by Jerome du Bois
In today's Modern Art Notes, Tyler Green takes apart Dodie Kazanjian's profile of Elizabeth Peyton in the October Vogue.
It sounded familiar to me. I did this earlier, and better, without the gushing and irrelevant photos. Let's see . . . ah, here it is, back on September 28, I posted a long piece called "Anti-Bush Art is Puerile." Part of it covered the special portfolio in Artforum that included Peyton's Kerry portrait.
Excerpt begins here:
. . . Then comes Elizabeth Peyton's hilariously devotional high-school portrait of John Kerry (online), which should be signed in the lower right corner, "All my love, Johnny." I'm going to dote on her a bit, since she's the artist of the moment -- and we can only hope that moment will be brief. Remember as you read: she is 39 years old.
The October Vogue, in Dodie Kazanjian's profile, contains a gold mine of Peyton's juvenile, narcissistic thoughts, and accurate descriptions of her work:
I myself have heard her work described as lightweight, "pretty," and as saccharine-sweet as the gushings of an obsessive teenage girl -- another symptom of the youth culture that disfigures our time. . . . Whether what she does can be called portraiture is debatable. . .
By general agreement, a great portrait shows us profound truths about both the sitter and the artist, and Peyton's don't do that. In one sense, they are all self-portraits -- dealized images that reflect her feelings about the people she chooses to paint. She seems to love every one of her subjects -- "That's why I paint them," she says. "I could never do the Windsors, for example, because there's something so evil about them." [But not Kerry the Dismemberer?]
. . . "Gavin [Brown] seemed to understand that it wasn't just painting I was interested in, it was more a sense of my time and history and the power of art, and what it could do to inspire other people and culture. . . ."
[On Kurt Cobain and his suicide]: " . . . I heard his voice on the acoustic album that was put out about six months after he commited suicide, and I thought, Oh, my God, I can't believe this man was alive at the same time I was. I was so moved that this person had existed and made what he'd made. He was the first person kind of my age, who was American, that I really, really identified with and wanted to paint."
What's constant in all these images [portraits] is not accurate likeness, or even personality, but a kind of obsessive, fanlike identification. Each of her pictures is like an act of love.
It's all about her. And of course the most MOR fashion designer around, Marc Jacobs -- he of the cashmere yawn -- is wild about her stuff.
"It's women like Elizabeth who inspire me," Jacobs told me, "women who are alive today and play a creative role in the world."
Finally -- she's taking landscape classes, and her next portrait subject will be Abraham Lincoln:
"I made some paintings of him the other day," she tells me. "I discovered he looks a lot like Cameron Diaz."
. . . I am usually not at a loss for words, but I flounder as I struggle to find some common ground between Ms. Peyton's tweenie planet and mine, good old Earth.
Excerpt ends. You be the judge, reader.
(The anti-Bush art piece, by the way, was a two-parter, but after the election, the second part seemed blessedly irrelevant.)
Posted by Jerome at November 30, 2004 08:26 AM | TrackBack