September 09, 2007
Primavera Postmoderna; Or, Last Spring Fashion Collage
Primavera Postmoderna (detail). Paper collage on foamcore mounted on masonite. 20" x 60". © 2007 Catherine King. Price $30,000. Here is the whole image.
by Jerome du Bois
Here I present a great work of art, and a major work of art of the 21st Century, both pinned to its time but pointing perenially backward and prophetically forward. It is as generous, turbulent, and encompassing as Life; it honors the shapes that emerge from the artisan's hand, and that hand itself: look at all those hands! And by interlayering images of grass and cut stone Catherine both pays tribute to Nature and binds Her to her beautiful purposes, making Art outlive Nature.
Perhaps I am expected to summon such superlatives, given that I'm married to the artist, but I make my case for them after the jump. Up here I'm showing the whole collage, the closeup above, and four more closeups, from left to right. Each is worth lingering over for a long time. Catherine King makes the most of Spring.
So much to say, since I watched Catherine patiently create Primavera Postmoderna from before its birth, through every choice torn from the pages of fashion magazines, through every curving cut of the X-acto blade to make how many thousands of elegant paper shapes? How many aesthetic choices, drawing on fifty-plus years of paying attention to beauty and form, half of them professionally? How many spiritual choices --what to say to the world?-- based on years of paying attention to the other side? How many discussions and explorations as we sat studying it propped on chairs during its many iterations? An uncountable number of bits of reason and ideas and imagination and spirit, matched with an uncountable number of blades of grass, crafted gems, woven surfaces, feather filaments, shaped metals, concentrated fabrics . . . Nature improved by human hands, shining forth in small, carefully-cut pieces of glossy magazine stock.
Catherine King draws proudly from her grounding and long career in graphic design and cut-and-paste advertising; she draws deeply from her American soul; and she emphasizes that this multilayered, intricate collage, overflowing with beauty, glamour, mystery, allegory, charisma --all the charmed fruit born from the circle of Nature meeting the spiral of Culture-- is at bottom a sign, an advertisement, inscribed on the orange megaphone:
We Will Not Be Silenced.
Catherine King 2007.
The sign points to our weblog, which includes a gallery on the sidebar of Catherine's artworks, and which archives our lives as artists and writers, and as activists for human nobility, dignity, and respect --in art, in politics, in all the rooted sinews of American life. The sign points to our tears, our two hearts, our two souls, and our times.
This is Catherine's fifth and last fashion collage. You can follow the changes in technique, theme, and emphasis on the sidebar. Like the others, Primavera collects the best images from the cream of the fashion magazines of the season. Unlike the others, Catherine developed the idea of each of the letters of SPRING 2007 floating in a kind of low-walled, overgrown garden, with gates at front and back. Then she developed it further so that they represent graves as well. Also unlike the others, this fashion collage would feature jewelry and accessories rather than whole outfits. And Nature's green everywhere, bursting through in its superabundance. Finally, unique among the fashion collages, Catherine herself, the shaman who believe me went through hell to make this piece, appears twelve times, giving a nod to Andy Warhol while surpassing him by.
--But before I go on, I need to finish up with that sign --and its message-- above. This complex piece encompasses and springs from these times, after all. Catherine, working night and day with the television murmuring in the background, said that when she saw the news story about the New York-Arabic public school, "the spirits gave me the image of the megaphone." Then she saw, in an online article, a picture of the art critic Lucy Lippard --someone Catherine used to admire--dressed in a black t-shirt with two white inscriptions, one above the other, saying the same thing, the one on top in Arabic, the one below in English: "We Will Not Be Silenced."
Well, well, thought Catherine, Islamists and their apologists don't have a monopoly on that determination, and so she appropriated the sentence for her new megaphone. --
Note also that the woman is armed and charmed --daggers and pentacles-- and that some of her shields bear the Cross, including the Maltese Cross, symbolizing the island where the Muslim Shah's army was utterly defeated by the Knights of St. John. This is no accident. In this war against the Islamic fascists, wierd alliances are forged between pagans and Christians. As I said, this is a woman of her times --a true feminist, warrior, and freedom fighter. This is American Woman, striding forward, toward us and past us if necessary, striding into the future as the best --the prophetic-- example of what an American woman should be.
Catherine King has a long history with the technologies of graphic design and advertising, going back to hand-setting lead type and photofax-type copying machines. She kept pace with the technology. Here she exploits like no one else the resolution, the colorfastness, the durability of the new glossy papers, and the advances in cameras, inks, imaging software, and ease of printing. Talk about resolution! Walk up close to an Andreas Gursky and the thing falls apart into pixels. That's not the vivid illusion one has come to expect from a so-called photograph, and suffers from swollen ego too. Take also Sandow Berk, whose large urban apocalypse paintings we saw in Mesa. Step up closer than four feet and the clever multitudinous buildings become rectangular dabs of paint, pedestrian and pointless perceptual dead ends.
But step up close to Primavera Postmoderna and the ultrahigh resolution satisfies all the needs of the human eye. There is no disappointment. As far as the eye can see, these are faithful reflections of reality, in all its gleaming, shading, bevelling, curving, and graininess. And it is accomplished by the simplest technologies channelled through her talented hands: scissors, X-acto blades, paper shapes, and rubber cement. There is not a single eighth of an inch of this teeming, effervescent, overflowing piece which is not coherent and articulated down to the threshold of human visibility. That's one of the keys to its power and greatness, as Catherine exploited these facts to pack her masterpiece with the beautiful, actual shapes which master craftspeople have abstracted from Nature. She has coined the term "microcollage" for this work.
Is that what makes it great? No, what makes it great is its --her-- ambition, harnessing her encyclopedic knowledge of art history, the natural and supernatural worlds, and her mastery of graphic form into a triumphant portrait of Life, and Humanity, unstoppable Nature, and the unstoppable need of humans to make archetypal, beautiful, pleasing, spiritual physical forms from the throwaway jewelry of Nature. Primavera Postmoderna is a giant, generous embrace. In these times, that's both needed and unique. (And, too often, spurned.)
If anyone thinks, by the way, that Catherine King is just some cut-and-paster who can't wield a brush or pen, these two examples of a pastel still-life on pastel board, from 1979, should change their minds. She has worked in gouache, alkyd, oil, watercolor, and acrylic as well, with the same mastery.
As for influences and comparisons, Catherine tells me that although she wouldn't use the word "influence," "this work has a lot in common with Botticelli, the Unicorn Tapestries, and the work of Richard Dadd."
It also, in my opinion, far surpasses the work of Jess, Henry Darger, Bruce Conner, Fred Tomaselli, Tom Friedman, and Tim Hawkinson, to name only a few well-received artists.
Finally, so there are no mistakes about the price, let me spell it out: Thirty thousand dollars. If there are any questions about that price, see the list immediately above for comparisons. Catherine King is not some emerging artist.