| Much has
been made about Fiona Rae and
her fellow British New-Wavers.
Rae is both celebrated and
criticized for her habit of
copping the trademarks of
American Abstractionists and Pop
artists, but at the heart of her
second-generation appropriation
is an analytical concern for
technique. Her canvases are
compilations of the greatest
technical hits of the twentieth
century, but they have been
dissected and reassembled to be
new and, if not innovative, at
least controversial. One critic
who visited Rae in her studio
noted that the room was
scattered with open books on
Basquiat, Twombly, and
Rauschenberg, and littered with
snapshots of graffiti and
commercial typography. The heap
of cultural detritus struck the
critic as funny -- not odd, but
“ha-ha” funny. The revered and
the maligned mingle on Rae’s
canvases to the same effect: the
mix of audacity and genuine
expression are as surprising as
a punch line.
Rae’s paintings are serious,
but not deep. They are
expressive, but cool. A Pollock
squiggle is simply a squiggle,
not the symbolic torture of the
artist’s soul. Just as it was in
the 1960s, continual
appropriation and juxtaposition
works to flatten cultural
elements out -- the targets, the
Expressionist smears, the
dribbles are all copies of
copies. Rae’s work plays in this
arena of the flat and empty
signifier. The Miró-inspired
biomorphic forms, the
Twombly-esque scratches, and the
Disney allusions that critics
love to identify: all fly past
in Rae’s conglomeration of
cultural influences and adopted
techniques. She admits that she
shares the mockingbird aesthetic
of filmmaker Quentin Tarantino,
borrowing motifs and moods from
all genres to create her own
work. She sees her painting
process as a form of editing: “A
whole painting is a series of
edits. To edit is to shape
something and adjust it and cut
things out. To sound bite is to
take it out and present it as a
summing up moment. There may
well be sound bites in painting
as a consequence of skillful
editing.”
Editing is important for an
artist who describes her process
as one of continual association.
An idea never has a chance to
reach fruition before another
arises to supersede it. In her
early work, her editing took the
form of isolation, with cells of
abstract paintings stopped at
the hard edges of a white
background. As her work matured,
her canvases elongated into
balanced compositions that
traversed all modes of technique
and color, capturing her thought
processes. With an explanation
that sums up well her content
and technique, Rae has noted,
“The improvisation is a
permanent record of a series of
transient moments.” The cultural
allusions in her work can be
read as a kind of social
timeline, a two-dimensional
representation of the transient
moments in recent popular
history. Which is why critics
love to talk about her -- they
love that they get it. Those who
praise her are delighted that
they’re in on the joke. Those
who sneer when a painting looks
like an early story board for
“The Matrix” don’t like having
their erudition rendered
obsolete: they can’t unpack her
latent obsessions or influences
because everything is obvious.
Either way, there’s no denying
that Rae’s canvases play with
the surface of our culture.
-Source: artandculture.com |
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