John Currin “Memorial” at Gagosian
John Currin, “Memorial”
Gagosian 541 West 24th Street
September 14 - October 30 2021
Currin presents seven more-or-less human-scale paintings lined up on a single wall of a gallery large enough to accommodate several times this offering. From the street, I entered a white-walled foyer, presented my Excelsior Pass (good god, what a name), and moved through yet another doorway to a chapel of smut.
They’re explicit pictures, and in a world so entirely scrubbed clean of transgression, any sense of naughtiness is its own form of pleasure. Dainty feet and hands poke out in flirty little kicks, one appendage in front of the trompe l'œil frame, the other receding behind. The effect is not unlike a peep show, but with the added embarrassment that you, the viewer, the pervert, are not in a private booth immured from reality and prying eyes but in a stark white gallery. A young man who walks in during my visit seems to become aware of this and quickly departs.
The colors are harsher and the flesh more taught than the pastel Currin who painted Jennifer Lawrence for the cover of Vogue, whose rosy-cheeked subjects seem always at risk of dissolving into a dream. The too finely-rendered grisaille figures here assume the poses of naked women in various combinations of orgiastic delight, but on closer inspection they reveal themselves to be ghoulish statuary, waking up and pumping up their droopy breasts like water balloons to perform another round of joyless erotica, dutifully reaching to the tidy little creases and dainty x’s that stand in for vaginas and anuses. They are what a pubescent boy might imagine, having only seen naked statuary, a handful of photos of Pamela Anderson, and the harried face of his aging nanny.
Currin takes the male gaze, ambiguous as it is, as a dare rather than a problematic. These have less to do with flesh-and-blood women than any great Venus pictures of old, but they seem, just as aptly, to substitute the figure of woman for that which is ineffable in the world, that which desires and repels. Any one of these figures could be Ingres’ virginal Odalisque, had she been rendered with the same dark magic as Dorian Gray.
No more voluptuous accoutrements of the harem, she’s been banished to the dark, barren stage sets of De Chirico’s joyless purgatory, and Currin, with his recycled classical frames, is further closing her in as she performs the scene over and over again.
The realization seems finally to be dawning that Sexual Liberation has left us more, not less, weird about sex, the taboos more byzantine and the pleasure more plasticine. But as with all liberations, there is no bottle to which this genie can return. Currin is of course salty about the pendulum swing back toward sexual conservatism, titling his show “Memorial” and taking care to dispel any ambiguity about what the memorial might be for in the press materials. I have some sympathy for all the old cads who are finding their glory years of young pussy coming to an end as changing mores and their own changing looks converge. But come on, don’t be gross.
There is one lady with flaxen hair and a pink halo illuminating what is almost a genuine smile as she plays with herself. Her tits are something resembling a normal size, if arranged in a rather abnormal anatomy. She, with no frame and at the smaller of Currin’s two scales, seems to be the only one having any fun. Let’s hope she’s not the last.
Installation view. John Currin. Photo: Rob McKeever. Gagosian.
