BAY WINDOWS February 25, 1999 (Boston)
"The Artist as Comedian and Tragedian" (unedited version)
by John Ruggieri

“Cary S. Leibowitz/Candyass: New Works” @ Clifford•Smith Gallery

“Francesca Woodman: Photographs” @ The Bernard Toale Gallery

BRING BACK THE TORTURED ARTIST! I say (with a chuckle). In two exhibitions happening now, we glimpse two very different but compelling portraits of the scraggly emotional states of the contemporary visual artist. Cary Leibowitz, in the guise of his pseudonym-alter ego Candyass, makes bright, sarcastic word paintings that seem to be simple, biting one-liners but also reveal the daily reality of being an artist. On another seemingly unrelated hand, Francesca Woodman’s photographs of parts of her nude self slithering in decayed domestic spaces seem to be about revealing but ultimately are enigmatic anti-stories.

Lucy, dog-in-residence at the Clifford•Smith Gallery, trots leisurely around the high-sheen floor, scanning for an affectionate hand as the gallery is readied for Leibowitz’s opening reception. Leibowitz’s work also reaches out from all angles for attention. Variously sized slick-painted panels and works on paper on the wall mingle with sarcasm-bitten vintage photographs and special Candyass “products” such as rain slickers urging “LIZA MINNELLI FOR PRESIDENT” modeled by scary manikins, with the requisite mug and canvas tote thrown in for that faux-corporate high.

Leibowitz advertises a certain Jewish, gay, campy, acerbic, self-gorging artistic identity that is strangely familiar. I am reminded of all those friends and acquaintances - and myself at the height of art-fag angst - who have had no problem with being morose and overly ironic, especially the more intense of these artists whose lives are (and were) pure edge.

Though his work has the appearance of being quick and glib, it nicely posits an unofficial place for the alienated intellectual in the USA, dolled up in a candy-colored rain poncho, while “live” local TV programming in the gallery acts as the barometer of authenticity, spontaneity, and the present moment. Leibowitz’s targets include himself, hyperproduced art video installation, artistic posing, the quest for happiness, commodified self-improvement, reified and refried patriotism, and the now-derided antics of modernists.

Like Lucy the adorable gallery pooch, Leibowitz, too, is apparently seeking some love or, more accurately, the opportunity to offer “free decorating advice with every handjob!” in one piece. His postmodern proverbs beg us to guffaw (“modern art sucks. you’re fat.”) and to sort-of think (“attention! all art critics must wash hands before leaving!”). His newest slogan is emblazoned on plastic shopping bags: “SAD AINT BAD.”

His work is about an ironic distance common to many post-Warhol conceptualists, and yet be they about integrity or post-integrity, his errorfilled typewritten journals included in previous shows reveal a disarmingly human poet (who doesn’t always spell well) and the daily, unheroic drag and sometime joy of making and thinking art:

i like to pretend i,m someone else as much as possible so wont get too too depressed. well i cant do a lot of things, lots of things indeed and i,m not as smart as i would like to be and not as political_y aware/politically correct as I would _ike to be and this is nerve-ous making if i let it so i like to try and kill time and avoid the serious issues i was tought to well sort of avoid by making art i dont moan to say that art isnt/or should be serious i just mean that if i were good at something else i would probably avoid art you know so i try to kill time by avoiding the other serious issues that i’m bit good at. i make it/art by just sitting down and doing make stuff first then think about it.... thats my motto. if its not worth doing again i wont but if i like it i will try and kill as much time as possible by making it - - and things like it until i just dont feel like making anymore and i feel good about this i never make any promises to myse_f wel_ sometimes/often i do i think if you think too too much about it its done already and then you still have to think of something to make your done thinking so just try try try, thats my motto.

Francesca Woodman was a remarkably productive photographer whose work has been steadily gaining critical attention - for very good reason - since her suicide death at the age of twenty-two. These distinctive, petite compositions, printed after her death, are highly choreographed moments of her body in hiding: shielded, burrowing in darkness, lain on cold stone floors, stained by dripping black paint.

These are highly original portraits of the self in the light of vintage homes ravaged by abandonment and disregard. In “It must be time for lunch now,” she peeks out of the darkness under a window, surrounded by table utensils. A sweetly embossed light flutters from an antique fork upheld in her hand, as life-imitating-art-imitating-life in the form of an unstretched painting of silverware in abstract space lies limpid and crinkly off the sill.

Her photographic statements are so unbelievably right on at times, using her body as a half-staged, half-oozing subject. At the top of #18 from the “Angel Series,” her bare, standing legs are visible, as she arches her feet above a pair of shallow canals dug into the hard dirt floor below. The dug-outs in the ground reflect the “A” shape of her limbs, a perfect blending and bending of meaning that is inherent in her oeuvre.

In #15 “Untitled,” she is part of an Italian landscape: a young tree stands in the foreground, with Woodman’s slippered feet and the hem of her dress the only visible traces of her physical self, as a white shape of cloth (cheesecloth? a shower curtain?) floats large and gossamer in murmuring, cool light, standing in metaphoric place of the remainder of her body.

In #12 “Untitled,” she becomes at one with the emptied domestic space, her curvy legs and hips horizontally jutting out of a pantry closet, as the jagged teeth of the doorway molding threatens to chomp her vulnerable, languorous form from above. There is a timelessness here, due to the antique environment and her own vague and shimmering nudity. In one especially evocative image (#22 “Untitled”), her back is the subject, as she kneels on a tiled floor. She pours a bucket of white liquid over her shoulder, all half Pollock action painting, half low-key prayer.

Though she borrows from performance art, this is no NEA-bucking, middle-finger-at-Jesse-Helms act. Her production is one of stillness, using photography’s means of slow exposure and blur to slide into the bucket of painterly nuance. In a wholly material setting, she receives from above a more spiritual, albeit chilly showering of mystery. I cannot imagine her enjoying the making of these shots, feeling cold white liquid run down her back into her hind quarters. There is a sense of martyrdom to contorting one’s body in odd angles, within and under old, peeling found objects and furniture while awaiting the shutter to click open and then close on her private, awkwardly beautiful world.

Copyright © 2007 John Ruggieri. All rights reserved.