The Art of Donna Stackhouse
2000

If we take Ben Shahn’s remark that "nonconformity is the precondition for all art," then of course a surprise or challenge is to be expected whenever we go to a gallery or museum. With new art which is, by definition, nonconformist, we might see something wonderful or awful….as with each new mountain we climb we might find a safe, new route or come to an unclimbable precipice. This challenge to deal with adversity, with surprise, with distaste as well as summit rapture, is the thrill art lovers have for new work. The only challenge there is in seeing old Leviathon work, going to another Monet or Picasso exhibit for example, is hoping to find some obscure drawing or little painting one has not seen before.

The thing about Donna Stackhouse’s art, now showing at the Raritan College Gallery, is that it is so absolutely, wonderfully female. I mean, often I have wondered if I could tell whether a piece of music was written by a woman or a man, or in my own racket, whether a certain photograph might have been taken by a man or a woman; that is, whether there is a discernable difference in the way men and women express themselves in art. Is there something about Louise Nevelson’s sculpture that is manifestly female? Is there something in Monet’s painting that is just as obviously masculine? Needless to say, we are all aware of the obvious…Mary Cassat’s or Julia Margaret Cameron’s work would never be mistaken for the work of a man nor would Jackson Pollock’s large drippings or Picasso’s nudes ever be mistaken for the work of a woman… but what role does gender play?

In any case, when I look at the images of Ms Stackhouse I am reminded of Marc Chagall and Ben Shahn… paintings which emanate from a visceral place rich with personal remembrance such as a very poignant tempera called New York, 1947, in which Shahn has used such symbols as the fish and scale to invoke a sense of balance in the central theme of the work -- which is the drowning death of his brother -- his brother portrayed as a young boy in a swim suit centrally located on the canvas. Shahn cannot anymore escape the trauma of his brother’s death than Ms Stackhouse can escape the trauma of childhood abuse or, more recently, an emergency room visit in which, despite excruciating pain she was treated by the resident Hypocrites as just another hysterical female and sent home; only three days later finding herself back again undergoing emergency abdominal surgery.

Real art can come only from a totally visceral place inside each of us and every one of us is either male or female, inward or outward, campestral or urbane… I remember many many years ago at the Ansel Adams workshops where I worked for several years, people would come from New York or Philadelphia and want to take wilderness landscapes just like Ansel’s. That’s a ridiculous assumption in itself but further, Ansel’s photographs resonate with wilderness because he was a highly competent mountaineer and as comfortable around a campfire as he was in a salon playing a Mozart piano sonata. Our work is merely a reflection of our inner selves. Ansel could no more photograph in Philadelphia than the Philadelphia lawyer can photograph in the Sierras.

The art of Donna Stackhouse is the story of her female journey from childhood to middle age…The sexuality of this work is inescapable; and this is where the challenge comes in for a man looking at very, very feminine work. We have to struggle. This is a different world we are looking at, a totally unique set of parameters, codes, sensitivities, and experiences…. everything is alien to us so we cannot approach the work from any snug perspective. It is like going out on on that long dark Brooklyn pier at midnight looking for Vitto (Aconci) and, finding him there, he would tell us something disturbing (and who wants to be disturbed?) So, reluctant, do we venture out on the pier to learn more about ourselves, art, and him? This fear is what the real woman artist holds out for us men.

Will we (men) be able to deal with the voyeuristic image of a grandfather incessantly photographing the young girl …and aside from carnality this image makes all of us realize how our photography, innocent or otherwise, is an intrusion into other normalcies; a child deserves a life without a camera stuck in his/her face at every moment, much less the lens of a lascivious grandfather.

Of course women are different….duh!!! But when are we men going to put our behavior where our mouths are? Some of the strongest work in this show is a series of medical texts interwoven with naked self-portraits…a text on Gynecology (referring to vaginal pain) reads: "…a pain which the patient describes as burning or throbbing rarely has an organic base. ‘Excruciating’ is also an adjective which raises doubts as to the genuineness of the discomfort." (and we read in the latest Time, March 1, 1999, a report which confirms that women and blacks are given 40 percent less serious treatment by physicians across the country) Could there be even the remotest relationship with the medical texts of the late 19th century which Ms Stackhouse has superimposed with her naked body illustrating the exact bodily locale of various female indiosyncracies such as Nymphomania (about where the sternum is)…"Many women also request urethal and vaginal treatments for nonexistent disease… (which) are masturbation equivalents." I had an uncle once who, I suspect, made such reading the basis of his decision to go into Obstetrics and Gynecology.

The male artist is usually going to tell us things we either already know, or take us places where we have at least been to the trailhead. Odds are we will be comfortable (or at least familiar) with the antecedents, the earlier explorations. The male artist is usually more gregarious, open, public. A woman, on the other hand, lives in a realm of quiet longing, abuse, private humiliations, moments tied to her childhood, family and loved-ones.

So, the exhibition of a woman who literally bares her naked self in her art, an art about the female experience is, at least in the case of Donna Stackhouse’s photographs and lithographs, a rare and unforgetable adventure for the male art lover. As a man I don’t mind being hammered over the head now and then by a truculent Ani Defranco or the Gorilla Girls; I’m sure I deserve every unflattering epithet they hurl at me, but the strength of Ms Stackhouse’s images is that rather than sledgehammer us into contrition they lead us quietly through dark nightmarish places with a deft maturity and wisdom which can only leave us gratefully stunned.

There are of course admirers of Albers, Mondrian, Kelly, Rhyman and the rest of the coterie of selfish "art for art’s sake" academic daubers but how refreshing to discover an artist who harks back to a reflective, ironic, Daumier, Beckman, Chagall, Brecht ("Art is not a mirror of society, but a hammer with which to shape it!"). I am not making comparisons but I am saying that Stackhouse’s art is imbued with the same inner conviction, spirituality, and universal message we admire in the great missive artists of the past. I despise the Warhollian notion that "anybody can be an artist." And I equally loathe the notion of "art for art’s sake." I hold to the fact that real artists are unusually-gifted individuals with an uncanny craft, sensitivity and prescience; combined, we have paintings, sculpture and photographs that transcend craft, gimmickry, pornography, prettiness and reminiscence. Ms Stackhouse’s work takes us to territories of private realities of universal female experience assuredly, elegantly and with a beautiful (and much appreciated) lack of rancor.