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At a Woman's Pleasure
John Haberin New York City
Kyle Staver and Katherine Bradford
One could write an entire history of art around images of women. No, not the course from goddesses to courtesans and back, although it would slip in whatever I say. Think more about just who is telling them that they belong.
The history could collapse centuries into business as usual, on behalf of men—and then collapse the last few decades into men trying hard not to repeat the mistake and feminists not believing them for one minute. Then one could have the mess of the present, with women demanding to tell their own story. It would have to have room for an excess of paint, cartoon graphics, myth and legend, and just a bad day at the beach. It might even be hard to tell just who is exploiting whom. 
It also might be hard to choose from among the storytellers amid the cacophony, but I might privilege anxiety, humor, and a woman artist's point of view. Among the siren's calls are those of Kyle Staver, who makes a woman's image stranger still in a return show, while Katherine Bradford turns a woman's unflinching gaze on dreams of pleasure for men and women alike.
Dangers and temptations
Sirens, they say, lured sailors to their death, but (honest) it was only a myth: the sky and the sea held more than enough dangers and temptations of their own. They still do for Kyle Staver, who nonetheless revels in myth, the hoarier the better. She may, though, leave wide open just who is endangering or tempting whom. She may also leave in question just who is human and who is supernatural. Take, just for starters, an encounter at sea.
Her sailors show their interest plainly enough, three leaning over a rail and a fourth perched overhead in the ropes and sails. Still, it could be almost clinical interest, with the first seen only from the back and the last leaning over with a parrot on his shoulder and the self-control of a virtuoso. The sirens appear between them, with little to show for their sex appeal beyond blond hair and a hint of breasts. Staver uses the quickest of pink brushstrokes for flesh, with black dots for smiles and mermaids tails, if they have them, safely beneath the waters. They might be the ones in need of rescue. Then again, they might just be out for a swim beneath an American flag.
Staver's figures are often rising or falling, but she makes it hard to say which. Calisto, the bear of myth, descends helplessly from the heavens, while her former human self reaches upward—pleading for transformation and a place in the night sky. A guardian angel holds a woman on the verge of consciousness or dreaming, just inches above grasping arms or tentacles and a penis. He might just as well, though, be abducting her, and their dark feelings might be aimed at him. The paintings may rescue myths for a woman's agency, as the gallery argues, or not. Either way, purity is out of the question.
The myth of humanity's fall looms over everything, another hint that a woman's agency has its risks, just as for Aneta Grzeszykowska or Marilyn Minter. It appears explicitly with an angel, sword drawn, chasing Adam and Eve from the garden. Yet it colors Greek myth as well. When Cupid, with small wings on a notably adult and muscular male body, animates Psyche with his breath, the moist air takes shape just outside his mouth like something full and ripe. It could be the fruit of the forbidden tree, and Psyche could be feeding him. When a woman hurtles forward on the back of a swan, I can almost hear "The Ride of the Valkyries," but I have no clue who will live and who will die.
Staver's colors burn even in darkness. The light piercing the guardian angel's clouds could be fire, and the spheres in Psyche's Watch could be candle tops or suns. (Psyche, apparently, gets to return a sleeping Cupid's favor by animating him.) Cupid's red anklet and a dog's tongue could be glowing embers. Hell fires rage behind Hades and Persephone, but the brightest whites belong to skeletons in the foreground, and they are slinking away.
Fierceness slips easily into comedy, much as for male artists like William Copley still reveling in the adolescent gaze. Sketches in fired clay retain the artist's loose hand along with its whiteness. That swan could just as soon pass for a stuffed animal or a sheep. And the refusal to moralize gets an added push from quick dabs in oil—ever so far from Eden for Lorenzo Ghiberti, Fra Angelico, Albrecht Dürer, or Mannerism. Maybe the sirens will come on board after all, while the sailors dive right in. They can take turns boasting of comforts or pleading for help.
Fleshing out a myth
Rarely is a saint's body such contested ground. Saint Sebastian dominates his painting, but not by much. He dominates because this is, after all, his martyrdom and because Staver zooms right in on her return to the gallery, making his wounds impossible to overlook. Yet the executioners press in as well, plenty of them, their bows and arrows only inches from his flesh. Above their heads, angels sweep in from both sides, too, for a closer look if not to save him. Good and evil each have their say, but just what they are saying differently may take some thinking.
Saints are always in the right, of course, with a nation, a family, or its painter eager to claim them—but martyrs are always contested ground. Believers make a point of their suffering, because victimization can justify all sorts of things. (Think of the fan base for Donald J. Trump now.) For Staver, though, contested voices have a way of filling the air not with certainties, but with their cacophony. Her bright colors and skewed perspectives bring them all close to the picture plane, but in a richly uncertain depth. She is drawn to old myths, but updated and skewed for the temptations of life today.
Another set of bodies is often contested ground, too, women's bodies, and Staver's new work gives them pride of place. Swans lean over a drowning Ophelia, either to lick her wounds or for one last bite, while Venus swaps her clam shell for an octopus. Death and the Maiden continues the theme of sex and death, and it is hard to know who is more alive—the maiden or the skeletons. If that puts women one step ahead of their oglers, Susanna lolls in a hammock on a summery afternoon, with not one of the elders in sight. She is plumper and older than they might like anyway. With his long blond hair and flaccid anatomy, Sebastian looks ambiguously feminine, too.
Sebastian became a popular figure in Italian art, as a study in male anatomy. He comes with that quarter turn at the waist, or contrapposto, that brought the heroic nude into three dimensions for the Renaissance. Piero del Pollaiuolo surrounds him with a circle of executioners, to display a mastery of geometry in perspective. Andrea Mantegna lashes him to the ruins of an ancient column, to underscore his roots in classical art. Staver, though, has no heroes, only temptations. Who could miss adding another arrow to the flurry, one right through Sebastian's neck and not one of them fatal?
Georges de La Tour in the Baroque showed his survival, with Saint Irene caring for his wounds by candlelight. (He was later clubbed to death.) Staver, though, shies away from austerity and silence. In her last show, those sailors and the sirens tempting them to their death seemed both just short of song. The latter, in fact, looks very much like Sebastian. Now, though, women plainly have their say, including older women.
I would not normally review an artist again so soon, if at all, but the newly gendered paintings all but demand a correction (and anyway it is just too much fun to watch galleries reopen after the lockdown). Her media have broadened, too. Bright colors remain, sometimes close to comic, but conflicting planes have given way to that dark uncertainty. She is more likely to smudge her colors as well, akin to another painter of summer and women, Katherine Bernhardt. She has also added etchings, but with fresh pools of ink, and unglazed clay, somewhere between low relief and full sculpture. They feel preparatory, toward canvas, while looking ahead to the painterly and physical potential of oil and myth.
Out of the pool
Katherine Bradford has made it out of the pool. It is about time, coming after Labor Day, with galleries back in action and people back in the city. It might have been about time anyway, lest the crowded public pools and oceans of her last show become an expectation or a formula. They were awkward places to be anyway. 
Everyone seemed to be having a perfectly good time, but no one seemed to know one another, much as in the galleries, and every summer athlete was trying way too hard or not at all. As she calls her latest paintings, they were "Friends and Strangers."
Her subjects might have emerged from the water, but the water is still pursuing them. A glaringly pink woman sits as an unseen friend or stranger pours it down her back, like a cold bath. A man lies next to his bathtub, unable to remove his undershorts and to get in. One man in swim trunks stands in shallow water, against a backdrop of even deeper blue, like a more welcoming sea. One might want to shout at him to get out or in, but that can hardly account for a second man, in business wear—face down and with a grim expression barely an inch above his head. They might share a single cramped and surreal space, or they could just be, as the title has it, two kinds of Suits.
Business or pleasure? The question keeps coming up, by Bradford's very choice of public and private spaces. People make their way through an airport and toward the viewer. They take no notice of those seated to either side, faces cut off. Others gather for a family meal or in the circle of a wedding dance. The huge dining table, with whole fish and animals, or the schematic red outline of the dance leaves everyone untamed or at sea.
Are we having fun yet, and who belongs and who does not? That, too, keeps coming up, but do not answer too soon. Those seated at the airport might be mere outlines, too, while the walkers stand out with pink or red faces and, in one case, clown-like orange pants. Then again, the lead walker with his sleeves rolled up has yellow flesh matching the background—while another's white pants match the stark light fixtures above. They might all fit in just fine, while the artist stands uncomfortably apart, along with you. She might have been the only one not enjoying a swim as well.
Bradford is neither young nor emerging, although she plays the part just fine on the Lower East Side. She comes in a wave of proud but lonely images of men and women, naked or clothed—as with Staver and Haldeman, Ellen Berkenblit and Heidi Hahn, Nicole Eisenman, or Bernhardt, who shares her gallery and acid colors. She also fits the rebirth of paint for its own sake. Her brush moves among jagged lines, blank faces, and colored silhouettes. Her pools were always remote from the California sunlight and luxury of David Hockney, and her swimmers were often little more than a dab apiece, much like many an eye. They make it hard to know what Bradford has effaced or erased.
She still has no shortage of odd men or women out. Like the "suit," several lie prone, hands stiffly at their sides, like living corpses, while others appear as arms or faces above or below the action. One has milk coming from her breasts, but also from elsewhere in her body—unless, of course, she is lying on a bed of white spikes. Are the central figures indifferent to their fate, and is the artist? Not necessarily, not when the woman in a cold bath has a red rectangle in her stomach like a TV set for Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik. The next performance is about to begin.
Kyle Staver ran at Zürcher through October 14, 2018, and Katherine Bradford at Canada through October 21. Staver returned through July 24, 2020.