Why is Eric Fischl Playing With Dolls While the
Nation is Rioting?
Christian Viveros-Fauné | November 26, 2014
Inez van Lams weerde and Vinoodh Matadin, Kirsten, Star (1997).
“W hy, in the m os t powerf ul and riches t nation in the world, at a tim e when Am erica
leads the world in science and technology, are many of its most talented artists
pla ying with dolls?" An excellent question, this is how painter Eric Fischl spins his
newest curatorial effort, “Disturbing Innocence," in a recent conversation with the
magazine Dazed and Confused. Though a virtual American Girl store, Fischl's cr owded
exhibition leaves one short on answers. This proves doubly true when one looks,
mostly in vain, for a robust rationale for what is a star -studded, but conceptually
confounding affair.
A large group-show Fischl organized for Chelsea's Flag Art Foundat ion, “Disturbing
Innocence" packs together 87 artworks by 58 historical and contemporary artists into
two floors of the Chelsea Arts Tower. The exhibition purports to explore the use of
effigies as an artistic “genre," yet consists of little m ore than a ro ll call of popular
works that em ploy k iddie surrogates —dolls, toys, robots and m annequins —to trace
what the exhibition release terms “a subversive and escapist world at odds with the
values and pretensions of polite societ y." Lik e Fischl's m em orable 1980s paintings,
“Disturbing Innocence" works best as a group of single pieces that dwell on
childhood's loitering traumas; conversely, it flounders whenever adult connections
struggle to be expressed.
Divided into three unfocused sections, the exhibition reveal s a congested display the
minute the elevator opens onto the Flag Art Foundation's 9th floor. There, in less than
twent y square f eet of space, are arra yed Claudette Schreuders' carved twin wooden
figures The Third Person, Gregory Crewdson's C-print Untitled (Empty House), Amy
Bennett's intimate oil painting Property Line, James Casebere's setup
photo Landscape with Houses (Dutchess County) #9, W ill Cotton's candy-themed
canvas Brittle House, and a Roy Lichtenstein bronze abode painted in Mondrian
prim aries —red, yello w and blue. T hese paintings, sculptures and photographs
introduce the section Fischl calls “Suburban Idyll (or not)." Com pared with the ersatz
baronial Levittowns and Greenwichs that are these works' inspiration, Fischl's use of
gallery space is an exercise in co-op living.
Aura Rosenberg, Laurie Simmons/Lena Dunham, 1996-1998.
Like curators with a fraction of his experience, Fischl routinely fails to distinguish
between art that is merely related to his subject, a nd objects that are indispensable to
developing the exhibition's overall them e. T hough hung cleanly, the show's other two
sections —they are prosaically titled “Mannequins, Morphs and Robots" and “Boys will
be boys and girls will be…" —are jamm ed together so tightly a s to resem ble a garage
sale, but in a toolshed. As a consequence, “Disturbing Innocence" comes off as
substantially less than the sum of its parts. Half of the art in the show could easily
command the Flag Foundation's entire footprint.
As it is, “Disturbing Innocence" delivers mostly boilerplate pairings together with
disparate if f am iliar artwork in various media. There are Mike Kelle y's stuffed
anim als, Two Frogs/Two Cats , hung high above E.V. Day's f ive f ram ed Mummified
Barbies and John Wesley's Caryn and Robin, the painter's sign-like treatment of two
limber prepubescents. But there's also Richard Prince's Spiritual America, the artist's
f am ous fair use “transf orm ation" of a 1976 photo of a naked, oiled 10 -year-old Brook e
Shields. Like with the uninspired colocation of the Kelly work, the placement of
Prince's image between a Laurie Simmons/Lena Dunham portrait of Dunham made up
to look like Howdy-Doody and Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinooodh Matadin's portrait
of a young blissed-out girl Kirsten, Star reinforces an obvious angle, cue observations
about childhood celebrity. Yet it does that superf icially, too, turning Prince's infam ous
act of artistic appropriation into outsider doll photography —like the more conventional
camera perversions enacted elsewhere by shutterbugs Dare Wright, Ralph Eugene
Meatyard, and Morton Bartlett.
Never as disturbing as a single New York Times story about Jerry Sandusky or one of
Fischl's own angsty Town and Country narratives, “Disturbing Innocence" also fumbles
the celebrated curator's own individual contribution. It consists of a rough -hewn male
bronze with a hard-on, done in the sincere but intentionally clum sy st yle of the artist's
controversial Tumbling Woman (the artist is on record as saying that the public fal lout
from that sculpture's brief residency at Rockefeller Center left him “confused and
hurt"). It might have been far simpler and stranger to include something more
vo yeuristic and less self -ref erential; sa y, f or exam ple, the artist's genuinely
creepy Girl with Doll from 1987.
But this questionable politico -aesthetic decision itself is typ ical of the problem s with
“Disturbing Innocence"—along with a general bagginess, it helps push the show's
subject matter into a truly strange arena that recalls the embarrassments of the 1990s
men's movement and the bloviations of Robert Bly (a discussion in the exhibition
catalog between the curator and participating artists Lori Simmons, Cindy Sherman and
David Salle includes an awk ward discussion about f em ale biolog y). T he justly
celebrated Fischl did well to pull in friends and non -friends into a show of disturbing
stuff that, unfortunately, channels rem arkable curatorial innocence. Flaws aside, it's
all too easy to see how a radical edit might squeeze an original idea or two from this
oddly innocuous exhibition.
ALL DOLLED UP: ERIC FISCHL EXAMINES
‘DISTURBING INNOCENCE’ IN CHELSEA GROUP SHOW
By Anna Heyward │ 11.05.2014
Elizabeth King, Richard Kizu-Blair. What Happened, 1991/2008.
The Saturday before last, Chelsea’s The FLAG Art Foundation opened “Disturbing Innocence,” a wonderfully
weird and beguiling show about dolls curated by the artist Eric Fischl. Every piece in this show has something
to do with some kind of doll, from Mike Kelley’s stuffed rags to Jennifer Rubell’s buxom, life-sized mannequin,
whose crotch visitors can use to crack walnuts (which are provided by the gallery). There’s also a bust by
Giacometti and a 1938 sculpture by Hans Bellmer of a pile of breasts rising to heaven as they grow in size.
Stepping out of the elevator, one is met by images of suburban order – the show is inspired, in part, by Fischl’s
childhood in suburban Long Island – including a sculpture by Roy Lichtenstein and an image by Gregory
Crewdson. Around the corner, the show gets into what the catalogue calls “mannequins, morphs, and robots,”
where Louise Bourgeois’s mummy-like couple in pale ink appear to be doing something in between copulating
and dying, and an untitled Robert Gober sculpture turns outdoor plastic café chairs into a nightmare. Male
childhood, Fischl told me, as we walked around the show, often features some point at which the boy-child
feels the need to destroy his dolls. We stopped in front of a Henry Darger which features men in hats
strangling little naked girls.
Don’t leave without going upstairs – that’s where things get really weird. There are Real Dolls (sex dolls)
involved, and a bed that looks like it should be in a hotel that charges by the hour.
What if Sid from Toy Story made art?
Curator Eric Fischl corrupts innocence and reveals a darker side of childhood in
‘Disturbing Innocence’
By Maya Oppenheim │11.04.2014
John Waters. Playdate, 2006.
At first glance, Disturbing Innocence looks to be a ramshackle collection of discarded dolls, toys and
mannequins, but at a closer look, it is far more sinister. Like a nightmare in which all your toys have
come to life, the beheaded dolls, mummified Barbies and ashen-black newborns reveal a dark,
twisted innocence. Curated by Eric Fischl, the exhibition is inspired by his own upbringing in the far
reaches of Port Washington, Long Island. Haunted by suburbia, the paintings of eerie cul-de-sacs,
neatly trimmed hedgerows and tautly pulled curtains are reminiscent of Pleasantville. But these
same depictions of ostensible order and innocence crop up again, yet this time, they are disrupted
by army tanks and enveloping floods. From the Barbies whose vacuous eyes have been gouged out
to the paintings of cherub-like girls doused in thick, black mascara and sticky pink lipgloss, Disturbing Innocence is reminiscent of a childhood marred by lonely consumption. Joined by
58 historical and contemporary artists, Fischl’s exhibition sedates and disturbs in equal measure.
Could you tell us about the exhibition and the key themes?
Eric Fischl: Disturbing Innocence's use of dolls, toys, mannequins, robots, and other surrogates
forms an interesting genre. This exhibition examines questions surrounding social constructs of
youth, beauty, transformation, violence, sexuality, gender, identity, and loneliness. Further, it raises
questions about the effects of a youth-obsessed culture.
Would you say that the exhibition seeks to disturb innocence – if so, do you see this
transformation as irreversible?
Eric Fischl: Disturbing Innocence is a sword that cuts both ways. Is the exhibition challenging and
disruptive to our notions of childhood innocence, or is it positing that childhood is, in itself, disturbed?
The experience of each artwork in the show pulls the viewer in a variety of directions – some
humorous, playful and tender – some not so much.
How was the exhibition inspired by your own suburban upbringing in Port Washington, Long
Island?
Eric Fischl: We are all a product of the environment we grew up in. My work explores
the subversive and escapist world at odds with the values and pretensions of polite society, and
many of participating artists are from the same generation who grew up in the suburbs and their
work reflects their own reactions to the picture perfect pretense of a suburban upbringing.
What do the images of beheaded dolls and mummified Barbies seek to represent?
Eric Fischl: There is no single interpretation to the art in this show but each work resonates with
memories and feelings I think most of us can recognize and empathize with. There comes a point in
children's lives as they begin to distance themselves from their parents and develop their own
distinct identities that they destroy, harm, and mutilate their toys. This is a significant transitional
stage in a child's development. I think, in the case of the mummified Barbies and other works in the
show by women artists, there is a further examining/challenging of the stereotypes of women's roles
as mothers, homemakers, and objects of desire. Why adult male artists are playing with dolls is a
more troubling and confusing issue. I put the show together in hopes of raising some of questions for
which I don't have the answers.
Would you say the exhibition depicts the darker undercurrents of modern day American life?
Eric Fischl: Yes. Why, in the most powerful and richest nation in the world, at a time when America
leads the world in science and technology, are many of its most talented artists playing with dolls?
This exhibition is meant to start this conversation.
“Disturbing Innocence” Refreshes Despite its Uncomfortable Conceit
December 10, 2014 | by Emily Nathan
“Young Girl with Bow and Dress and Stuffed Dog” by Morton Bartlett, 1950, printed 2012. Unique digital print, 14 x 11 inches. Courtesy of Marion Harris, NY.
The viewer who might wince at the prospect of an art exhibition about dolls is in good company.
There is, to begin with, the creep factor: dread in the pit of one’s stomach elicited by the mere
suggestion of the uncanny valley, that fraught ontological space between life and its imitation. And
as a subject for scholarly engagement, a child’s plaything seems almost laughably low-brow.
But “Disturbing Innocence,” judiciously installed at Manhattan’s FLAG Art Foundation by Hamptonsbased artist Eric Fischl and on view through January 31, 2015 is refreshing and inventive despite its
unpretentious, and uncomfortable, conceit.
Featuring more than 50 works by a sprawling roster of contributors—including Charles Le Dray,
Louise Bourgeois, Henry Darger, Inka Essinghigh, David Salle, Will Cotton, and Hans Bellmer,
among many others—the show purports to explore the diverse biosphere of artistic engagement with
surrogates: more specifically, with mannequins, toys, robots, and dolls.
.
The bulk of the sculptures, drawings, paintings and photographs on view are necessarily figurative in
nature—but Fischl has notably eschewed organic form for the first wall that greets viewers when
they exit the elevator on the ninth floor. Providing a kind of opening salvo to the show, this horizontal
suite of images offers seemingly innocuous visions of suburban domesticity: houses on a hill;
houses by the road. Almost entirely devoid of life, the works seem to function as architectural
symbols of the show’s theoretical armature, rather than as variations on its theme.
Consider Gregory Crewsdon’s 2001-2002 photograph Untitled (Empty House). A horizon line of flat,
low mountains is foregrounded by darkened tract houses abutting some rural road. The only
suggestion of human occupancy shines forth from the windows of an under-construction two-story—
but the light reveals emptiness inside, unhung white walls. A single flash of color is supplied by the
chalky pink insulation lining the garage. The rest is gray: gray dirt; grey plywood; a rolling gray sky of
grayer-yet clouds.
Crewsdon’s homes aren’t dolls—although meticulously staged, this location actually exists in the
world—but they might as well be, stripped as they are of any signs of life’s residue. He gives us
veneers, paradoxically polished to approximate the kind of messiness we might recognize as
human, but in so carefully orchestrating his scenes to emulate life, he zaps the life from them. It’s
architecture as empty shell, constructed for the eyes of an audience and existing primarily as a
receptacle for a viewer’s imaginings.
That human tendency to fantasize and project comprises the conceptual marrow of the exhibition.
Rounding a corner, viewers are confronted with a flurry of waxy skin; splayed limbs; glossy, bloodred lips and plush torsos. Here is a room devoted to artists who have seized upon our desire to
replicate life in our toys—and then twisted it, creating images and objects that draw attention to
those impulses by manipulating our expectations.
Rather than discovering in these artworks the idealized visions of life that we anticipate, we find
something just left of center. James Croak’s ashy gray Dirt Baby (1986), hung on the wall like a
canvas, is a perverse distortion of a sweet baby doll. In place of soft peachy flesh and rosy cheeks,
Croak’s infant has cracked-black skin like petrified wood and is made entirely in cast dirt, more
rotting corpse than plastic toy.
Hung across the room, a suite of 1950 photographs by Morton Bartlett presents realistic young girl
dolls posed in disturbingly naturalistic positions. One leans casually against the doorframe, while the
other is seated on the floor, head cocked to the side and hand on hip, scolding a stuffed puppy.
But something is awry. The first doll, which has jet-black hair and almond-shaped eyes, is entirely
naked aside from a straw hat and a floral lei: female figure reduced to signifiers of sex and ethnicity.
The other sits in a short dress with her legs spread open toward the dog, provoking uncomfortable
assumptions about the dynamic between owner and pet.
The next gallery erupts into mounds and lumps, voluptuous curves and salacious angles. This is the
pulsing heartbeat of the show, where testosterone whips passion into frothy action and dolls and
mannequins are presented as surrogates for human relationships, of both the romantic and sexual
persuasions.
Carroll Dunham’s Red Studies Itself (1994) sets the pace: a crimson-colored highway of blood
platelets, a seething mass of organic genetics being propelled through the pathways of desire. This
is echoed in George Condo’s bubblegum pink serenade to animal instinct, Embracing Lovers (2009),
which presides over the room like a mantelpiece.
Etched in pastel, oil and charcoal on linen, the painting’s two forms are entwined in the thrusts of
love, their faces contorted into Baconesque masks of monstrous lust, teeth bared, tongues rolling in
wide-open mouths. Nearby, Hans Bellmer’s La Toupie (1938) is a teeming mass that rises from its
pedestal like a mushroom cloud—a painted-bronze homage to the breast, all soft undulations and
pert nipples.
Offering an aesthetic and conceptual counterpoint to this mess of hormones, a quiet 2004 sculpture
by Louise Bourgeois is installed across the room from Bellmer’s mammary explosion. Perched high
on a pedestal in a glass vitrine, two stuffed dolls in pastel-pink fabric—a man and a woman—face
each other chest to chest, pressed up close in intimate rapture.
Titled Couple, the sculpture might represent a paragon of romantic human entanglement, preserved,
as it is, like a rare and precious specimen inside four walls of glass. But a closer look reveals these
tender lovers to more closely resemble a patchwork quilt of loosely woven parts, their pink stitches
raw and visible.
Bourgeois has left the process of fabrication transparent: laying bare for all to see the seams
inherent to the construction of fantasy.
BASIC FACTS: “Disturbing Innocence,” curated by Eric Fischl, continues through January 31, 2015
at The FLAG Art Foundation, 545 West 25th Street, 9th Floor, New York, NY 10001. FLAG will be
closed December 24, 2014 to January 6, 2015.
IN THE HAMPTONS: Panel Discussion at The Parrish – “Dolls and Mannequins at Play in
Contemporary Art” takes place at the Parrish Art Museum on December 13 at 11 a.m. The talk
features exhibition curator and artist Eric Fischl, Sotheby’s North and South America Chairman Lisa
Dennison, Child Psychiatrist Robby Stein, and FLAG Art Foundation Founder and art collector Glenn
Fuhrman. The Parrish Art Museum is located at 279 Montauk Highway Water Mill, NY 11976.
DISTURBING INNOCENCE IS THE ART SHOW OF YOUR NIGHTMARES
By Michael Yalinsky │ October 24, 2014
Jennifer Rubell. Lysa III, 2014. Image courtesy the artist.
The FLAG Art Foundation will open its doors tomorrow to quite the unusual group show. Celebrating what
Claudia oh-so-hated in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, curator Eric Fischl has brought together 50 artists, in a
croup exhibition entitled Disturbing Innocence, “whose use of dolls, toys, mannequins, robots, and other
surrogates forms a deep and powerfully expressive genre.” In The Bluest Eye, we remember the doll as that
which represents beauty by way of opposition or antithesis to the person who holds it. The doll is the
paradigm. The perfect human prototype.
Artists call the shots: When Gustave Courbet organised an exhibition, it was a radical act—
but now artist-curators are everywhere
By Pac Pobric. | December 4, 2014
“I conquer freedom; I save the independence of art.” So Gustave Courbet, the self-proclaimed “proudest and most
arrogant man in France”, described his decision to skirt participation in the French state-sponsored Exposition
Universelle in 1855 and install, instead, an independent tent full of his own paintings just outside the expo’s doors
on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. For 20 sous, visitors could enter Courbet’s “pavilion of Realism” and browse 40
pictures hung to the artist’s liking, without the interference of troublesome state curators.
But Courbet’s pavilion was a disappointment. The crowds never came. Critics took little notice. Ticket prices were
halved by the time Eugène Delacroix came to see the show in August. It was not, even, strictly speaking, the first
self-organised show. Jacques-Louis David had already put together a show of his own work in 1799. Yet Courbet’s
exhibition, in hindsight, was foundational. Courbet’s unwillingness to collaborate was, as the art historian Yve-Alain
Bois once put it, “the first avant-garde act”. It was the first deed of curatorial refusal: meddling bureaucrats be
damned.
Something to talk about
The issue of the artist as curator is under scrutiny in Miami this week. As part of the Art Basel Miami Beach
Conversations programme, panellists including the Beijing-based artist and curator Liu Ding, and the New Yorkand Berlin-based artist Rirkrit Tiravanija will examine the phenomenon on Sunday 7 December.
Indeed, artist-curated exhibitions are everywhere, from expansive biennials (in November, Christian Jankowski was
named the curator of the forthcoming Manifesta 11); to commercial gallery shows (“Peter Blake: Slide Show”, at the
Paul Stolper gallery in London until 10 January 2015, is organised by Blake himself); through to institutional
exhibitions (the Museum of Modern Art in New York has had nine offerings in its “Artists Choice” series since 1989,
the most recent edition organised by Trisha Donnelly in late 2012).
At the Hayward Gallery in London in February, seven artists including Richard Wentworth and Hannah Starkey will
curate a section of an exhibition focusing on British history in the past 70 years, covering topics such as feminism.
The show is part of a trend at the Hayward Gallery; in 2009, the Turner Prize-winner Mark Wallinger organised an
eclectic exhibition there called “The Russian Linesman” (above).
Artists as unalike as Ellsworth Kelly and Glenn Ligon are even organising shows of their own art, just as Courbet
had done 160 years ago. Kelly recently put together “Monet Kelly” for the Clark Institute in Massachusetts (until 15
February 2015), which pairs his work with pictures by the French Impressionist painter. Ligon is currently at work on
“Encounters and Collisions”, which includes his art and that of contemporaries like Chris Ofili and Robert Gober (at
Nottingham Contemporary in the UK, opening in April 2015).
How did artist-curated shows become so widely accepted? The first step was the collapse of central art institutions
like the one that Courbet had to contend with in his day. Today, there is no organisation that has anything near the
governing power of the French Beaux-Arts regime, which had the unilateral ability to arbitrate and display art.
Instead, we have just the opposite: a commonplace sensibility that no single authority has a monopoly on art
history. No one institution can tell the whole story; there is no longer a dominant “grand narrative” for us to appeal
to.
“I don’t think there is a definition of high art,” says the painter Eric Fischl, who organised “Disturbing Innocence” at
the Flag Art Foundation in New York (until 31 January 2015). “There are just well-executed and creative things.” His
show speaks to the prevalence of pluralism today: it includes work by 50 artists as diverse as Roy Lichtenstein and
Alberto Giacometti, and each piece in the show includes figures of dolls, toys or mannequins. (Fischl’s art is also on
view.) Today, “artists have the benefit of being influenced by work that is not mainstream, or that is not considered
high, great art”, Fischl says.
Shows like these generally emphasise an artist’s individual sensibility, rather than a supposedly objective historical
chronicle. Artist-organised exhibitions tend to be “clearly editorial, as opposed to reportorial”, says Ann Temkin, the
chief curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA. “All curatorial work is subjective, but with shows curated by artists,
the subjectivity of the choices is foregrounded,” she says. And though, today, seemingly all ideas about art carry
some legitimate currency, academic curators still face institutional constraints that artists can simply shrug away.
“I’ve seen shows that artists have put together that seem to have a liberatory force, where things are arranged
without obedience to certain categories that I carry with me as an art historian,” says Helen Molesworth, the chief
curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. This is true of politically inclined shows, says Jens
Hoffmann, the deputy director of the Jewish Museum in New York. “I cannot express my own personal political
opinion through an exhibition,” he says. “But an artist can do that.”
That raises some questions: do the restrictions faced by institutional curators lead to more historically accurate
exhibitions? Does the pluralist attitude that fosters artist-curated shows also open the door to curatorial
misconceptions? Are artists simply more likely to get it wrong than academic curators? Most contemporary thinkers
are dismissive of the idea. The only important question is whether an exhibition is intellectually productive, says the
art historian Bruce Altshuler. “The problem is, what would 'misconstrued' mean?” he asks. “Is the show
illuminating? Good exhibitions can be done by professional curators, or they can be done by artists.”
Taken for granted
The freedom Courbet demanded 160 years ago is taken for granted today. Porous boundaries between artists and
curators; an exponential increase in legitimate cultural perspectives; the lack of a central guiding institution against
which to rebel: these conditions form a landscape in which practically all distinctions are easily collapsible. “Maybe
there isn’t a black and white division between an artist’s [body of work], strictly speaking, and the rest of the
creative things the artist does,” Temkin says. So if artists can be effective curators, it is only a short jump to the idea
that curators can be compelling artists, and that curatorial work is itself a kind of art-making.
Robert Gober’s current retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (until 18 January 2015) includes two galleries
arranged by the artist of work by Anni Albers, Robert Beck, Cady Noland, Nancy Shaver and Joan Semmel. Each
was included in a show Gober organised for the Matthew Marks gallery in 1999, which Marks hoped to sell as a
whole to the Art Institute of Chicago. As he later recalled in the catalogue for Gober’s retrospective, he pitched the
idea to the museum curator James Rondeau, telling him that he would be buying not only work by five separate
artists, but that Rondeau would “always have the option to show them together in one gallery and then you’ll have a
Robert Gober installation as well”.
Nicolas Bourriaud, the director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, says that recycling is the
condition of contemporary life, so that it should come as no surprise that artists are organising shows to develop
new artistic ideas. “We are becoming more and more conscious that you cannot invent something from scratch,” he
says. “There is nothing ex-nihilo.” Many artists are now “producing new pathways though culture and history, and
that’s very close to curating”.
Yet even in a pluralist world, the idea of a curator-as-artist rubs some the wrong way. “I think that’s completely
foolish,” says the US art critic Dave Hickey. “You’re a lot of things, but you’re not an artist. It’s just another way of
‘social relations art’ making the party into the art. It’s a sign of the times, of course, but I don’t think any serious
artist would ever propose that.”
Crafty curators
Indeed, some artists have actively fought the idea. In 1972, the French artist Daniel Buren censured the curator
Harald Szeemann for his handling of Documenta 5. Buren felt that Szeemann had confused curating and artmaking and that Documenta had become one big art piece. “More and more, the subject of an exhibition tends not
be the display of artworks, but the exhibition of the exhibition as a work of art,” Buren wrote. In the hands of crafty
curators like Szeemann, art became “nothing more than a decorative gimmick for the survival of the museum”.
Buren wanted to take back the narrative, something that the artist Dara Birnbaum says is still a concern for many.
“A lot of artists try to curate shows to get back some of the power of contextualising their own work,” she says. “I
think many artists feel strongly that the curatorial position of predominant shows like Documenta have become so
strong that the artist is almost subsumed.”
The institutionalised artist-curator exhibition—and even the idea of the curator-as-artist—is not likely to disappear.
“It is a serious responsibility,” Courbet wrote to Bruyas, “to provide the example of liberty and personality in art.”
Artist-curators inherit Courbet’s legacy in a radically different world.
Me, myself and I
“0.10: The Last Futurist Exhibition of Pictures”, Dobychina Gallery, Petrograd, 1915, organised by Ivan
Puni and Ksenia Boguslavskaya: Around 6,000 people paid one rouble each for admission to this show, which
organisers grandly boasted was the “last” of the Futurist exhibitions. In fact, there was still much left to discuss. The
ever-warring Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin split the 12 other artists included in the show into two factions: on
the one side, those who grouped around Malevich’s pursuit of ineffable spiritualism; and, on the other, those who
followed Tatlin’s insistence on hard, physical, earthly materiality. For at least one critic, both artists were at dead
ends. “It makes no sense to describe this drivel,” he wrote. “Suffice it to say that the insolence of the artists knows
no boundaries.”
“The First Gutai Exhibition”, Ohara Hall, Tokyo, 1955, organised by Jiro Yoshihara and the Gutai Art
Association: Three years before the American artist Allan Kaprow wrote “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock”, where
he argued that Abstract Expressionism led naturally to performance art, a group of Japanese artists led by Jiro
Yoshihara had already made the connection. At “The First Gutai Exhibition” (which was, in fact, the second), Kazuo
Shiraga crawled through mud for 20 minutes while, in another piece, Saburo Murakami tore through layers of
packing paper (above). Inspired by their New York School counterparts, the 16 artists in the show also exhibited
abstract pictures, all in the service of “direct emotion and direct connections between the spirit and the material”, as
Yoshihara explained on the show’s invitation card. In the exhibition catalogue Sadamasa Motonaga offered
observations about the work of Yozo Ukita that could apply to the show as a whole: “There is something very
strange about this work.”
“Freeze”, PLA Building, London, 1988, organised by Damien Hirst:Damien Hirst was just 23 years old and a
second-year art student at Goldsmiths College when he launched his career with this exhibition in 1988. Even then,
Hirst was an entrepreneur. The artist cut through red tape to get permission from the Port Authority of London to
transform a disused gymnasium into an art gallery. He managed to secure funding from the property developers
Olympia & York for the show’s catalogue. He even made sure that important visitors like the curators Norman
Rosenthal and Nicholas Serota and the collector Charles Saatchi saw the exhibition (he supposedly sent taxis for
all three). “Frowned on in the same way as self-published poetry, wistful attempts at exhibitions by friends and costudents have normally failed,” wrote one critic in the Guardian. Yet there was no way of getting around it: Freeze,
the writer concluded, “is a success”.
‘Disturbing Innocence’
By Ken Johnson | December 25, 2014
"Disturbing Innocence": a Charles Manson figure in John Waters's "Playdate."
Credit John and Amy Phelan
At the start of “Disturbing Innocence,” an entertaining and provocative exhibition organized by the
painter Eric Fischl, you encounter ominous images of suburban homes in photographs by James
Casebere and Gregory Crewdson, paintings by Peter Drake and a sculpture by Roy Lichtenstein.
Moving into the main part of the exhibition, you discover what goes on behind closed doors: a riot of
polymorphous perversity in the form of paintings, photographs and sculptures, by more than 50
artists, representing children, dolls, mannequins, robots and toys.
Here you find men in hats and suit jackets strangling nude hermaphroditic children in a large
watercolor by Henry Darger, and a naked Barbie-type doll lying spread-eagle, her face having been
repeatedly slashed as if she were the victim of an extremely violent rape, in a black-and-white
photograph by Cindy Sherman.
Haunting black-and-white photographs by Ralph Eugene Meatyard depict dolls abandoned in
melancholy situations. An uncannily lifelike doll representing a young girl, approximately half lifesize, is by Morton Bartlett, who also made the clothes she wears. You get the feeling that he wished
that she were a real girl.
A Pop-style painting by John Wesley pictures nude twin girls doing a gymnastic routine. A man and
a woman, naked and made of stuffed fabric, meet face to face in a sculpture by Louise Bourgeois. A
sculpture by John Waters called “Playdate” consists of two life-size baby dolls in pajamas with the
grown-up heads of Michael Jackson and Charles Manson.
These and similarly charged works by Charles LeDray, Robert Gober, Loretta Lux, Laurie Simmons,
Jim Nutt and many others suggest that what America needs now more than anything is a good
therapist.
Disturbing Innocence
By Dan Piepenbring | October 31, 2014
Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, Kirsten, Star, 1997.
The artist Eric Fischl has curated “Disturbing Innocence,” a group show on display at The FLAG Art
Foundation through January 31, 2015. More than fifty artists, historical and contemporary, are
represented in the exhibition, which features work with a focus on surrogates – mannequins, dolls,
robots, toys – and “presents a subversive and escapist world at odds with the values and pretensions
of polite society.”
Fischl says in a preface to the catalogue:
Curiously, “toy,” “robot,” “mannequin,” and “doll” are all nouns with negative connotations
embedded in their definitions, including phrases like “something of little value,” “non-important,”
“subservient,” “a non-entity,” “without original thought,” “controlled by others,” “a pretty girl of
little intelligence,” and “disposable.” The very thought of this goes against the profound
experiential impact these supposedly trivial attachments have had on our imaginations and
within our emotional development as children. It flies in the face of what we know from our own
essential experience with our toys. The difference between children playing with their toys and
adult artists using toys and other surrogates for their art, the way that male and female artists use
these surrogates differently, are the crux of this exhibition.
INEZ VAN LAMSWEERDE AND VINOODH MATADIN KIRSTEN, STAR, 1997
Disturbing Innocence is open at The FLAG Art Foundation through January 31, 2015
The iconic image of Kirsten shot by Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin first appeared in Visionaire
10 BEAUTY. The young girl, made up by our own James Kaliardos, is lit “to the gods” and appears stunningly
angelic. Yet, there’s something about the image: although her eyes aren’t completely closed, only the white
of her eyeballs shows. The 1997 image is part of The FLAG Art Foundation’s new exhibition Disturbing
Innocence. Featuring over 50 historical and contemporary artists whose use of dolls, toys, mannequins,
robots, and other surrogates forms a deep and powerfully expressive genre, the exhibition poses profound
questions surrounding social constructs of youth, beauty, transformation, violence, sexuality, gender,
identity, and loneliness.
Eric Fischl Questions America’s Obsession With Dolls
By Ian Epstein | 12.10.2014
“Next to the Aura Rosenberg portrait, you have the Richard Prince rephoto of Garry Gross's photo of prepubescent Brooke Shields. And then
there is this Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin [photo,] Kirsten,
Star. Each photo has its sense of turning a female — a child — into a doll,
dehumanizing it. By conflating real children and dolls, these works
challenge the ideas of objects of desire.” [Eric Fischl]
Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, Kirsten, Star, 1997.
The sacred and the abject have always danced around one another. Eric Fischl, who began painting in the '70s,
has moved with grace between the two, capturing the sterile beauty of the suburbs of his youth — he grew up in
Port Washington, New York — and the troubled people who inhabit them. Both his aesthetic and his subject matter,
which he found through his own complicated relationship to his mother (an alcoholic who eventually committed
suicide), allow for an uneasy kind of voyeurism that exposes the security of domesticity and reveals a deep
isolation that no one can quite escape. In Sleepwalker, an early painting of his, a naked, adolescent boy with his
knees slightly bowed and his back hunched stands with water up to his shins in a kiddie pool, jerking off. In Bad
Boy, which Fischl painted two years later, a grown woman sprawls on a bed as brilliant filaments of light trace the
contours of her torso with the alternating slit shadows characteristic of Venetian blinds. She lies there as a boy
leans against a dresser, staring at her and, behind his back, slipping his hand into her purse.
Fischl worked with a mix of erudition, ennui, and humor that made his paintings, at first glance, accessible. They
often trailed off, however, into unanswered questions or unresolved narratives. But in the years that followed his
career's success, Fischl has tried his hand at putting together exhibitions of other people’s paintings, poems, and
photographs. When Glenn Fuhrman, founder of the FLAG Art Foundation on 25th Street, approached Eric Fischl
about curating a show, Fischl proposed "Disturbing Innocence," a show with clear affinities to his own work and
based on another broad question he’d been turning over in his mind. "Why, in a country that is arguably the richest,
most powerful, most technologically advanced in the world,” he wondered, “do we find so much of our artistic talent
playing with dolls? Is it something about a profound ambivalence towards the future? A terror of the future that
causes a regression? Is it about individual artists not really feeling like they're connecting to a bigger public, so
they're basically left playing with themselves, which is the arena of dolls?” SEEN spoke with Eric Fischl about
several of the works he included in the resulting show, "Disturbing Innocence," which runs through January 31.
Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 1999.
"There are two Cindy Sherman photographs of these dolls, one male and one female. The female is shredded.
She's scarred, cut up, brutalized, spread-legged, offering herself, but in a way that's so self-wounding."
Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 1999.
"The guy is this hideous oaf, this hirsute, overmuscled body and pretty-boy face — it's a shocking indictment of
maleness."
Hans Bellmer, La Toupie, 1938.
"It's almost like a plume of smoke, but there's a plume of breasts. As they go up, they get bigger and bigger and
bigger, which is very much a male thing — you know, fantasy fetish humor."
Amy Bennett, Property Line, 2007.
“The first thing you see are your stereotypical visions of a tranquil suburb.”
James Casebere, Landscape With Houses (Dutchess County)#9, 2011.
“James Casebere’s Landscape With Houses (Dutchess County) #9, 2011, is a daytime scene of a town, a New
England–y kind of town with a football field, and when you turn the corner …”
James Casebere, Landscape With Houses #11, 2011.
“… you see the nighttime view of it. You see that the town has caught fire. It loses its sense of security right away.
You immediately lose that sense of order and well-being.”
George Condo, Embracing Lovers, 2009.
"There’s this George Condo painting of a couple in a violently powerful embrace. Their faces are all teeth — big
eyes and teeth. They are in a sexual position where both the male and the female seem equally avaricious in their
sexual appetite and their physical need. They feel equally dangerous.”
Will Cotton, Brittle House, 2000.
“In the kind of crumbly nature of Brittle House, there’s something slightly off, there’s some undercurrent that's
present, but not overt in a way that you think about it. It’s a fantasy; sweet and childlike.”
James Croak, Dirt Baby, 1986.
“Is it a cast doll or is it a cast baby? It has that resonance of the bodies that they found in Pompeii, which had been
buried and burned in the lava. When they poured concrete into those holes, they came up with whole bodies that
had been frozen into tragic positions and burned to ashes, leaving just the negative space there. This has that a
similar quality of something that has been recaptured from a tragedy.”
E.V. Day, Mummified Barbies, 1991–Present.
"Let me say this about the exhibition: The way that the female artists use the dolls and toys and mannequins is
fundamentally different from the way the male artists do. The female artists are exploring, challenging, exploding
stereotypes. When a woman mummifies a Barbie, that makes a pretty big statement, I think. In E.V. Day’s
mummifying of Barbie (putting her to “rest”), she creates a kind of jewelry display — the silvers and golds, the
shininess and preciousness of them — which also take on the characteristics of sex toys.”
Sarah Lucas, Realidad, 2013.
"In the exhibition, this Sarah Lucas sculpture of a woman with like six breasts is juxtaposed with the Hans Bellmer.
She’s resting her head and her arms on her bent legs, conveying a feeling of utter exhaustion. It seems to take on
the weight of [male] expectations, as well as the responsibility of nurturing.”
Aura Rosenberg, Laurie Simmons/Lena Dunham, 1996-1998.
“On one of the most troubling walls in the exhibition, there's an Aura Rosenberg portrait of a young Lena Dunham
being turned into a puppet. Dental floss was used to create the separation of jaw from face in keeping with the
“puppet” effect. It is Lena’s mother, Laurie Simmons, who is behind her, holding the floss, adding another
dimension to this really intelligent and disturbing photograph.”
Ivan Witenstein, The World’s Slippery Rim Is a Dry Hole, 2001-2005.
"It's Wonder Woman and Alice from Alice in Wonderland, and Alice is sort of trying to crawl back up inside Wonder
Woman."
DISTURBING INNOCENCE, curated by Eric Fischl, at the FLAG Art Foundation
By Paul Laster | January 2015
Martín Gutierrez Real Doll, Raquel 3, 2013 Archival inkjet print 12 x 16 inches
Courtesy of the artist and RYAN LEE, New York
Exploring the art world’s fascination with dolls, toys, mannequins, robots and other real life substitutes, artist
and guest curator Eric Fischl assembled work by more than 50 like-minded artists—both living and dead—that
make use of surrogates to address issues of youth, beauty, transformation, violence, sexuality, identity, gender
and domesticity.
Describing it as “genre that has become a global movement,” Fischl began the exhibition with representations
of homes, including Will Cotton’s 2000 painting Brittle House, depicting a dwelling made from peanut brittle
that plays to our desires, and moves on to images of domesticity, such as Laurie Simmons’ 1979 color
photograph New Bathroom/Woman Standing, which uses a toy figure and dollhouse furniture to replicate
reality, and Martin Gutierrez’ 2013 inkjet print Real Doll, Raquel 3, which finds the artist eerily playing the role
of a sex doll abandoned in the corner of a living room.
Dolls are also the subject matter for photographer Dare Wright, a Canadian-American artist/author who’s
famous for her 1957 children’s book The Lonely Doll. Her 1968 photograph Edith And Big Bad Bill: Little Bear To
The Rescue shows a female doll tied to a tree that’s being freed by a teddy bear—though without the title one
might easily read the image in reverse, as a child being restrained by a bear. Meanwhile, the artistic duo Inez
van Lamsweede and Vinoodh Matadin’s 1997 color photo Kirsten, Star portrays a young girl made-up like a
porcelain doll.
Sexuality takes center stage in Steve Gianakos 2011 black-and-white painting The Farm Had Been Rescinded
Just A Month Earlier, which shows a young woman in a compromising position atop a troth full of pigs, and
John Wesley’s 1968 canvas Caryn and Robin, which reveals two nude girls gleefully playing while nearly
bumping their private parts.
Fabricated figures are the focus of the Chapman Brothers’ 1997 sculpture Doggy, depicting two girls joined at
the waist like Siamese twins that are wearing nothing but sneakers, and John Waters’ 2006 sculpture Playdate,
which features baby-like versions of Michael Jackson and Charles Manson looking curiously at one another.
Speaking about the piece, Waters said, “Imagine if they ever had met as children. Maybe they might have
worked things out and it would have ended better for both of them, but you wouldn’t want either one of them
with your children—let's put it that way!"
Other works that feature real people imitating dolls—similar to Inez and Vinoodh’s angelic picture Kirsten,
Star—are Aura Rosenberg’s 1996-98 portrait of Lena Dunham as a ventriloquist’s dummy being controlled by
her mother (the previously mentioned artist in the exhibition Laurie Simmons) and Loretta Lux’ 2000 digitally
enhanced portrait of a young boy in a ruffled collar, set against an imaginary background of cloudy skies, that’s
straight out of a Renaissance painting.
Morton Bartlett Young Girl with Bow and Dress and Stuffed Dog, 1950, printed 2012
Unique digital print 14 x 11 inches. Courtesy of Marion Harris, NY
In a recent interview in Dazed & Confused, Fischl summarized the exhibition in this way: “Disturbing Innocence
is a sword that cuts both ways. Is the exhibition challenging and disruptive to our notions of childhood
innocence, or is it positing that childhood is, in itself, disturbed? The experience of each artwork in the show
pulls the viewer in a variety of directions—some humorous, playful and tender—some not so much.”
A vibrant show with lots of challenging imagery, Disturbing Innocence opened a vein of psychological art
making that runs deep back into modernism yet revealed by example that it is as expressively vital today.