Figure It Out

One of the problems with much recent political art is that artists seem to be trying to achieve a fixed style for political work.
—Douglas Crimp

When Douglas Crimp noted in a roundtable discussion in 1984 that some artists invested in political work were adopting a "fixed style," he was referring to what he perceived as a troublesome consolida­tion of formal elements that "tends to reduce the work to a general­ized politicized statement, rather than one of real specificity."^# Crimp's point is well taken, and we might extend his critique to institutions and to art history; museums and critics often do their own "fixing" of styles by categorizing artists within movements in order to produce manageable taxonomies, even as artists themselves pursue unruly, multivalent practices that span a range of apparently contradictory genres. This problem is especially acute when artists who are considered "radical" or progressive also pursue stylistic modes that have fallen out of political favor or have been cast as outdated—in particular, representational forms.

Since the 1980s, many aspects of figuration have been viewed with suspicion; this is due in part to the rise of highly valued neo-expressionist painting in those years, which was widely under­stood as one facet of a conservative backlash against more obdurate and potentially more difficult-to-sell minimalist and conceptualist works. The concomitant art-critical swerve sharply against referen­tial legibility was encapsulated in Benjamin H. D. Buchloh's seminal article from 1981 on the upsurge of figuration in European painting starting in the early twentieth century, "Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting."^# Buchloh's historically specific discussion regarding the waning of abstraction and the implementation of "outright authori­tarian styles of representation" from World War I to neo-expressionism has been taken as a global condemnation of any kind of mimetic reference as pandering to the market.^# Yet many artists who have been deeply involved in the development of the dovetailing discourses of appropriation and institutional critique have employed figura­tion, reshaping its ideological contours in the process.

In what follows, I track the use of figuration by Adrian Piper, Robert Gober, Sue Williams, and David Wojnarowicz to contend that these vocally feminist and queer artists have utilized drawn and painted representation as a specifically polemical resource. I focus on a small number of images, moving episodically via an associative logic rather than following chronology in order to ask a series of open questions that, following Crimp, aims not to "fix" any one political style: What is at stake when figuration is deployed by artists ostensibly categorized as "conceptual"? What happens when the material specificity of line, tone, and composition—often caricatured as regressively formalist—reemerge as significant terms for feminist and queer artists? And how have contemporary dis­courses on "the body" in the past few decades (as diseased, disci­plined by power, under siege, or anxious) informed the changing reception of figuration?^#

It has been difficult for art history to assimilate the figurative work of an avowedly conceptual artist such as Adrian Piper, who has painted since the mid-1960s. Her Multichrome Mom and Dad (1966), an acrylic-on-canvas portrait of her parents, reminds us that the "monochrome"—a major catchphrase for modernism^#—is also loaded with racial connotations. In this work she used both a black-and-white palette (around the edges of the image) and col­ored pigments (in a rectangular window in the center of the image) to depict, in multichrome, a mixed-race couple. Such a painting flies in the face of evaluations of Piper that focus mainly on her work in performance. Kobena Mercer has stated, "Piper's art has been fiercely antioptical from the start."^# But there is nothing "antiopti­cal" about Piper's careful attention to framing, visual balance, and hue here—rather, she cannily mobilizes the opticality of modernist painting to highlight the ocular elements of racialized recognition.^#

To be fair to Mercer, Multichrome Mom and Dad is an early work, yet Piper has consistently continued to display her skills as a student of the human form, including in Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features (1981) and, most notably, in the Vanilla Night­mares series, begun in 1986.^# In these works, charcoal and oil crayon drawings of bodies and faces cover pages of the New York Times, their expressions and body parts responding to both the form of the newspaper and its content, with its stories of white farmers in Zimbabwe and updates about interest rates. In Vanilla Nightmares #20 (1989), Piper's black faces with white eyes echo the photo­graph of South African miners on the cover of the newspaper's Week in Review section from July 27, 1986. Hands appear to cradle or support the boxed-off lead article about US sanctions against apartheid, complete with photos of Ronald Reagan and Desmond Tutu, as graphic depictions of male and female sexual organs teem in the lower third of the image.

Combining the techniques of mass-media appropriation with her lushly hand-drawn figures, Piper resists any attempts to box her in to a firmly "antioptical" regime. In Vanilla Nightmares #20, medium matters: charcoal (with its own racialized connotations) is a nimble vehicle for her almost iconic forms, gathered together with mouths open as if in a chorus of protest. It may seem an obvious point, but drawing and painting allow for invention, including the opportunity to signify "bodies" en masse in a nonspecific manner, rather than tethering the figure indexically, as can be the case with a photograph, to "these particular bodies." Other artists since the 1960s, like Leon Golub and Ida Applebroog, have turned to figura­tion because of its ability to blur the lines between the recognizable and the fantastical. As they depict characters that move in and out of the known world and present figures whose very blankness becomes a screen for the viewer's projection, their canvases have the potency of dreams so vivid they feel real. They are also distinctly politically oriented, as works like Golub's Mercenaries IV (1980) lay bare the interpenetration of violence, domination, and masculinity. Apple­broog's gridded Couple I (1983) repeats a pair of schematic figures—a man and a woman seen in profile—whose gestures take on different affective valences as their bodies shift from the vertical to the horizontal and as they are given a variety of formal treat­ments: outlined, inked in, silhouetted. The generality of their faces opens up interpretative space: is this an embrace or an assault?