Art
Mullarkey, Maureen
Art WOMAN'S WORK? MIRIAM SHAPIRO'S 'FEMMAGE' THE HAZARDS OF viewing art through a filter of ideological rhetoric are fully apparent in the recent Miriam Shapiro exhibition at the Lemer-Heller...
...What the work does not do is reveal the "new social consciousness" that is claimed for it...
...At a close viewing distance the fabric is as flat as wallpaper...
...Major museum exhibitions of traditional quilts during recent years have demonstrated that such work needs no apology...
...She became nationally known in the seventies for "feminist art" consisting of fabric swatches, combined with acrylic washes and stenciling, on shaped canvases...
...As a visual adventure the work is often startling...
...Shapiro began as an Abstract Expressionist and in the late sixties was a popularizer of the short-lived trend toward vaginal imagery, a form of abstraction that proved to have little sales appeal...
...Pieced quilts maintain their tactile qualities even while hung on a wall as paintings...
...It creates a lively field that transcends the limitations of run* of-the-mill pattern painting by putting women's time-honored medium, sewing material,, to a modernist use...
...Shapiro's work deserves to be enjoyed as the visual entertainment that it is...
...Shapiro sees her use of fabric as a medium to be a political act, a deliberate attempt to maintain cultural continuity with the quilt-makers of America's past...
...MAUREEN MULLARKEY (Maureen Mullarkey is a painter and a previous contributor to Commonweal...
...In addition to their design capabilities, his fabrics are used to celebrate the high-orange heat of Southern fields, the lure of a small town bordello, the cold that comes through the boards of a country shanty...
...It is the iconography of sentimentality presented with the florid sincerity of a Hallmark...
...Her mammoth fans and kimonos, with their inlaid geometric designs, are satisfying for their graphic clarity and marriage of surface and form...
...Only its scale, a lesson learned from Alex Katz, saves it from kitsch...
...There is no satiric comment to complete the rescue...
...It doesn't invite and it doesn't yield...
...The lines of stitching create a dimensional effect that, together with the natural puckering of fabric, is evident even at a distance...
...MIRIAM SHAPIRO'S 'FEMMAGE' THE HAZARDS OF viewing art through a filter of ideological rhetoric are fully apparent in the recent Miriam Shapiro exhibition at the Lemer-Heller Gallery in New York...
...In decoration art there is little to orchestrate as there are few, if any, essential differences...
...Such echoes are absent from Shapiro's work...
...Bearing out the truth of Baudelaire's observation that the most telling criticism is an equivalent, the eight-foot fan, representative of Shapiro at her best, hangs in silent judgment on the rest of the show...
...And if one assents to Bernard Berenson's emphasis on tactile properties as an indicator of true quality in art, then America's quilts rank higher as an art form than Shapiro's femmage...
...Bearden's patchwork is always subservient to the figure—an intention that permits him to reclaim the eloquence of a once-vital tradition in a way that Shapiro does not...
...In the waste-not-want-not practice of collagists and quiltmakers, bits of doily, cheap dress material, old organdies and upholstery stuffs, dime-store laces and voiles are cut up and pasted to the canvas in a process Shapiro coyly terms "femmage...
...Romare Bearden, a black male collagist whose' 'Patchwork Quilt" is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, comes closer than Shapiro to fulfilling the feminist intention of solidarity with the country's unnamed needlewomen...
...The flatness and rigidity of it 25 April 1980...
...Shapiro is an activist, a founder of tr;e Feminist Art Institute, and one of the best known practitioners of the currently popular pattern painting or decoration art...
...At worst, it is a form of profiteering...
...The promise of comfort and protection is incorporated in the medium, always visible, and part of any quilt's sensuous appeal...
...If her recent pieces, with their out-sized hearts and flowers, reveal anything at all, it is a warning that popular feminism runs the same risks of debasement as popular religion and popular psychology...
...To find Shapiro's painterly capacities expended on a campy diversion is a disappointment...
...To hear the expenditure extolled as political art is to give credence to the suspicion, circulating sotto voce, that it was a pattern painter who devised the wardrobe for the Emperor Who Had No Clothes...
...Bearden uses the same materials to suggest what Shapiro omits: this is where the quilts were used...
...To its critics, the advent of pattern painting, which reduces the problems of painting to a minimum, is more interesting as sociology than as art...
...Far from creating "a new myth of female culture," as one feminist critic put it, Shapiro reprocesses an old one: the notion that aesthetics are feminine in nature and that art is a category of special female interest, like housework...
...It offers painters a way of behaving as if dealing with yard goods while maintaining the dignity that accrues to the easel painting...
...And it is the differences, not the similarities, that are of real interest on both artistic and feminist grounds...
...In looking at a quilt, there is no ignoring the birthing, dying and lovemaking that occurred under the splendor of those designs...
...Central to her current exhibition is Shapiro's signature piece, "Barcelona Fan...
...Cabbage roses assert themselves in every grade of fabric from Scotch-Guarded cotton to gold lame...
...Composition is eliminated...
...One comes away from the latest Shapiro show aware that women's art is one more manufactured item in a succession of trendy commodities (women's studies, presses, bookstores, bars, baths, buttons) aimed at a growing market...
...Feminists might serve us better by refusing to ape the climate that co-opts the work of women by turning it into the cultural corollary of the still-salable Peanuts phenomenon...
...Women are all heart...
...245 deprives it of that implicit reference to the figure that is inherent in quilts...
...At best, such insistence is an indulgence in what Robbe-Grillet disparagingly called "the myth of depth...
...Without a doubt, she shares with these anonymous women a concern for surface, color dynamics, pattern and form that places them both in the mainstream of modern abstraction...
...Shapiro's work has hone of the polemical significance attributed to it...
...Nor does it establish new aesthetic criteria for the evaluation of so-called "women's art," as it is fashionable to insist...
...She is an outspoken apologist for "this new race, this new culture: women" and for women's handiwork...
...Yet Shapiro's work differs in method, intention and result from that of quiltmakers...
...They function formally as lights and darks rather than as textures...
...The titles tell all: "Murmur of the Heart," "Heart Throb," Heart Felt," "The Heart of the Matter...
...It maintains the posture of a carefully groomed Victorian flirt: visually exciting but wholly untouchable...
...The fabric provides both the form and the content of the work...
...The heart of the home...
...There is only the initial pattern, repeated until the canvas is filled...
...They make clear that what is known as "women's art" owes its existence more to promotion and a market economy than to any qualities of mind that are particularly feminine...
...Its proponents see this as a legitimate and necessary means of liberating art from what feminists consider a falsely hierarchical "male aesthetic...
...Denatured by layers of matte varnish and library paste, the fabrics lose their texture in the process of application to the support...
...Self-consciously ideological in origin, pattern painting is a recent attempt to raise the applied arts, especially textile design, to the status of the fine arts...
...Shapiro then turned to pattern painting and collage and, therein, found her metier...
...Traditional painting, whether abstract or representational, is Commonweal: 244 an orchestration of multiple differences of tone, texture, line, plane, color, and light...
...The latest canvases are shaped like hearts or the facades of frame houses with a heart motif inside...
...With the loss of texture comes a loss of association and a consequent lessening of emotional impact...
...The daily history of them reverberates in the folds of even the most fastidiously preserved...
...It ought not be touted for statements it doesn't make...
...Commonweal: 246...
...Instead, they have seized upon pattern painting as the standard-bearer of female pride and accomplishment...
...these are the women who made them...
...Despite the High-Art prices ($8,000 to $15,000) and the weightiness of the socio-aesthetic lingo that supports them, these canvases look disconcertingly like mock-ups for commercial valentines...
...Shapiro's work even, the best of it, has no such appeal...
...There is greater textural sense in the painted illusions of fabric in the interiors and still lives of such recognized women as Nell Blaine, Margaret Erlebacher and Tomar Levine...
...Each of these women is too aware of her debt to the textural achievements of the Dutch Masters, of Vermeer and Rembrandt, to capitalize on a handicap by claiming to produce "women's art...
...The design emphasis is floral...
...Feminists see no irony in an identification of the female and the decorative and nothing antiquarian in the concept of a separate-but-equal feminine sensibility...
...Women, it seems, are an expanding industry and feminism an exploitable topic...
...In her most successful works the overlapping layers of transparent fabric result in shifting planes of color that advance and recede on the canvas in fine abstract tradition...
Vol. 107 • April 1980 • No. 8
