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Graphic or Novel? ©MURAKAMI and Others

Joyce Pensato, Katherine Bernhardt, and ©MURAKAMI

Is there a direct line from Austrian and German Expressionism to comic books? In the first half of 2008 one might easily think so. Both allow one to wear one’s emotions on one’s sleeve and to wonder how they got there. They link big brushwork to ready-made images. And who can refuse the pleasurable but unhealthy muddle of sex, mockery, and dread? It gives new meaning to the graphic in graphic novel.

Joyce Pensato unites both ends of the story, with dark drips over familiar cartoon faces. Katherine Bernhardt may seem closer to a much earlier form of modern art, with sharp, thick dabs of color over women strutting their stuff. However, she updates them for a New York scene in which the strut means something other than male desiring and disgust. Katherine Bernhardt’s Grey Sweater (Canada gallery, 2008)

Last and definitely least, Takashi Murakami comes at the end of the tale. His comic-book characters purport to stand for an imperiled civilization but mostly blow up an eight-year-old’s dreams to museum scale.

One line or two?

Not that expressionism ever went away. It remains in the name Abstract Expressionism, back when critics like Clement Greenberg relegated “mere illustration” to the history books. It peeps out more overtly even then in goddesses by Willem de Kooning or Jack Tworkov, well before Neo-Expressionism. It assumes cartoon form at least as early as with Philip Guston, but it appears in more than just figure painting. Explicit sex, big gestures, and readily graspable imagery underlie many of the trashy installations that fill Chelsea galleries. If some of the more obnoxious appeals to museum audiences feel like cartoons, they do not necessarily look like them.

Nor did cartoon imagery go away either. Francis Picabia and Stuart Davis did not propel Marvel Comics, but they do connect to Pop Art. Often, too, now the fad for album-cover imagery comes off as a way of avoiding emotions. It turns on high style. Outside of the movies or the madhouse, sometimes restless activity is playful and audacious, and sometimes it is just childish. Consider just one example before, I promise, bringing together again the threads.

Dan Perjovschi, for one, hardly minds if one calls him audacious or just restless. Last year he took MOMA’s Projects series out of hiding and into the four-story atrium, covering on its white walls from floor to ceiling. Not even Martin Puryear has taken on so directly the challenge of the site, and his doodles added up to the world’s most maximal and ephemeral graphic novel. For a while that May, visitors could also watch him and his black Magic Marker at work—or play. Up close, unfortunately, it had little in the way of plot or content.

More recently, Perjovschi has managed to hold himself to the scale of a gallery, which serves as his blackboard. If Jennifer Bartlett’s Rhapsody can thrive on the transition from a gallery’s winding walls to the atrium, why not try it in reverse? Perjovschi’s childlike chalk drawing has an appealing restraint, too, after the big gestures of graffiti. Besides, text like his can make anyone laugh after a long day in Chelsea. “400 galleries, 5 shows,” “Mad in China,” or “we have successfully exported our democracy” anyone?

Still, how simplistic can art as political cartoon get before it has to compete with the real thing, even if I happen to agree with it? Nothing much beyond the scale of his ongoing, city-to-city project suggests a real openness to debate, a real depth of political convictions, or even a willingness to take artistic chances. Mostly the tired invocation of smokestacks—and hooded Klansmen that Guston would have identified with himself—made me wonder how well the Romanian artist knows America. It also makes me again look at artists who can unite a cartoon’s poles of expression and ironic detachment. Thankfully, when it comes to gestures in art, at least three artists are thinking largely in two dimensions, and they are thinking big.

While I omit a fuller theoretical context, an earlier article traces the revival of Expressionism to its adoption in America. It contrasts Georg Baselitz’s resistance to narrative, Guston’s comic disdain, and Julian Schnabel’s face-off between a cultural inheritance and an imagination at risk. And now three artists leave deliberately uncertain when the graphic becomes comic rather than darkly expressive. Murakami leaves it uncertain merely by fudging, by a token bow to serious subject matter. The others do so in a more interesting way, by a native confidence that accepts comic relief as a matter of course. As Pensato puts it herself, it is not about fudging but erasure.

Erasing Mickey

Joyce Pensato calls her latest show “The Eraser,” but she could not have erased the slightest slip. She still paints in black and white, but now the more the merrier. Only a determined critic would dwell on the darkness.

Pensato outlines faces as familiar as Mickey Mouse. They look just grotty enough for modern painting, just savvy enough to acknowledge the irony. Throw in spare enough to suggest art as sign system, obvious enough for the street cred of graffiti, and silly enough to make one laugh. At her former gallery, her bunny rabbit seemed a natural for Williamsburg’s exaggerated rough edges and high style. Out there, even when an artist has visions of childhood, it means basic black. No wonder the characters cannot stop grinning.

Pensato’s black and white take turns as figure and ground, but the blackness has spread and penetrated the white. Sometimes she paints over a silvery ground, so that black and white shine that much more. Does all that black figuration recall late Jackson Pollock, the overlapping planes of a Willem de Kooning abstraction, or Robert Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic? Maybe, but relax. If one has to mention the 1950s, think of early acrylic paints, which artists back then generally found too runny for common use. Pensato’s drips run down freely, almost begging for that eraser, and she enjoys every minute of it.

Her cartoon subject has darkened, too, simply by coming up to date. The cast now runs to The Simpsons and South Park, sometimes in close-ups that isolate the eyes. Traditionally, eyes serve as windows onto a portrait’s psyche, and these figures have endured plenty—only starting with fine art. Still, they remain best of friends. The gallery calls them ominous, but I prefer to say stoical. Everything rolls off these guys, not unlike the drips.

The broad white curves indeed border on erasures, and Pensato’s title makes me think of a phrase from Jacques Derrida, sous rature, usually translated as “under erasure.” The French actually means something closer to “beneath effacement” or simply “crossed out,” not unlike the ironic strikeouts in many a blog. Paul Chan adopts the device for his video of disaster at the New Museum, The 7 Lights. For Derrida, erasure allows thoughts to survive and multiply. Things persist, like it or not. Pensato’s characters would still forgive Homer for messing up or trust Lucy with the football.

For all the updates, she has grown closer than ever to a previous generation. An Andy Warhol silkscreen or another Mickey, by Roy Lichtenstein, allowed smears to disturb the borrowed image. They took pleasure in pure painting and impure culture. And they, too, once seemed either lightweight or morbid. I prefer not to worry about it. Buy your own eraser.

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