John Currin: Reﬂections on Contemporary Society

CUJAH MENU John Currin: Reﬂections on Contemporary Society David Morris In this essay, I will look at the paintings of the contemporary American painter John Currin. I will examine his oeuvre and attempt to illustrate his portrayal of beauty, gender roles, and behaviour as something not innate, but socially constructed. To do this, I will make a case for Currin’s paintings of middle-aged women as an expression and refection of the dominant cultural views of women of this age. In addition to his portrayals of women, I will look at his representation of homosexuality. I will also discuss the interaction between cultural relativity and the construction of both beauty and gender. Currin’s style harkens back to the time of the so-called geniuses of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods. Currin acknowledges that his “… guiltiest pleasure is that [he] really like[s] high culture. [He] really like[s] old painting” [1]. However, unlike the artists of the Renaissance that he admires, Currin’s work does not have a specifc type of beauty, an ideal beauty that he creates again and again, as can be seen in the oeuvres of Botticelli and Leonardo. Currin ex- aggerates the proportions of the female body and sometimes renders it with a heavily painted face to illustrate how beauty is a construction of society. This is perhaps due to the fact that he lives in a postmodern society, where grand-nar- ratives and the belief in ideals have been, for the most part, rejected. In today’s postmodern society, a culturally relative understanding of beauty carries a lot of weight, much more than the ideal beauties that Renaissance artists sought to depict. Most cultural relativists would argue that: The customs of diferent societies are all that exist. These customs cannot be said to be ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ for that implies we have an independent standard of right and wrong by which they may be judged. But there is no such independent standard; every standard is culture-bound.[2] This is to say that beauty, like any other concept, is a culturally relative phe- nomenon, which does not owe itself to any conception of an ideal. Historically, female beauty has been created and dispersed by those in power. The relation- ship between the people who create our society’s notion of beauty, (e.g. the cosmetic and fashion industries), and those within our society is a hegemonic one. This is because the beauty industry popularizes a specifc standard of beauty that is difcult to achieve. People attempt to emulate the ideal models that are plastered on top of buildings and that adorn the covers and inner pages of magazines. Those who create the predominant sets of guidelines that defne beauty prey on both men and women, but it is women who have historically been at the center of their control. In examining Western society, John Berger notes that a woman’s appearance is her most valuable asset, or conversely, her appearance can be her strongest hindrance from being perceived as a “successful woman.” A woman’s beauty, argues Berger, dictates her future: She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.[3] Currin’s interest in women’s issues and women’s position within society is the crucial sociological interest manifest in his art. Currin’s paintings from the 1990s are primarily about sex, gender, and the per- son inside the body. One of the interesting facts about the women that he portrayed during the early 1990s is that they are not the typical group most male artists tend to depict. The women that are painted on the canvases of many male artists are typically young, thin, and very attractive. Alternatively, many of Currin’s portraits are of middle-aged women, as demonstrated by his Skinny Woman (1992), Nadine Gordimer (1992), and Ms. Omni (1993). In each portrait, the woman occupies the majority of the canvas, which has as its background a sof tone of beige, green or gray. With Skinny Woman and Ms. Omni, the subject’s gaze is directed of the canvas, away from the viewer. The commonality that links the three paintings, as well as Currin’s other paintings of middle-aged and elderly women from this period, is the representation of woman as separate from her own sexuality. There is the sense of the woman’s physicality, as well as the idea that there is a body underneath the clothes that each woman wears. The bodies being clothed are very thin and do not attract the viewer’s attention. This is due to the abnormally-sized heads of these women. The head of Ms. Omni is too large for her body, while the head of the skinny woman is too small. In the Nadine Gordimer portrait, her head is excessively large, which is perhaps intended to emphasize her intelligence, and is reinforced by the pas- sive posture of the rest of her body. Her hands are purposefully resting on her lap and the clothes that she wears bare no trace of any physical body underneath. Furthermore, Currin notes that these women are all divorced [4]. In addition to his creating of a history for his women, he had other psychological in- tentions that compelled him to portray women as lacking a sexual body. Currin states that: At the beginning, there was no sexual element in my work, or at least there was no evidence of me thinking about sexual things. When I frst started painting middle-aged women, I would try to avoid anything sexual, not even showing a breast under the clothes. [5] Although separating middle-aged women from anything sexual can be inter- preted as problematic, I believe that there might be several reasons why Currin might operate in this manner. For one, he compels the viewer to engage with these paintings and to question what it is that makes them so unusual. Second- ly, he states that overtly representing women of this age as either sexual or asexual would prompt accusations of his being sexist [6]. When Currin was painting his series of middle-aged women he had the idea while he was painting them “… that they were divorced” [7]. It is my argument that Currin is look- ing at contemporary society and commenting on the trend of middle-aged men separating from their middle-aged wives in order to pursue younger women. The portrait of the skinny woman seems to be a merging of the two sides of this issue. The painting portrays the middle-aged woman with grey hair and wrinkles, and as extremely thin. She could possibly be described as model thin or anorexic. This is an important painting to analyze when dis- cussing how cultural relativism plays a role in the art of John Currin. The thin woman appears as an assemblage of youthful attributes in conjunction with the more aged attributes of a middle-aged woman. Although these women are divorced, they remain dignifed and better yet, they appear to be happy, noble, and proud. That Currin’s representations of these women are ofen considered to be sexist is indicative of the prevalence of ageism within our society. By our cultural standards, these women have no more sexual value; they are no longer interested in sex, but are “… only interested in culture, like museum patrons. That’s why [Currin] gave them such short haircuts…” [8]. Currin makes use of the culturally dominant prejudices and beliefs about middle-aged women as people who have completely abandoned their sexuality to his advantage to create paintings that are striking and also quite controversial. Currin responds to this social view by employing culturally constructed signifers of gender to make his portraits of middle-aged women lack sexuality. Since long hair is a signifer of femininity, the artist gives his subjects short hair. Currin’s more recent works difer from his paintings of middle-aged women. He recently decided that he would make paintings where “… the sex is so up- front that it would be neutralized” [9]. The sexuality of the woman’s body is so exaggerated that it is no longer attractive. By doing this, Currin is commenting on the plethora of cosmetic surgeries that change or “enhance” the woman’s body so that she can be perceived as an attractive and successful woman. The paintings that epitomize this style are The Bra Shop (1997), Dogwood (1997) and The Farm (1997), the viewer’s eyes being immediately drawn to the woman’s breasts, regardless of the viewer’s sexual orientation. What Currin is asking, with his big breast series, is “at what point are breasts too large?” In addition to this, Currin is sarcastically ofering the heterosexual male viewer what is sup- posed he wants—only an exaggerated form of it. These women, unlike the middle-aged women previously portrayed, all have long hair. The blonde hair that many of these women wear does not allude to any sense of individuality. Their hair seems to come from women’s magazine covers that promise the latest styles, crazes and ways to keep a man. In The Bra Shop, there are two women standing in front of an orange backdrop. Both women have large eyes, important to note when examining the construction of beauty.

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