soho's oldest, northern storefronts, that marvel of upscale furniture, tacky clothing, and, yes, David Salle. Twenty years since he found stardom, Salle's work still "projects the distinct impression of being about ideas without offering a ready proof that any ideas are actually there." This, one understands, is nothing against Salle. It is, the Times critic insisted, "one of the most attractive things about his art."

Was I still clinging to delusions of art's deep intentions? Museums, the paper suggested, gave them up long ago. The Met takes on Dosso Dossi, a decidedly minor Renaissance artist of "indecipherable sophistication." Dossi's gentle, streaky brushstrokes display "the perfect gift for the ineffable in nature." That gift extends right down to his notoriously wooden drawing and static poses. They suggest some kind of story, while their charm lies in Dossi's bright colors, hazy sunlight, and air of fantasy. Forget the earthy style of such contemporaries as Jacob Bassano, with his Flight to Egypt.

Dossi spins allegories one interprets at one's peril, much like his greatest influence, the Venetian painter Giorgione. Dossi, says even the standard textbook, "tamed Giorgione's hostile nature," just as Giorgione might be seen as taming his master, Bellini. What poetry can explain the older artist's gorgeous forest scenes of clothed men and naked women? It could help me account for that cute little dog next to Dossi's enchantress. It might even make Salle's angels tolerable.

Still reaching for something serious? I put down the paper and grabbed the thick pile of notes from a business trip to Washington, D.C. On top lay damaging evidence that I had gotten away from work myself, sneaking off for one afternoon to the Hirschhorn. It was a brochure for Julião Sarmento, a Portuguese painter and sculpture. Sarmento's headless female figures appear trapped in interiors they never chose, like the lives they could not fashion or create.

The submission of these women speaks of deadened feeling and sexual drama. The thick black line, set against stark, white canvas, lends poignancy to feminist outrage. Or does it? "It would be a mistake," the Hirschhorn notes, "to simply ascribe literary motives or interpretations." Not to paintings "too fragmented in their imagery, too indirect in their mode of representation." I have felt this way faced with the eloquence of another feminist narrative, a pietà, but really? I had better get used to it: "if a narrative underpins a Sarmento painting, it is one written deep in the imagination of the viewer."

And then I thought of the most provocative allegories in town, at David Wojnarowicz's retrospective down at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. The artist, who died of AIDS in 1992, loved stories. He made them feverishly, in every media from painting to video. He gave voice to AIDS sufferers, to an art world confronting censorship, and to an East Village scene on the edge of danger. And yet the stories never add up. The paintings have a mute flavor of comic-strip illustrations and deadening colors.

The impulse and the dream

Left-handed compliments aside, the Times's critic had a point. In a postmodern age, art somehow carries on the modernist ideal. Even now, art does not represent anything, but rather it reflects on itself and its conditions for meaning. It even clings to the Enlightenment baseline for knowledge, one person's "distinct impressions." (Descartes preferred to call them "clear and distinct ideas.") Only art's reflection has entered a hall of mirrors.

Wojnarowicz's cartoons pile up and recombine in work after work. They take their force from their familiarity as much as from a particular context. More often than not, they float above an image of the artist's sleeping head. They argue that a gay man can never altogether choose his fate, but they release the uncontrollable power of an artist's dreams.

All these artists project the illusion of ideas, like today's feature presentation. And there is no way out of this movie. Larger than a Jackson Pollock and centered higher off the ground, Salle's canvas functions as both screen and projector. I thought of Brian de Palma's obsession with the hidden camera as metaphor for, well, Brian de Palma.

Craig Owens, an influential theorist before his death in 1990, loved to invoke the movies, too, and he did not mean to trace its influence on video art. However, even when he discussed film, Owens preferred a different metaphor. He saw fine art's unity of form and meaning dissolving, as if in one more camera movement. But he called it the "allegorical impulse." Reminded of a medieval Everyman as the image of God?

Think again. Beginning with Robert Rauschenberg, Owens wrote, artists spin out image upon image, and these signs remain mere images. Art no longer reveals hidden connections, not even to see through them. Its "pathos," as Owens terms it, is to make connections impossible.

But exactly what was going on? How can allegories take leave of the text? And just who gets to set the moral? I took up the Times again—and with a lot less guilt. Maybe I had to face a thought-provoking weekend after all. Let me give each of these shows more of the attention they deserve.

Fortifications for the art wars

Each institution is doing what it does well—and not so well. A gallery has given a one-time star a chance to shine, and Salle takes up the challenge. He has not dropped the glib images that lost him critical favor, just when the oversized gestures of his European contemporaries get major retrospectives. Rather, he makes them less cynical by accepting them for what they are. They stay arbitrary conjunctions, but they do not make a fuss of fighting each other either.

When an angel hovers over half a painting's worth of white splotches, it does not trumpet the value of greeting cards or make fun of abstract painting. It just shows the modest rewards of a culture ready to grant both their fifteen minutes of fame. Pace gave his wall-size paintings ample space, so they will not take on more grandeur than they can stand. They even look pretty, if also pretty silly.

Salle refuses the intricate unity of form and content that has been essential to art at least since Romanticism. Does he critique it effectively as well—or just supply a good excuse to write off the emptiness of contemporary art? Perhaps he knows now how little a celebrity can do either one, at least without consciously playing the part.

The works could be the postmodern equivalent of Jasper Johns, in his superb late, cryptic split images. Like Johns in gray, Salle both hides and flaunts the reflection on himself, and he, too, has come to love paint. Yet he knows his stance commits him to something less than greatness. The works cannot stick in the memory, because they have abandoned the continuity of memory. They leave history to artists able to engage the present.

Sarmento is one such artist, and the Hirschhorn deserves credit for featuring ambitious art with little visibility in America. It also raises the tough question of a man's role in feminism. Still, the museum somehow stresses its limitations, just as it can never pull off much press for its shows. As always, the Hirschhorn manages to convince me that I am reading the footnotes to the National Gallery. A big sign out front leads to a confusing maze inside. And sure enough, the exhibition turns out to fill only two rooms, in a small corner off the middling permanent collection.

The marvelous architecture says it all. The museum's exterior looks like a reinforced gun turret. I have fantasies of the Hirschhorn going to war against the Whitney's expanded bunker. Inside, the floors hold surprisingly few galleries, almost always in the middle of a rehanging. Appropriately, the sculpture garden sinks into a small, rectangular pit out front. Imagine the Museum of Modern Art as bargain basement. It is a tribute to Sarmento that I still remember one sculpted figure, bent so achingly over a kitchen table that her flattened body merges with its iron shape.

Going to the dogs

Ready for a pricier shopping spree? The Met sure knows how to trumpet greatness, and only a critic more cynical than Salle could complain. It treats Dosso Dossi with the care and reverence of a master. And that is why it, too, prefers in the end to stop making sense.

I find any Renaissance retrospective, even one as good as last year's of Filippino Lippi, a treat and also a disappointment. Inevitably, as the Met faces in planning a show from Assisi, major works cannot move from their site in Europe. Even the choice of artist for an American museum is limited, as is the context its permanent collection can provide. In show after show, the Met has repeatedly made the mistake of hiding its limitations, even when it comes to Lippi's father, Fra Filippo Lippi, one of the period's first and greatest. It thus diminishes not just the audience for art of the past, but sometimes the art as well. Here, however, the Met's strategy works, and I left the show almost as dreamy as the paintings.

A careful arrangement takes into account both Dossi's evolution and the way he worked. Although roughly chronological, it sets off work in different genres. A central room brings small panels together to suggest the grander commissions left back home. A final room then focuses on late works in collaboration with others. Their harsh lines and colors could represent a restorer's over-cleaning. Mostly, however, they help one grasp the particularity of Dossi's landscape style.

One sees how Dossi's literary bent and elite patronage led him to painting about the arts. Take that woman and her dog. They derive from Tasso's epic poetry, which was to influence the English tradition as well through Spenser's Faerie Queene. The woman, a sorceress, turns men into animals. And back then dogs meant hunting creatures, with a nastiness far from Upper West Side house pets. More like the kind that runs off the leash in Riverside Park.

Dossi, however, knows too much of own magic to demonize an art of transformation. He cannot altogether look down on the animal, when art seeks its truth in nature. His work, aimed at the literati, cannot even set poetry against the ruthlessness of power. Here the woman, clothed in radiant color, gazes upward to the sky. Her dog looks silken and content.

Painting identifies with both, because it fears them both. It has the power to release men from bondage, like the tiny background figures recovering their human form. At the same time, it immerses them in nature, in a shimmering landscape. It reflects on its art, an art of narrative and poetry, but also an art that hides its meanings from all but the few. Historians in fact debate over some of the mythic panels today, even before they touch the instability of artistic truth in more familiar work.

Politics outside history

I have juxtaposed artists half a millennium apart. I want to remember just how much gets swept under the rug when art theory gets millennial. Salle, Sarmento, Dossi—these artists all flirt with nonmeaning. They all begin stories they cannot finish, and each in his own way earns Owens's term of endearment, pathos.

Owens wants allegory to do suspicious double duty. It reaches across centuries with a fixity of form and purpose. It becomes, in short, an artistic genre, like landscape or still life, and even Jan Vermeer is there with his own allegories of painting and faith. Or at least it becomes like the Museum of Modern Art's naive notion of still life, in an equally bogus show title from a year ago. Yet allegory also becomes the mark of the postmodern, a bursting of signs that once bore profound significance. It becomes very much like allegorical art itself in his view: a sign that ceases to signify.

What is going on here? Surely allegory used to mean something like Pilgrim's Progress. It avoided the ineffable. It gave every person's passage through ordinary life an eternal meaning. It made life simple and readable as well.

Owens wants to recover the political impulse in art, after decades of formal perfection. To pull it off, however, he has to step outside of art's history, to an unchanging ideal—the very dream of an esthetic elite. He wants to salvage political anger and popular culture after real mass movements have lost their promise of redemption. As for Dossi, that takes a form of rebellion for the privileged crowd that truly knows how to rebel. It means taking art, pop culture, and politics back—along with the word allegory. Let me try to recover its changes.

Romanticism had rejected allegory, because it rejected a realm of belief above everyday life. Life was too important to require a subtext. Madame Bovary's town, Flaubert declared, "is worth Constantinople." Prefer to imagine that I am talking about lords and not country people, George Eliot joked in Middlemarch? Go right ahead. But, one really has to add, you can do so only because ordinary fools matter enough to stand for lords.

Writers like these understood the elitism inherent in allegory from the time of Dossi. But they paid a price to reject it. They had to accept a single, seamless reality, the stuff of fiction for the masses. And before long, Modernism set out to burst the seams.

Completing the circuit

Walter Benjamin made the classic statement in The Origins of German Tragic Drama. He looked on allegory as a device, with a special historical context. Like Bertolt Brecht or modern painters, Benjamin wanted to make art and life alike a lot less self-evident. By positing a split between the most progressive art and its meaning, allegory could have subversive value.

Decades later, Peter Bürger took the next step. In the 1970s this German critic articulated an entire "theory of the avant-garde," and it depended on disjunctions. Bürger developed a whole vocabulary of avant-garde devices. His list included montage, chance, and once again allegory.

Bürger managed to elevate the new at almost exactly the moment modern art was getting old. He explained modern art's power, just when its power implied it had become part of the old establishment. He codified the rules, like Napoleon laying down the law of the civil service. In a related move, Paul de Man found in poetry an "allegory of reading." In true postmodern fashion, that fine deconstructive critic meant an allegory of the unreadable.

David Salle was just about through school. And so were budding critics like Owens. The new generation worked by what I have called the Postmodern paradox, creating a new generation by making art's content the previous one. They reflected on modern art, while assimilating it to a popular culture it had tried to destroy.

Owens kept the entirety of Bürger's civil code—of random events, fragmentary gestures, and allegory. Codes, the semiotician's text, in fact became the dominant conception of the image. Only they have nothing left to rebel against like a proper modern rebel, no magic in art other than meaning itself. Is there room left even for Dosso Dossi's self-conscious puzzles about art as poetry?

What, he asked, makes Robert Rauschenberg's Allegory an allegory? Rauschenberg's marvelous silkscreen painting "seems to be declaring the fragments embedded there to be beyond recuperation, redemption; this is where everything finally comes to rest." In place of a rebellion, one has the "pathos" of rebellion's failure. And then in one final ironic twist, Owens's generation succeeded, although Owens himself died young of AIDS. And that brings one back to the art of David Wojnarowicz, in all its glorious glibness and anger, altruism and art-world elitism.

Wojnarowicz's allegory can short-circuit meaning, but not with the precision of Vermeer's characters without a story or Chardin's proverbs without a moral. He risks not always knowing which impulses he has chosen, which accepted from commercial pressures. He depends on prior texts, but that means repeating cheap stereotypes and received images. Ironically, the East Village's few, hot gallery years turned out to mark a long weekend. Surviving dealers moved to Soho as fast as gentrification and opportunism could carry them. At the New Museum, one looks back at the impasse of the 1980s, with the chance to puzzle freshly over the blockages and joys of art today.

Anger, bluntness, and repetition

The New Museum of Contemporary Art has its strength and weakness in its partisanship. It is a champion of the marginal, which it defines in opposition to tradition. Instead of the white, male, and heterosexual, it speaks for the outsider. Instead of a modernist tradition from representational art to abstraction, it presents blunt speech, from folk-art styles to media-influenced montage. The museum is determined to undo their silence, and with David Wojnarowicz it succeeds.

In one nasty photograph, thick threads sew up the artist's mouth, and a needle points right at the center of his bloody face. Silence could well lead to death, as perhaps it has for blacks or Jews. No wonder that Wojnarowicz gets to speak in so many media. His retrospective slouches across three floors like a house party.

The New Museum gets caught easily in abstractions of its own. Traditions multiply, but they and the mainstream take on false, rigid boundaries. A woman's art purports to define femininity, like Judy Chicago. The East Village now gets to stand for another boundary, Wojnarowicz territory, where he went after growing up on the streets. These boundaries echo with a patriotic fervor that the artists most fear.

Wojnarowicz's repeated motifs testify to that same tense mix of playfulness and anger. Their numbing repetitiveness comes from his allowing both to settle into abstractions. They seem at times aimed straight for mass culture after all, and Saks Fifth Avenue used his motifs for store windows this winter, in honor of his show.

One can reduce art neither to text nor to instinct. Owens's speechless allegories plead for a middle ground. Perhaps he knows that looking is pre-verbal, but what I see is always caught up in who I am. And who I am is always caught up in the stories people tell each other.

Artists respond by telling still more. To their credit, Wojnarowicz and Owens alike have some brutal stories in mind—but some glib ones as well.

Sewing up Postmodernism

If art must always have stories to tell, let me end with the best of modern fables. In Ulysses, in a dazzling and difficult meditation along the beach, Stephen longs for the ding an sich, Kant's thing in itself. To find it, Stephen immerses himself in phenomena. He also cuts himself off, however, from ordinary language as no one can without self-destructing. Still, he has to give it a try, to get rid of some excess baggage, starting with Buck Mulligan's whole sick crew.

Leopold Bloom brings Stephen reconnection, but at a further risk of madness. Nighttown could stand as the undoing of Stephen's hopes back on the strand. The liberation of desire turns upside-down his hoped-for liberation of perception and the physical world. Bloom can accept the consequences, so he gets to go home. Stephen, the angry idealist, can only vanish into the night.

In my fable, art and humanity can neither become text nor get past words. Art can only rediscover their frailty, a frailty that persists as long as each person lives among others. Artists create something outside themselves, as a representation of themselves and what they know, and then it takes on a life of its own. What artists and viewers hoped was "us" does, too.

My fable has a flaw, though. For James Joyce an artist encompasses both Stephen and Bloom. Artists today know that that they cannot. Connections and representations break down anyway, as long as the culture that creates them knows who it ought to exclude. That means gay men like Wojnarowicz.

Perhaps he used the same needle and thread to prepare a turkey for his cruelest video. He shows the ideal American family sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner. But the turkey is smeared with blood, and the family is mired in self-hatred and mutual rejection. The artist knows just how brutal the rejection could become. Yet by poking fun at an easy stereotype, the artist recovers it for others. It does the same with the cartoon imagery of painting after painting.

The sewn-up mouth has a double meaning that Wojnarowicz may never have intended. I felt not just a gay man's forced silence, but his work's refusal to speak for anything but itself. At a crucial moment, it recapitulates a refusal of meaning—just when the artist wants most to find some kind of sense. Is the postmodern weekend over yet? Go to Soho and judge for yourself.

jhaber@haberarts.com

David Salle showed in January 1999 at PaceWildenstein, the Soho branch. "Dosso Dossi, Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara," ran at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through March 28, 1999. Julião Sarmento has a small show at The Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Gallery through June 20, 1999, and "Fever: The Art of David Wojnarowicz" ran at The New Museum of Contemporary Art through June 20, 1999, the Saks Fifth Avenue windows through February 2.