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Sexual Politics as Myth
John Haberin New York City
Nancy Spero, Janet Cooling, and Doreen Garner
Ribbons spread apart as they descend from the ceiling, to fill a two-story space in Queens with color. At the end of each ribbon, Nancy Spero sets a cutout face.
Is her Maypole also, literally and figuratively, a big tent? Does it celebrate the diversity of New York City's most diverse borough? Perhaps, but descend to the basement for a closer look, and each face is plainly bloodied or beaten. Spero created the work for a Venice Biennale just two years before her death in 2009, and it could sum up a lifelong testimony to violence and her determination to fight back. As the subtitle puts it, Take No Prisoners. For her, though, the struggle moves casually between history and myth, as if they had better be the same. 
Spero is not the only woman with an eye to politics as mythmaking. Janet Cooling dreamed of an apocalypse—but was she only dreaming? She came to New York between Stonewall and the AIDS crisis, when an LGBTQ artist could dare to dream. Yet the fires still burn on every side. Doreen Garner aspires still more to the mythic, in remembrance of a risen Jesus and the immortal life of Henrietta Lacks. She pays the price in a woman's flesh.
Take no prisoners
Actually a chain, barely visible, holds each paper face in place, but otherwise Nancy Spero has no patience with illusion. For her, anger is always a matter of pride, as an artist and a woman. Upstairs, her retrospective is just as celebratory and just as unrelenting. One can see the arc of her career as piercing the darkness, from her "black paintings" in the early 1960s to the final burst of color, in the maypole or a clothes line. In between, hand-printed collage runs floor to ceiling, like one sustained outburst. It contains no end of text, because her work refuses to shut up.
Spero was a founder of A.I.R., the woman's collective with a gallery still in Dumbo, and her work is filled with women. They appear in the black paintings as mothers and lovers. They appear even more in the prints, as gaunt silhouettes dancing, running, walking, or crawling. Ample space and faint letters make them seem gaunter still. Still, she identifies them as goddesses from no end of ancient civilizations—from Greek vases and Celtic myth to Anatolia and China. Take your pick.
Born in 1927, she created the black paintings in Paris, where she lived with husband, Leon Golub, before their move to New York. Just as he asked that a painting's rough surface stand for harsher realities, she indulged in a dark version of Abstract Expressionism, broken only by deep reds and primeval women. That literalism dogs her right to the end, where the cutouts stand for heads decapitated in the Iraq war. It also drove her to abandon painting in 1967, as "too establishment." Who has time any longer for art? And then she kept making more of it, transferring hand drawing and stenciled letters to zinc plates—for what the museum calls her "Paper Mirror."
Spero felt compelled to give up what she increasingly saw as "corporate art," in part because of the Vietnam War and, twenty years later, death squads in El Salvador. Men may go to war to fight and die, but her first prints, the War Series, argue for war's disproportionate impact on women. Then, too, she had discovered Antonin Artaud and his "theater of cruelty"—although, as ever, she finds cruelty gendered. Her Codex prints quote Artaud taunting his audience, with vous êtes des cons. ("You are cunts" or, more generally, whatever he despised.) Once again, male scorn has become a woman's pride.
The prints show women as capable of "appraisals" and "active histories," along with myth and dance—much as for Mrinalini Mukherjee in India. They also address men as "you," but not as an invitation to a dialogue. You had better recognize yourself, they insist, pulling out your penis or a sword. A familiar street sign in French warning against pissing in public becomes a demand to keep either one to yourself. "Could a woman," they also ask, "ever know what the heroes felt?" Maybe not, but then women in charge might not go to war.
Painting as the establishment rings truer than ever in today's mix of art and money. And still, a man running for president can get away with dismissing Hillary Clinton and Planned Parenthood as the establishment, too. As with Golub or Sue Coe, also recently at MoMA P.S.1, an excess of literalism can feel less than real. Where women aspire at once to archetypes and the center of current events, they may end up as neither halfway divine nor fully human. Spero's world tour of ancient cultures may condescend to global particulars at that, much as early modern art sought "the primitive." Only her sixty years of felt anger can, at times, transform dogmatism to celebration.
Going nuclear
From 1978 to 1982, Janet Cooling painted a single extended nightmare. Back in New York from Chicago just in time for the AIDS crisis, she must have felt that she was living one as well. Just once, though, she shows herself caught up in a waking dream. She appears to relish it, too, and to have slept on her back. Her face looks upward, teeth bared in predatory pleasure, and oh what she sees or dreams. She is looking directly at her future and imagining what she has left behind.
Just above, apartment towers have a bleak but gorgeous anonymity. They lean back, as in an amateur photograph that tilts upward to take in tall buildings. Cooling never much cares to correct her mistakes, not when they take her so deep into a dream. They could be literally collapsing, and for a moment one could mistake her entire city for the twin towers on 9/11—or they could be rising, twisting, and alive. In other paintings, they are also on fire, like candles in the night, and a Chicago resident was sure to remember riots and burning. An African American, Purvis Young, has relied on similar images for his energy in LA.
Hers, though, are still halfway idyllic, like crude women for Rachel Feinstein, even at their worst. Elsewhere, stags and other animals leap across the chasm between buildings, as if catastrophe could return humanity to Eden. New York had its crime in those years, but also its enclaves like much of Manhattan before it was no longer affordable and Central Park before it drew a crowd. At the center of another painting, couples cross a green world. In the dream itself, suburban tract housing from her childhood fills the space below her head. She might take relief from catastrophe in her memories, or she might be grateful to have moved on.
She must have been grateful to find herself in New York as an artist and a sexual being. The bare teeth mark her as a demon lover. If that sounds stereotypical for a woman, Cooling is delighted to play against stereotype. It makes her dark myths that much more fun. Often a large woman's head dominates a shaped panel close to an oval, like an eighteenth-century portrait but with trendier hair. At the center of still another painting, a couple is plainly having sex.
Then again, nothing in a dream is quite plain. She is asserting herself as queer, but that couple has no obvious gender, and those on the grass are mixed. The first AIDS cases did not appear until 1981, but Cooling had no shortage of nightmares all along. Cars crossing a painting look more savage than the stags, and nuclear towers look worse. She remembered them from growing up in New Jersey, and, the gallery suggests, nukes had to be on her mind late in the Cold War. If nothing else, they supply the paintings with radioactive colors, like the heads in a downright fiery blue.
The gallery also compares her to David Wojnarowicz. Still, Wojnarowicz before AIDS layered on his colors, while Cooling's glow from within. Later, she amped up the reds and oranges in faces, for a Neo-Expressionism closer to Sandro Chia or Francesco Clemente. Then she amped up the bodies, including male bodies, and more recently she has brighter landscapes far from cities, at once harsher and more idyllic. Still, nothing since goes anywhere near as sensual or as nuclear as those first four years. She was dreaming, but always wide awake.
What she left behind
Not every gallery stays open on Easter, not even on the Lower East Side with its customary Sunday hours. Fewer still would dare to stage an opening. Doreen Garner, though, was equal to the occasion—to the point of taking the holiday for a black woman's own. Her show includes an open coffin and work dedicated to Henrietta Lacks, whose cancer cells became literally immortal. The HeLa cell line was also an important contribution to medical research, bringing hope of life to others. Still, "She Is Risen" has little in the way of celebration. Its predominant note is anger, and everything within speaks of pain and death.
A title like Garner's means to shock, and so does the work. The coffin on its raised trestles opens only so far. Its lid lies on pegs just inches above the rest, and the narrow space offers a grim view inside. Rather than empty, it holds at least a dozen thick, rubbery, resinous surfaces in a ghastly pink, each topped by a forceps and wrapped in black. The artist or her subject may have risen, but leaving flesh in the unfeeling hands of others. Lacks did not consent to becoming lab materials at her death in 1951 either.
More pink samples rest on a shelf by the wall, named for Edouard Manet's Olympia, pierced by needles and shaped like labia or lips. Garner relies often on silicone, urethane, and black hair, in ways guaranteed to give you the creeps. They line an old gramophone and the back of a not quite American flag. They thicken into still murkier reliefs, interrupted by glass beads, glass shards, and plastic vials. Medical research here looks none too advanced, and it is hard to say just what it may have learned. The assemblages look back to Surrealism, Joseph Cornell, Kiki Smith with her precious bodily fluids, and Mary Bauermeister in her acts of defiance, and their feminism looks uncertainly ahead.
Garner names the flag for Betsy Ross, although its brown leather may recall less the American Revolution than the Deep South, if hardly the New South. The gramophone, she explains, still works—and it plays the story of another African American woman. Pulled over in 2015 for a minor traffic violation that she may never have committed, Sandra Bland was berated, beaten, and arrested. Three days later, she was dead of a hanging in jail. By the show's end, the promise of eternal life looks more remote than ever. Black Lives Matter, it says, because the alternative is death.
I cannot swear that Garner intends the blasphemy, given the role of churches in the black community, and besides I can speak only as a nonbelieving Jew. Perhaps she asked what Jesus would do and found herself answering, "Come back from the edge of death." Still, she fully intends the earnestness, which may yet hold her back. How big a victim was Lacks anyway, apart from pointing to evolving standards of privacy? Where is Bland in what one sees rather than hears, and how do such different lives come together at all? Still, she makes it hard indeed to turn away, from the ideas or the materials, not even with the creeps.
If Garner has disposed of the bodies, Cameron Clayborn supplies the body bags. They are nice ones at that—in clear vinyl and real leather stuffed with, well, I hesitate to say. At times they gather together, for company if not for sex, and they may take the shape of human limbs. They are, in short, yet another manifestation of the body as palpable and politicized, in his case as a gay male. At times, though, he takes on baggage, as the bags acquire handles. Where Zoe Leonard has displayed suitcases for each year of her art, he accepts transience and isolation in his very sense of himself.
Nancy Spero ran at MoMA PS1 through June 23, 2019, and at Galerie Lelong through March 25, 2023. Janet Cooling ran at Jack Hanley through July 3, 2019, Doreen Garner at JTT through May 26, and Cameron Clayborn at Simone Subal through May 12.