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"Red
Curtain," by Shawn Spencer
2004.
Oil on Birch
Edward Thorp Gallery
Backstage
Guide to the Dangerous Territories - Sara Clarke
I
am standing in an art gallery in Chelsea, sipping white wine, and bantering
with my fellow art opening attendees. Under my breath I am humming the
theme song to a cartoon from my childhood. The cartoon was called Maya
the Bee, and it featured a spunky
honeybee who went on crazy bee-sized adventures with her various insect
pals. It could have been an animated version of Shawn Spencer’s
work in Children of Paradise.
There
is something vaguely haunting about Spencer’s insect portraits,
as if the anthropomorphized cast of some Saturday morning cartoon grew
up and started getting more serious roles. Her moth-like subjects exhibit
more personality than most humans I know. They could leap off their two-dimensional
panels and do a soft-shoe routine or tell me the best joke I’ve
heard in months. But the dark, dramatically lit backgrounds tell a more
serious tale. These insect actors aren’t auditioning for sitcoms
or romantic comedies. They stare out of their panels as through the mesh
of a roach motel or the footlights of a stage, interior monologues beating
that familiar performers’ tattoo of “Please like me, please
like me, please like me…”
“The
Manic Lover” has a burlesque feel. This is butterfly as aging Vegas
showgirl, parting her gilded and feathery wings once more before an up-and-coming
ingénue kicks her down the stairs, ending her career. “Guide
to the Dangerous Territories” does not feature a butterfly, but
instead a coral-colored snake languishing in a cypress tree, a lush and
glossy illustration from an exotic travelogue or a fancy new edition of
Heart of Darkness. Spencer’s
snake is one of the few creatures in this show that doesn’t seem
at all desperate. Rather than performing for us, she watches the passing
parade of art-viewers from the safety of her cypress branch. You can hear
her inwardly critiquing our clothes, our dates, the prestige of our post-gallery
weekend plans. “Don’t call us,” she hisses. “We’ll
call you.”
Other
paintings seem Dutch Master-esque, all heavy chiaroscuro and sunlight
bursting through windows flung open. Except, you know, with bugs. Like
painters of that era, Spencer puts special emphasis on light and narrative,
as well as texture. Wide brushstrokes across a white ground create the
delicate look of feathers, butterfly wings, Spanish moss, and other things
too fragile to be touched. Washes of color form unbelievably expressive
eyes.
It’s
incredibly figurative, yet also process-oriented. Looking at Spencer’s
brushstrokes, I can’t help but imagine the exact size, shape, and
texture of her brushes. I can visualize every movement they make. I even
see, somehow, the way she considers the framing, like a patient photographer
of insect headshots and modeling portfolios. I play over in my mind each
step, from the lumberjacks cutting down the birch trees that make up her
panels to the final glazing that illuminates the water of her swamps like
fresh ink.
This
process is echoed in a series of small works on paper, with swamp plant-life
as their subjects rather than animals. Two pieces featuring irises seem
to run lines back and forth, trading soliloquies in anticipation of the
day when they are not mere wetland flowers, but stars, baby. Leafy willow
branches form kick lines into the foregrounds of another, giving the evil
eye to the aging moth showgirl on the opposite wall. “We will have
your job someday, just you wait,” the nubile young leaves brag.
Their synchronized dance looks effortless and smooth, like Spencer’s
painting. A well-rehearsed and seamless play within a play, on a stage
set of luminous black panels.
"Absorption in Theatricality,"
by Shawn Spencer
2004, Oil on Birch Panel
Edward
Thorp Gallery
A Note on Shawn Spencer
- Morgan Meis
People have been thinking about what
makes human beings different from other animals for a long time. It could
even be argued that one of the things that specifically characterizes
human beings is their interest in what distinguishes human beings from
other kinds of beings. This is the interesting, though not necessarily
vicious, circle that Aristotle was one of the first to talk about. Human
beings are the kinds of creatures that ask questions about what makes
things the way they are, he said, more or less. As he formulated it, human
beings have the capacity to think about ousia, essence. And they tend to direct that question at
themselves. What is it to be a human being, they ask. And in asking it
they often ask the negative question as well. What does it mean not to
be a human being? Why is that thing over there a ‘whatever it is’ and
what makes it that ‘whatever it is’ that it is.
In thinking about what makes humans
human, the question of thought always comes up. To return to Aristotle
for a moment, he liked to define human beings as animals that have logos.
Logos can mean a lot of things in ancient Greek but for Aristotle it served
as shorthand for ‘rational thought’. The difference between human beings
and bees, for instance (Aristotle liked bees), is that bees are not able
to generalize from experience, they are not able to use concepts. Human
beings wouldn’t be the creatures that they are without all their concept
using. But, of course, it is one thing to say that this is the case, which
certainly must be true, and another to say what concepts really are. Everyone
knows that they are using concepts
all the time and no one has ever done a satisfactory job of defining exactly
what they are. Reason, thus,
continues to be something unquestionably real and unquestionably elusive
at the same time. Every human knows how to be human but no one agrees
about what that means. That is an interesting situation to be in.
That situation has always been interesting
for art. Art, actually, is another thing that human beings tend to do,
though few of them agree about what, precisely, they are doing. The paintings
of Shawn Spencer are part of the history of human beings thinking about
these kinds of things. Her painting Departure of the Unbeloved
is a good example of just such ideas and problems. It is also a very modern
painting, if modern can be used in the broadest sense, the sense that
modern people have particular ways of thinking about themselves and their
world. Shawn Spencer often paints animals. Departure of the
Unbeloved is, in fact, a painting of an animal. A bird, to be
precise. The bird is standing
on a ledge and there are two hills in the background and a vast and empty
sky. The bird isn’t looking out toward the sky but backward, and down.
The most remarkable thing about Spencer’s
bird is the way it is standing and the way it is looking. One wants to
say, “that bird has an interesting look on its face.” But it isn’t usual
to accede things like faces and looks to birds. It is true, of course,
that animals manifest all kinds of behavior and we think that we know
what is going on with them. ‘That animal is scared’, we can say, or tired.
Sometimes we can even say things like ‘that animal is bored, or crazed’
though as we do we already recognize that we’ve gone a little too far.
We also come across instances where human representation has ‘humanized’
some animal or another. Bugs Bunny, for instance, isn’t much like a bunny
at all. The morphology of ‘bunny’ has been completely discarded but for
tail and ears. He doesn’t move or make noises or hold himself like a bunny.
He is more like a person in a bunny suit, though he has special, vaguely
bunny-like powers. There are thousands, millions of similar examples,
many of them intriguing in their own ways.
Spencer’s bird is, however, something
different. The legs are wrong. Morphology has certainly been toyed with
there. The legs have a humanoid quality to them, a bird simply couldn’t
have legs quite like that. But they are unmistakably bird-like too. And
the wings are like wings, they have a quality of ‘wingness’, but they
are hanging down in a manner that is not like a bird at all. The entire
pose, the legs, the wing-arms, the tilt of the head has basic bird morphology
but that morphology has been transcended. No bird could be standing the
way this bird is standing, no bird could act this way. But it isn’t a
fantasy bird, it is a study in the nature of things. The disturbing and
uncanny nature of the painting is there to see, but it is difficult to
put one’s finger on.
Ultimately, the bird is expressing
something between lethargy and disappointment. To express disappointment
is a complicated thing. It requires the combination of a thousand things.
It requires a whole world and a stance toward that world. One has to be
able to project things like hopes and wishes. One must have a sense of
oneself as a being with identity and of one’s continuation in time. One
must have a sense of the future and the past. To be disappointed, one
must approach the world from a place where counter factuals are possible,
where things could be otherwise and can be imagined to be so. To be disappointed
is to live in a world where possibility and actuality have complex relations.
But in the contact that one has with birds in this world, it is simply
impossible to treat them, truly, as creatures for whom genuine disappointment
is a possibility.
So, Shawn Spencer’s painting of a bird
is a phenomenological study in ways of being. We know something deep and
true about the disappointment of this bird simply by realizing that it
could only be acting this way by participating in the world in the same
way that we do. The bird has entered into the particular human way of
things. And this has an implication for concepts as well. Concepts are
as much about a certain way of holding oneself, a certain tilt of the
head, as they are about the Platonic kernel of meaning that lurks in every
sentence. That kernel may, indeed, have a universality to it but, at the
same time, there would be no utterance at all but for the kinds of creatures
that stand, and look, and hold their arms just so at the end of the day
when nothing is going right. The bird in Spencer’s painting is communicating
with us as a rational agent. Perhaps the bird is a bastard, perhaps he
earned his disappointment. It doesn’t matter. The bird is showing us a
lot about what it means to be us and that is an extraordinary thing.
Alate
- Josh Tyree
In the paintings of Shawn Spencer,
there is an inquisition into the details of natural beauty. Spencer paints
moths, butterflies, frogs, trees, and snakes on luminous birch panels.
These creatures are neither designed to be “nice” nature paintings (though
they are absorbing and infinitely intricate) nor specimens. But they are
also not ironic mockeries of the nature-painting genre.
Their deceptive simplicity would be
difficult to write about were it not for clues in the titles: a moth pinned
in a spotlight is called “Absorption in Theatricality”; a garden-of-Eden-like
snake in a tree above a swamp becomes a “Guide to the Dangerous Territories.”
Something happens – ideas, concepts, narratives – and that something belies
the easy approach to Spencer’s work as being simply lovely to look at.
Animals are not supposed to have narratives
(or secrets), and, in a way, that may be part of what Spencer is getting
at, among other things. I don’t know how Spencer manages to give a moth
or a frog what looks like a fully-fledged personality, any more than I
know how she commits herself to the painstaking, seemingly endless patterns,
lines, and brushstrokes in a pair of wings. But that personality is not
the one of a dog playing cards or a Wegman puppy dressed up in heels.
It is a personality that forces back the gaze and resists penetration
or understanding. It is alien and strange but yet somehow familiar. The
effect can be uncanny.
In one panel, “Protagonist,” an alate
creature is simply resting on a pebble in the middle of a soft and vaguely
Chinese semi-abstract backdrop. That is just right: the moth is the hero
of mothworld, even though we have no idea what the story is and wouldn’t
be able to begin understanding it. Protagonist of what? I’d like to ask.
The whole proposition behind the question is wrong, because the only way
I can think of the mothworld is in terms of a version of my own concerns.
And the moth is not thinking about getting another glass of wine or tallying
its grocery list on the way home or anything else. A moth cannot think
of itself as theatrical, can it?
After the opening I had a discussion
with a philosophy student in which I proposed Montaigne’s idea of animal
intelligence as a way of getting at the paintings. In “An Apology for
Raymond Sebond,” Montaigne argues that some animals are more intelligent
than some humans, a proposition taken up by Derrida’s remark in Of
Grammatology that the concept of writing
may not be unique to the human species, any more than writing is the exclusive
province of civilized cultures. But to apply Montaigne’s idea to Spencer’s
work is not quite right, because it is not a human measure that is being
suggested, even though the notion of a non-human template is logically
impossible, a paradox that for me is the heart of the matter. Man is not
the measure of all things after all.
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OTR Comment - April, 2004