Photos of men climaxing. A Technicolor clown. A panel of built-up acrylic spelling out the words WHAT IS PSYCHEDELIC––no question mark. Given her work’s striking heterogeneity, it feels right that Aura Rosenberg’s overdue retrospective was divided across two locations, the Mishkin Gallery at Baruch College in Manhattan and Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The split spatialized her oeuvre’s overarching concern: holding contradictions and oppositions in the unstable equilibrium she calls dialectic.
Like the artist herself, Rosenberg’s art is slyly funny. But un-like its maker, it is decidedly not friendly. It seems calculated to resist casual consumption, at times seeming to parody the postcritical ease of much contemporary art. Take her closely cropped headshots of famous male artists such as Mike Kelley, Mike Smith, and her husband, John Miller, apparently captured mid-orgasm. They are hilarious, but also somehow morbid, the men’s expressions oddly pained. Or consider The Dialectical Porn Rock, 1989–93: stones piled Smithson style in a corner of the gallery, lacquered with old-timey smut. Women’s faces smiled and laughed from smaller round pebbles, their inviting expressions asking us to join in the prurient fun. But I found some of the stones so viscerally grotesque (a man cheerfully autofellating) and others so brutal (a woman being spit-roasted) that they provoked a prudish embarrassment I didn’t know I had in me. Likewise, Rorschach, 2014,a metallic print overlaid with acrylic paint. It shows a porno actress as she spreads her anus—the image is repeated four times in an X-shaped kaleidoscopic formation—her stiletto heel suggestively positioned to foreshadow penetration. Facing this work, I giggled immaturely. But it also made me terribly uneasy, and I hope I never see it again.
In Rosenberg’s work, spontaneous bodily pleasure is both promised and withheld. The overpainting of Rorschach, for instance, materializes a logic of mediation already present in the underlying image. Here, porn does not document desire so much as fabricate it––human see, human do. Likewise The Astrological Way, 2012–13: Inspired by a vintage black-light poster featuring sex positions based on the zodiac, Rosenberg assembled a group of performers, in sets of two, to re-create these smutty star signs. The artist provided them with a gallon of white acrylic paint to cover themselves in so that they could imprint their nude bodies on large sheets of black velvet. The resulting images are crisp and precise, implying a frozenness at odds with the convulsive passion of the intercourse they describe, evincing a dialectic between action and structure, performance and script. Fucking is structured like a language.
Rorschach and The Astrological Way denaturalize sex, the former through superimposition, the latter via discretization. It is hardly accidental, moreover, that they do so with paint. Rosenberg thereby synthesizes two primary concerns of her artistic generation: first, a feminist critique of sexual norms and, second, a postmodern reckoning with painting as a medium. In these works, the latter recovers its historic function as surrogate flesh, not in some amnesiac revival of painterly plenitude––an ideal irretrievably bound to misogynistic fantasy––but rather to overcome an impasse between dematerialized and more bodily practices within feminist art.
Consider Louise Lawler/Felix, 1996, a photograph from Rosenberg’s long-running, “Who Am I? What Am I? Where Am I?,” 1996–2008. That series began when the artist went to pick up her daughter from school and found that the children were all wearing face paint. Later, Rosenberg collaborated with a group of other artists––John Baldessari, Kelley, Laurie Simmons, and Kiki Smith––on works that explore the scenography of childhood. Here, Lawler costumed her son Felix like a clown, whom Rosenberg then photographed as a disembodied face, painted lurid yellow against a vivid-red background. Against the slogan-cum–doxa “the end of painting,” the repressed returns in this playful allusion to the Janus-faced innocence/guilt of painterly tradition, wherein artists from Jean-Antoine Watteau to Pablo Picasso have alternated between two avatars: those of unsullied child and tragic harlequin.
Unlike her modernist precursors, however, Rosenberg does not present these works as self-images but examines them as images. After all, the more knowingly one seeks naïveté, the more clownish one becomes. Yet, as she exposes this dialectic, the artist does not disavow her modernist inheritance but lovingly unsettles its whos, whats, and whys.
