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Point of No Return
John Haberin New York City
Judy Glantzman and Rochelle Feinstein
The revival of painting may suggest a return to the glory days of big gestures and big ideas. Still, do not mistake it for modern art.
Painters today are throwing in everything—and not just paint. Traditional media vie with collage, new media, and text, but also with skepticism, politics, and questions of personal identity. If the rigor of late Modernism meant excluding things, this art will have nothing to do with exclusions. Can it still have a direction, and should it? Judy Glantzman made her name with East Village art and Rochelle Feinstein on the emerging Lower East Side, where she returns to abstract art after a vocal display at the Bronx Museum. A two-gallery show poses a challenge to her own museum retrospective. 
Find Your Own Damn Voice. Back on the Lower East Side, Feinstein does not make it easy to hear yourself think, much less to claim the voice in your head as your own. All the same, she makes it hard to resist trying. She has enough variations on abstract painting to give voice to almost anyone. Artists like these can make it hard to sort things out, and good for them. They make it hard on themselves as well.
Down to size
So many artists appear along with Judy Glantzman that one can hardly count them all. They range from Renaissance Italy to the AIDS crisis, with goodness knows what else in between. And wonder of wonders, they get along just fine. Just as wonderful, there is no doubting that it is her solo act. Could that be because, in nearly forty years of her art, there are so many sides to Glantzman herself? They get along just fine, too.
There is the painter, on an epic scale, where brushwork becomes drawing and vice versa. And then there is the artist defying the shibboleths of abstract or Neo-Expressionist painting. Glantzman peoples her canvases to the point of outsider art or OCD, but with an eye to art history and little care for private agonies. And then there is the woman who gained attention with East Village art of the 1980s and its studied skepticism about painting, period. As with others then, too, she could play the political artist, with particular concern for AIDS and civil rights. One painting becomes a portrait of black American activism, with portraits in miniature of its leading exponents.
There is the artist never far from an awareness of death, as in small paintings on the theme of momento mori. And then death gives way to the struggle for life, in a series that includes what might well be several figures together in utero along with the expected books and skulls. Then again, Glantzman can set them all aside for the comforts of the everyday, like that of friends, their portraits perched in a high gallery window as if on their front porch. Her swimmers look straight out of a day at the beach, without the bare flesh or higher aspirations of bathers for Paul Gauguin or Henri Matisse. She thinks in such mundane terms that a painting becomes a calendar—but then the black Americans fill a grid like a calendar, too. A time line of African American history becomes a scrapbook.
As a sculptor, Glantzman has all these sides as well. She can work in hacked wood, like a primitive, with dozens of hands reaching painfully or hopefully for the sky. Or she can just carve and hinge wood as flat as a child's toy, for the swimmers and the couple's portraits. The momento mori fall between painting and sculpture, too, on plaster. As for the dead artists keeping her company, two freestanding figures take after early Renaissance sculpture, and twenty-five faces belong to David Wojnarowicz as a child. Other costumed echoes of past art fill the indefinite space of those gestural paintings.
Not that I can pin them down, not even to assign them to the Spanish court of Diego Velázquez as opposed to, once again, the Renaissance. Still, there is no mistaking Glantzman. While the show has work from 1979 to today, she seems hardly to have changed along the way. Much the same colors, images, and handling animate paintings and sculptures, sometimes paired—and their broad gestures seem less a plea for greatness than a mark of informality. The Renaissance figures could pass for lawn jockeys, given their size and the black clay of their heads. They could, that is, were not their oversized feet a comic green and their hands closer to her own flesh.
Uniting them all, she has a way of cutting things down to size without patronizing. Wojnarowicz's portrait takes on a worse case of buck teeth and thicker glasses than he could ever have known. In his last years, he used that portrait to declare that "One Day This Kid Will Get Larger"—with a gay man's anguish and anger at what that means for him or you. Glantzman's kid may never get older, but then Wojnarowicz did not have much longer to live. Could the momento mori speak on behalf of him and others, too, and do other works speak clearly at all? She would just as soon not sweat the small stuff and never forget.
In love again
Rochelle Feinstein may love painting, but her lovers (and styles) keep changing, and old ones keep coming back. Her largest work at the Bronx Museum runs to six canvases, with speech balloons out of Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein—and its message? Yes, Love Your Work. To relish paint that much more, she also has a smaller version in gesso. Feinstein returns often to diptychs for their gap between parts, to bring out their presence, while the thick white of Geography revels in paint as a veil or disguise. Yet another body of work takes her to text art out of Mel Bochner or Lawrence Weiner, most often in black and white, like Love Is Over.
Plainly she contradicts herself, and other text paintings, also about the nature of art, are of no help at all. One says only Mr Please Please—which might sound like #MeToo well before its time or something closer to "Oh, no, Mr. Bill." Yet it delights in excess, from its text in gold leaf to a splash of blood red. Another has slim cascades of white down a black canvas, which the museum compares to vertical "zips" for Barnett Newman. Could Feinstein have cast her reserve aside after all? Elsewhere she includes uncertain mappings, almost like subway lines, on deep gray and fancier brushwork, as a celebration of color.
Still, everything comes with a subtext. The zips repeat the word Bronco and refer to the vehicle at the center of the O. J. Simpson trial. And the gray of H(e)art Island alludes to an actual island in the Bronx that has served as a prison, a madhouse, a military facility, and a potter's field. Feinstein spent enough time there to begin the work with grave rubbings. Clippings akin to diaries describe her trip to Africa, and other recycled materials relate to fears for her future after the market crash of 2007. If that were not enough, she throws in cat pictures.
Try not to cringe at them, though, or at a show called "Image of an Image." Sure, you have heard it all before. You have seen images of images in Pop Art—and a snazzy Warhol retrospective now at the Whitney. And Warhol's irony returned with a vengeance in the 1980s, with "theory" and the "Pictures generation." (I have already used up my weekly quota of scare quotes, but Feinstein all but demands them.) All that self-reflection can still drive unsung artists nuts.
Take heart. Few are as free of cynicism as Feinstein. Work after work since 1994 seems utterly sincere, but for one nagging question: sincere about what? Her Bronx retrospective displays that love of painting and, behind it, deeply personal associations. Just try to connect the two.
She makes it impossible to believe that love is over, even if I never know for sure what to love. Her eclecticism belongs to the revival of painting and made her a standout on Orchard Street, at what was then On Stellar Rays. (She is actually a Bronx native, something else to celebrate and further dots to connect.) Does "anything goes," from realism to abstraction, run the risk that one remembers nothing? No doubt, but that risk means a willingness to try things. Good art often leaves viewers uncertain what to believe, but this artist cannot help asking.
Who asked you?
So go ahead and find your voice. With that directive, the title of a painting, Feinstein is positively shouting you down. Still, she may be directing it most of all at herself. Her latest spans two downtown galleries, with work from more than a decade and ever so many voices, and she may be still in search of one to call her own. If that sounds unlikely, it is late in the game to worry about authenticity anyway. All of it or none of it is hers.
She has her stripes, her squiggles, and her stains, her pure paintings and her photocollage. If she can claim all of them, she can make it tricky to know what to call any of them. The largest looks like poured paint, in bright colors blending into one another and shifting before one's eyes. A reasonably modest one uses dabs and spurts of color as a backdrop for text. She takes the word WRONG, in a clumsy enough font, and writes it backward at that, on a pillow. Apparently two wrongs really do make a right.
At the Bronx Museum, two years after retiring from the faculty at Yale, Feinstein seemed out to pack everything she could into six canvases, leading with text. Now just for starters, she picks up where that left off. Just off the Bowery, her very first painting on view has its lone words, barely decipherable and difficult to connect. Now Soon Stop Stay Her—they promise something due any minute now. (The same gallery has paint smears against floating rectangles and GNORW.) Persistent sounds emanate from video, but not voices. They are caws, from the crows that circle a cloudy sky, but the monitor is below your knees.
This time, though, she is going for variety and volume (not to be confused with Rachel Feinstein, whose show at the Jewish Museum had a more vivid focus). The single large room at her second gallery has an impressive display of what never quite settles into the grid. One has palpable brushstrokes in a warm brown, like wood grain. Others shy away from color or rub it in. One layers a diagram onto an uncertain landscape, like a map of where art has gone wrong. Red Square is actually a set of nested but misaligned red squares, trapped in a mess.
Could any of the voices be yours? She calls the show "You Again," which sounds dismissive of the real you, but is it? It could be merely what the real you is thinking faced with her. Have you seen or heard it all before? Maybe not, but the single most regular grid is a collage. It is also the work that asks explicitly for your voice.
Feinstein has sliced up her art, stuffed it into small plastic bags, and affixed it to canvas. Up close, the bags look refrigerator ready. When I saw the show, I had been reading a French crime novel, in which characters on the run keep turning to instant coffee and vending machines. (So much for the legend of French cooking.) Now I knew another model for the grid—and another reason that the French never contributed all that much to Minimalism. But then who needs Minimalism when many voices can speak simultaneously for themselves?
Judy Glantzman ran at Betty Cuningham through January 13, 2019, Rochelle Feinstein at the Bronx Museum through March 3. Feinstein returned at Candice Madey and Bridget Donahue through March 12, 2022.