Elizabeth Murray

Dancing in the Dark

I am writing this essay while listening to John Coltrane and Miles Davis play “Billy Boy” set on repeat. Two years ago, I was lucky enough to see the Rolling Stones play a small room at the Hard Rock Hotel here in Las Vegas. The room was ultra-crowded, although it wouldn’t have been nearly so crowded if the concertgoers, like the Stones themselves, were still trim. They weren’t, of course. They had grown up and out, and they had come to have a good time forgetting it. Even so, everyone in the room, excepting perhaps Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz, looked a little bit awkward and out of place, myself included. Somewhere deep in my resentful heart, I think, I had come to scoff at old guys playing rock-and-roll, but the concert was, in fact, a dose of what you need, a woozy blend of cavalier insouciance and hardcore professionalism. The Stones, in other words, were dancing on the dark side of the mountain.

During the instrumental break in “It’s Only Rock and Roll,” Mick Jagger started bouncing around the stage, clapping his hands over his head, and I found myself cheering him on. How great, I thought, to be honing in on sixty years old still making your living by bouncing around in a T-shirt clapping your hands above your head. How prescient, I thought, to have devised for yourself as a youth, a practice with a built-in hedge against maturity and angst. Over the years, I have found myself cheering Elizabeth Murray’s art in much the same way and for the same reasons, because early on Murray devised for herself a fountain of youth and good humor that has never run dry—that she has never allowed to run dry. So Murray’s paintings may erupt and explode but they never flinch. They sustain their insouciance, dancing now on the dark side of the mountain—so persuasively that Murray’s oeuvre is pretty much defined by this ebullient brand of courage. For her, if it’s not too much, it’s not enough; if it lacks high spirits, gestural eloquence, and blithe entropy, it’s not Elizabeth Murray. If the art world ever giggles again, she will be acknowledged as the comic ingénue of her time.

Installation view, Elizabeth Murray: Paintings 2003–2006. PaceWildenstein, 534 West 25th Street, New York, October 13–November 11, 2006. Photograph by Ellen Labenski, courtesy of Pace Gallery. © 2014 The Murray-Holman Family Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

As a consequence, in the gloomy pantheon of contemporary artists, Murray is the absolute mistress of high physical comedy, the hardworking party girl whose paintings with their slaphappy endings, artistic triumphs, and outright disasters take place while everything is happening at once. It often seems, in fact, as if Murray’s design agenda involves throwing everything in the kitchen up in the air and trying to catch every thing before it all hits the ground. Some version of this strategy has always been Murray’s modus vivendi. Over the years, in a Puritanical age of aesthetic divestiture, Murray has made a habit of acquisition and conglomeration. What was lost, she has found. What was neglected, she has attended to. What was dying, she has resuscitated. Of all the artists of her generation, who began their careers in the backwash of pop and minimalism, Murray alone found something to do with the pop sensibility that retains its spirit and ebullience, and since she has granted every painting its every whim, they seem calm and even relaxed in their chaos, like big old dogs dreaming by the fire.

Other artists under the influence of pop turned on its popular iconography in a new spirit of political critique. Others abandoned making things altogether and fashioned an “installation” aesthetic of manufactured found objects. For her part, Murray holds to Roy Lichtenstein’s caveat that pop art is about art and not about pop. She holds to the American romance of small occasions that dates from Harnett and Peto—but with rather large caveats and special effects. First, she recoiled from the cool classicism of sixties pop painting. She dispensed with the refined grandeur of Lichtenstein’s bourgeois interiors, the suburban intimacy of Wesselmann’s eroticism, and the social panache of Warhol’s chilly urbanity. In their place, Murray envisioned an unruly conjugal sublime, a language of chaos without terror, suffused with a destructive glee that always puts me in mind of the slow-motion exploding house at the end of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point—sexy without being sexual—sexy in the street sense of “Oh Boy!”

This new idiom, while still celebratory, aspires to embody the rough energy of a private tryst without pretending to control it. Like any number of strong women artists—Joan Mitchell comes to mind—Murray seems dedicated to reminding the more ethereal habitués of high culture that we all have blood in our veins, and to this end, she has revivified the practice of gestural painting without trying to capture its spirit in anything so staid as the rectangle, without trying to flatten its expressiveness into anything so repressive as a picture plane, or to invest its speed and high spirits with any more anxious solemnity than a painted gesture can bear. So gestural painting is revivified and detoxified in a pictorial atmosphere that harks back to Miró and Picasso—their arrogant modesty and tongue-in-cheek surrealism. It is this debt to prewar art, I suspect, that provides Murray, almost alone among her peers, with the permission to evoke specific emotional atmospheres in her work.

Murray’s paintings feel like something, like a genre or a species. The exploding images have their own specific energy and their ludic colors have their own music. These attributes combine with a graphic language that we almost understand and can nearly speak. We respond to Murray’s paintings as we do to an opera in a language we don’t quite understand. We attend the opera; we recognize the linguistic cognates and the voice of the music. We process the rhetoric of the singer’s gestures and the iconography of the sets and costumes, and we do all of this so quickly that we almost forget that we don’t know the language. Moreover, our not knowing the language may actually enhance the longevity of our interest, with our optimistic assumption that, eventually, we will. Or to put it another way, I have a sneaking suspicion that the crayon drawings an alien child might make and affix to the refrigerator door would look a lot like Elizabeth Murray’s paintings, or they should.

Murray’s idiomatic form of expression (which is, in fact, a new synthesis of older idioms) may be best described as still-life painting that is anything but still, that is more vivant than nature morte—a kind of “graphic cubism”—or “blobism,” as a friend of mine calls it. Her debt to pop resides in the fact that Murray’s paintings portray a relatively benign, although far from idyllic, image of bourgeois existence by deploying images-of-images in a manner that recalls the extravagant juxtapositions of Rosenquist and Rauschenberg, encoded and exploded. In the mechanics of this process, Murray overlays, abstracts, and encodes a private vocabulary of graphic images in a manner that is most reminiscent of Mayan glyphs. They conflate pictures, symbols, phonetic inflections, and syntactical markers into a unitary visual structure. The multiple, serial encodings of such glyphs (whether Mayan or Murray’s) almost guarantee our ultimate failure to decipher and render them clear.

We look at Murray’s paintings and we recognize the eggs, eyes, rooftops, rulers, furniture, fixtures, and baby snakes, but we are never sure whether these images signify objects or symbolize conditions. We accept the atmospherics of the blobs as pseudo-Oriental atmospherics. We read the talk balloons full of grids and squiggles as speech in another language, and interpret those little eighth-note triplets that appear in Do the Dance and The Sun and the Moon as musical accompaniment. Other recurring shapes, like the triangles, seem to function syntactically. In The New World, the triangle is at once a teepee and a frame for a landscape; in Baby Snakes, the triangle is either a corral for the baby snakes or their mommy’s womb; in The Sun and the Moon, the triangle presents some kind of astrological vector—or maybe not. In any case, as a graphic linguist, Elizabeth Murray is sort of like Alfred Jensen with emotional reach and stories to tell—or someone like Keith Haring with a domestic life and a PhD.

The irony is that even though there is no modern painting with which Elizabeth Murray’s painting doesn’t have something to do, she is indebted to no one in her willingness to dispense with boundaries. The authoritarian pressure with which Miró and Picasso, Pollock and de Kooning force their painterly adventures into the rectangle or flatten them into a plane is graciously forgiven in Murray’s work. The potential energy at the edge of the painting and on its surface of picture plane blows out, blossoming from the “picture plane,” encroaching on the space around the edge and only stopping when it needs to. As a result, the crazy repose you feel in their presence. For all their zany energy, there is nothing neurotic about them. They are relaxed paintings because the artist has repressed no instinct or tendency. They are where they want to be as paintings, finished, successful, and in repose. They have grown into their full, extravagant, noisy eccentricity with the artist’s ludic permission, and they have no plans to turn down the volume as the darkness gathers.