I decided
early on that my review of Cynthia Camlin and Irene Roderick's show
would argue not for the quality of the work, which is indisputable,
but for its importance. In my opinion, both Camlin and Roderick
actively participate in one of the most pressing debates facing
artists today: the status of visual pleasure in contemporary art.
I would first like to take a moment to consider what it is that
links these two seemingly disparate artists. To begin with, both
Camlin and Roderick flirt openly with the distinction between abstraction
and representation.Take the deer in Camlin's paintings. On one hand,
they are extraordinarily lifelike; their eyes and hair, in particular,
are rendered with meticulous attention to detail.The exact opposite
is true, however, of their antlers. With little regard for reality,
they careen and swoop into a variety of configurations, each more
implausible than the next. Roderick's paintings operate in a similar
fashion. From a distance they resolve into recognizable objects:
a tank, a motorcycle, and an architectural facade. Up close, however,
they dissolve into a maze of dots, doodles, swirls and patterns,
some vaguely reminiscent of female anatomy. Indeed, the abstraction
of Roderick's work proceeds almost entirely from this. Its decorative
quality, which the artist exaggerates almost to the point of parody.
Here, as elsewhere, Roderick explores what we might think of as
the "gender politics" of decoration. More specifically,
she embraces decora tion—maligned because of its perceived relationship
to "women's work"—precisely so as to redeem it as a viable
aesthetic strategy. Both Camlin and Roderick use color to heighten
the abstraction of their paintings. While Camlin's palette tends
either towards the somber or the acidic, Roderick's consists solely
of white and pink. In each case, the artist severs color from description.
There are thematic parallels between Camlin and Roderick's work
as well. Both artists, for instance, make allusions to war, conflict
and aggression. Indeed, it is tempting to read their paintings and
sculptures as allegories of the current historical moment (almost
all are from 2003). The deer in paintings such as Quaint Customs
I and II, for instance, are represented in pairs, their heads lowered
and antlers locked in fierce combat. Camlin herself describes these
paintings as part of an ongoing investigation into urban sprawl,
which wreaks its own kind of violence on the Unlike Camlin's, the
subject matter of Roderick's work evokes outright militarism. Accompanying
the painting of a tank are several sculptures consisting of helmets
that the artist covered with pills, pearls, toy soldiers and, in
one instance, grenades. As she does in much of her work, Roderick
exploits the tension between content and style, depicting icons
of masculine virility in a manner reminiscent of stereotypically
feminine pursuits like embroidery or needlecraft.The gender of Roderick's
work is in every way overdetermined—but purposefully so.
Above all, Camlin and Roderick share an approach to painting. Each
manages to form a productive union between modernism and conceptualism,
albeit with highly idiosyncratic results. Indeed, I would characterize
their work as a kind of conceptual painting insofar as it refuses
to allow style and technique to take precedence over content and
subject matter. Upon first glance, it might seem strange to describe
such beautiful paintings (and they are beautiful—haunting and melancholic
in the case of Camlin, lacy and elegant in the case of Roderick)
as conceptual. Conceptual artists of the 1960s regarded beauty with
disdain, even suspicion, as did artists associated with so-called
identity politics in the 1990s. What Camlin and Roderick demonstrate,
however, is that beauty is by no means an anathema to either intellectual
inquiry or social critique. Indeed, each in her own way instrumentalizes
beauty—and, by extension, visual pleasure—so as to address a variety
of pressing intellectual and social issues. Kelly Baum is the Assistant
Curator of American and Contemporary Art at the Blanton Museum of
Art in Austin, Texas, and a Ph.D. candidate in art history at the
University of Delaware.
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