John Currin: Confounded Genius


"A strong emotional feeling is at the basis of all art expression. If this feeling is not there, if it is not strong enough, the end product is not art. What comes out is phony, counterfeit, or as the French say, ‘cooked up’" Hilaire Hiler

All art is a kind of autobiography, self-portraiture, if you will. Actually, every moment of our lives, everything we do and the people with whom we associate, is a revelation of what we believe in, what we are willing to fight for, what we cherish and the way we think. The athlete who screams at a referee reveals his insecurities and fears, the mother who spanks her baby in the supermarket exposes her abandonment, the factory-owner who abuses his workers reveals his lack of spirituality. The car we drive, the books we read, the music we listen to, the places where we travel to, the politics we advocate, the partners we choose all reveal, reflect, expose the kind of person we are in one form or another. It is all a kind of public self-portraiture. When we walk over to that jukebox and slip in the quarter we are saying a good deal about ourselves to that entire café… no less than what it says when we carry around a copy of a Tom Clancy novel or wear a ring through our tongue.

I mean, lets examine the self-portraiture thing a bit further vis a vis a few modern painters….Manet painting the assassination of Maximillian, Van Gogh and his potato pickers, Cezanne discovering cubism in the rocks of Mt. St. Victoire, Munch and his psycho-dramas, Ensor looking into the soul of Europe on the eve of World War One, Beckman agonizing over the gluttonous interwar period, Picasso’s Guernica, Pollock’s angst-ridden splashes, Kiefer’s historiographic agonizings, Richter’s "Bader-Meinhof" series and so forth. This is weighty stuff and it will endure because its seriousness bears looking at over and over year after year because of its significance to its time, its author and us as serious participants in the project of and adventure of art. Which is not to deny a place, less archival perhaps, for caprice, vulgarity and kitsch somewhere in the vast and increasingly ineffable realm of art.

For example, I have had animated discussions with my daughter about art and "seriousness." I would ask curmudgeonly, "Well, would you really want to listen to that over and over again for the next year if you were stranded on a desert island with only one CD?"Although she happens to be a serious artist herself she would take the Devil’s position and remind me that there is a place for "entertainment" as well as gravity in art; that every piece of music we listen to need not be the Ninth Symphony, or every book we read be Ulysses, and so forth. I agree reluctantly. What I am uncomfortable with however, is putting the light stuff on the same shelf with the heavy stuff; putting Liberace up there with Horowitz, or Currin with Kiefer. I do not have a problem with Mr. Currin painting his silly caricatures and inflated breasts if that is how he chooses to exercise his talent. Putting him on the same shelf with the really big guns however is like putting Paul McCartney up there with Sergei Prokofief.

When I look at the paintings of John Currin I see the labors of a man lacking in the project of deep cultural principles and personal, anecdotal significance. "So what," you might say? Exactly… So what? Perhaps he is the Renoir of our time -- in as much as I see nothing particularly deep in those voluptuous, nubile women of Renoir. At least Renoir however, was celebrating something lovely, a fecund ideal of beauty close to his heart. When I see a Currin painting of a huge-busted girl I am reminded of one of those tasteless jokes which begins: "How many blondes does it take to unscrew a light-bulb…" I am offended and yet know I will chuckle at the sordid punch line and I say, "I dunno, how many?" And it is the same when a museum curator asks me to look at a Currin painting; "How many Yalies can paint shit and be acclaimed as great painters?" Currin seems to focus on only the pointlessness and stupidity in lives, which might contain meaningfulness in moments other than the private snapshots he sees through the pornographic keyhole in the door of his glaucoma vision. Those three neighbors of his he derides in Brunch, might, in fact, be nurses, teachers, parents or ordinary people with a morning off. Of course there is a silliness verging on revulsion for the nouvous riche in their houses too big, stuffed with faux art and collectibles and their gas-guzzling SUV’s out front, but Currin’s malicious version of the suburban Three Graces falls short because of his lack of deeper understanding of the human experience. Elliott’s Love song of J.Alfred Prufrock, for example, resonates because it carries us beyond the one, cynical image of silver spoons and wasted days discussing Michelangelo.

You know what I am reminded of when I see Currin's work? Liberace. Most people today under forty or fifty probably don't remember Liberace but he was the musical analogue of John Currin. Liberace, for those of you who do not remember him, was a virtuoso pianist who spent his talent wearing tight, white sequined suits, playing on a white piano with an elaborate candelabra on top in night clubs playing to an audience mostly of white haired old ladies long since around the bend. I mean, here was a man with enormous talent, which he spent completely on whimsy; which is absolutely fine and I applaud his showmanship and the fact that he was non-pareil in what he did but I do not think anybody is going to suggest that he belongs on the same stage of pianistic virtuosity as Horowitz or Rubenstein. No one would ever think of talking about them in the same breath. This then is the rub. Currin is a first-rate illustrator and parvenu of classical painting but he is being compared with really great painters like Beckman, Bacon, Kiefer or even Richter and Rauschenberg. All these other guys have balls. Their work, all of it, from the get-go, says something significant, something worth paying attention to because it comes from deep, deep down like the voice of a great tenor. Currin’s voice comes from no deeper than his arrogant and supercilious larynx.

I mean, what is the best that is being said about Mr. Currin? "He paints like an old master." Okay, okay, so he puts paint on canvas and applies some beeswax "like an old master." What else? What we are left with is a puerility pretending to (ambiguous) significance. We can wonder whether he is, in fact, a misogynist or just a tease. Does he like big breasts? Does he think big breasts are stupid? Is he saying something about breast implants? Sure, we know he is "referencing" the old masters with those time-worn poses, those swan-necked, wide-eyed, anorexic Westchester County rich girls but what are we to think of the "bimbo" cartoon faces and basketball breasts ad nauseum? Does he think that all blondes actually look the same or can we wonder legitimately whether he is capable of painting a face other than his own narcissistic image? I mean, is he capable of really looking at another human face and discerning the pain, suffering, struggle and occasional joy of life in that person’s countenance?

For example, when looking through a recent catalogue of Currin paintings (Taka Ishi Gallery, 2002) out of sixty paintings I see four which bear scrutiny; Lesbians, Volunteer Couple, Blue Rachel and Girl With Big Breasts. The first two show a sensitive eye for human experience. Blue Rachel is also a well-seen portrait. Girl With Big Breasts is a passably good painting of a young girl with rather large breasts unsuccessfully concealed by a bulky sweater. Some teen girls suffer from abnormally large breasts and I get the feeling that Currin actually sympathizes with this girl who might be the daughter of a friend. The other fifty-six paintings insist on puerility beyond belief for a painter of his age and so-called stature, especially his basketball breast series, some of which are no better than bad illustrations for Hustler (Check-up, Tropical Hospital and Gypsy), I mean, really, should I be interested in an illustration of a lascivious doctor with his hand on the fanny of a gigantically-breasted patient in clever Rockwellish examination-room caricature?

I can’t help but wonder what the point of Currin’s painting is. I think this derives from the fact that he paints so often, apparently, from what he himself has said, from magazine illustrations, newspaper clippings, snapshots and other visual detritus. I mean, what is the basis of his work? Obviously he loves to paint; so what does he do every day? Go into his studio and leaf through a few Playboys and then begin painting? Which, in fact, is exactly what he says he does when he paints things like Hobo and Sno-bo which might be illustrations for some vapid story in Playboy. And that might be fine were it not for the fact that he seems bereft of any talent for serious reflection. He might think that his silly swan-necked, full-breasted, bimbo-faced nudes are, in some way, sexy and that he is therefore making a statement about the ubiquity of facile sex in our society, but, in fact, they are devoid of sexiness because Mr. Currin is devoid of sexiness. How can an androgynous paint prodigy paint things which will turn us on? Sex is visceral while Mr. Currin is all surface.

Remember, this is a man who has been given a one-man show at the Whitney. I am not interested in lambasting some poor schmuck from the "outback" who has a show at the local vanity gallery. Au contraire; this is an academy award winner, a star, an art-world gold-medalist. At forty Mr. Currin has already had a retrospective of possibly the largest body of stupid painting ever accorded wall space in a major museum anywhere in the world. Mr. Currin is, unarguably, a kind of prodigy; in as much as he can do anything he wants with paint. He reminds me of some of these photographers today whose technique make Ansel Adams’s darkroom practice look suspect but whose images are stuck in the putrid mud of those shadowy canyons near Moab. I knew a guy in college who was the best "technical "skier in the country but still he couldn’t race worth a damn. I am happy that children all over the world love Harry Potter but does that mean that we should put J.K. Rowling up for a Noble Prize?

In the aftermath of 9-11, what is the meaning of art anyway? I guess, in the last hundred years all artists have had to deal with similar catastrophes to mock their self-indulgence….World War One (on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 30, 000 British soldiers died in the first half hour) and then Hiroshima and Nagasaki; a hundred thousand dead in the space of a giant flash and then the nightly toll of horrors sent from Viet Nam year after year…what is the meaning of art in the conflation of all this? In the face of the horrors of the Somme and Verdun, Bonnard retreated further into his garden and gave us some of the loveliest still–life’s of all time. After the bombing in the Basque village square Picasso gave us his Guernica. I think we are still struggling with what to do about those two bombs dropped over Japan in 1945. I don’t know what we will do about 9-11 either. I do know that Mr. Currin doesn’t seem concerned about any of this. I do not blame him for his lack of global remorse or melancholy; after all, the trauma is so huge that we can try to embrace it and live and work through the melancholy or we can turn off the news and try to get on with a semblance of normalcy knowing that there is little we can do anyway and that war, rape and villainy will continue regardless of our petty efforts; so why not paint flowers, lovers, soup cans or Hollywood bimbos.

Nonetheless, when I see Mr. Currin’s paintings I cannot help but remember ruefully that beautiful passage of Rilke’s where he describes (part of) what is necessary for the writing of a good poem.

"One ought to wait and gather some sense and sweetness a whole life long, and a long life if possible, and then, quite at the end one might perhaps be able to write ten lines that were good. For verses are not, as people imagine, simple feelings (those one has early enough) they are experiences. For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to the unexpected meetings and to partings one had long ago seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents whom one had to hurt when they brought some joy and one did not grasp it; to childhood illnesses that so strangely begin with a number of profound transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars – and it is not yet enough if one may think of all this. One must have memories of many nights of love none of which was like the others; of the screams of women in labor and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not yet enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many and one must have great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves – not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them…"

Currin loves greatness. He often alludes, unabashedly, to his own paintings as "great" and has made no secret of the fact that he craves fame (and greatness). The problem, I believe, is that great achievement can come only from great thinking and it seems, so far, at least, looking at a catalogue of bimbos and cynical caricatures beginning in the late eighties through 2004, that Mr. Currin is dispossessed of any capacity for thinking beyond a myopic, self-congratulatory puerility...which, in the long run, will never get him over the great divide.