TALA MADANI
THERE’S SOMETHING FAMILIAR about these men; if we don’t know them, then we know others like them. Wandering around the house in their undershirts, engaged in ridiculous horseplay, they are our eternally awkward uncles, the boorish family members you hope your friends never meet.
Or no, actually. Such an identification with the situations depicted in Tala Madani’s “Cake-Men” series (begun in 2005; all works referred to here are from 2005) depends on ignoring the constant reminders of their cultural specificity. The first hint might come from pictures within the pictures––portraits of men in turbans (perhaps ayatollahs?) that hang on the walls behind the men in paintings such as Eftar or Kneeling. After those details are noted, however, it suddenly seems obvious that the Iranian-born, American-educated Madani is recollecting the homeland she left in 1995 at the age of fourteen. Her artfully crude, expressionistically cartoony paintings capture the stereotypes of ethnic identity without losing the idiosyncratic details that allow a certain humoral quiddity to shine through. Though I feel they could have been recollected from my own Jewish New Jersey, these bald, grizzled figures are definitely men of the Muslim Middle East.
Madani’s work first caught my eye at the Volta Show in Basel last summer; the 2006 Yale MFA will have her first solo exhibition at Lombard-Freid Projects in New York in February. The headlong ease and assurance with which Madani addresses her medium will delight any lover of pure painting, but her disabused look at her subjects is intended to leave viewers troubled and questioning. “I am interested in presenting men as phenomena.” Madani has written. (In her artist’s statement Madani does not address what is perhaps an even more obvious question: What does it mean to paint “stereotypical men of the Middle East”––as she describes them––in a country currently making war on men not so far away from these?) But a woman painting men is still a contentious subject. When Ellen Altfest organized an exhibition at I-20 in New York this past summer titled “Men,” consisting of paintings of men made by women, the artists Nicole Eisenman and A.L. Steiner sent a letter objecting to the show’s premise. They wrote, “Men are problematic on every level, emotionally, spiritually, economically, physically.”
That’s certainly how they––excuse me, we––appear to Madani. A sort of quotidian slapstick appears throughout the “Cake-Men” paintings (with cake replacing the pie in the face). Yet even when nothing untoward seems to be taking place, in paintings such as Communal Blowing and Cake and Book, there is a sinister undertone. A violent humor invests the men’s shenanigans. The recurrent cake of the series title suggests not only aging but also the opposite––regression, the fantasy of a return to childhood. For Madani, it also evokes a chain of associations: “blowing out the candles, blowing out the fire, blowing up”; it bespeaks an incendiary atmosphere in which the candle is more like a fuse. What’s funny, though, is just how coolly one of the men in Hands In shoves a cake (with oddly smoking candles) down on the head of his companion. And why does the man in Carrying Cake kneel on all fours, a cake perched on his naked back? There is some sort of free-floating perversity at work, which becomes more explicit in Blowing: One character, again on hands and knees, balances a cake on his behind, as another guy puffs at the candles.
Madani’s larger paintings reveal a complementary aspect of her art, as if deliberately illustrating Clement Greenberg’s dichotomy between “the intensity of the easel picture and the blandness of the mural.” (Imagine if Sue Williams had painted her de Kooningesque abstractions of 2000 simultaneously with her raw notes on victimhood, made a decade earlier.) Limited in their palette to just three or four mostly bright, keyed-up colors, these works open up the hothouse domestic interiors of the small paintings to some unidentified open plane; individuality is effaced as the human figure is turned into something halfway between a motif in a pattern and a letter in a calligraphic scroll that inscribes, possibly, nothing.
Bowing might be thought of as a post–Jonathan Lasker reworking of Matisse; each figure, kneeling toward Mecca, has been suggested by a few summary swipes of fluent color. Sharing Matisse’s willingness to reduce the figure to a decorative module, Madani has something of his slyness as well. Remember that odd visual pun in his Moroccans, 1915–1916, whereby most of the people alluded to in the title are rendered so tersely as to be illegible, while the fruit in the picture’s lower left could easily be taken for the Moroccans themselves, “bowing their foreheads to the ground in prayer,” as Alfred H. Barr noted. Madani paints the bodies of her bowing men with just as much ambiguity––they could just as easily be, oh, I don’t know, a bunch of plucked chickens; only the caricatural heads she has lightly added to some of them clinch the figurative identification. She also includes a satirical fillip: Three men are shown kissing images of their spiritual leaders––one with such fervor that he has pushed his head through the picture. Praying to Allah, they unwittingly give themselves over to idolatry. Here, the submergence of identity in the homosocial mass brings an unholy ecstasy.
Barry Schwabsky is a frequent contributor to Artforum.
