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"If conceited girls want to show they already have a seat" (after Goya), Francis Stark

[|The Nude Maja], ca. 1800. //[|The Clothed Maja]//, ca. 1803. ||~  ||~ === The Maja (from Wikipedia) === Two of Goya's best known paintings are The Nude Maja (La maja desnuda) and The Clothed Maja (La maja vestida). They depict the same woman in the same pose, naked and clothed, respectively. He painted //La maja vestida// after outrage in Spanish society over the previous //Desnuda//. Without a pretense to allegorical or mythological meaning, the painting was "the first totally profane life-size female nude in Western art". He refused to paint clothes on her and instead created a new painting.

The identity of the //Majas// are uncertain. The most popularly cited subjects are the Duchess of Alba, with whom Goya is thought to have had an affair, and the mistress of Manuel de Godoy, who subsequently owned the paintings. Neither theory has been verified, and it remains as likely that the paintings represent an idealized composite. In 1808 all Godoy's property was seized by Ferdinand VII after his fall from power and exile, and in 1813 the Inquisition confiscated both works as 'obscene', returning them in 1836. ||

[|Google Images for Francis Stark]

Whitney Biennial 2008

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[|Back to top]  ‘Structures That Fit My Opening’ and Other Parts Considered to the Whole’ Sylvester Space
 * Frances Stark**

In the piece ‘Structures That Fit My Opening’ and Other Parts Considered to the Whole’. Stark deliberately chooses one of the most awkwardly conventionalised media for public address, the power-point presentation, to voice her reflections on the politics of her art practice. As the sentences continue from slide to slide, sometimes interrupted by images of works or photos of domestic situations, you curiously follow the unravelling of Stark’s thoughts that go through sudden twists and reversals. Stark clearly stakes her position, yet in doing so she constantly shifts between categories, moving from feminist concerns to motives of desire, fear and inspiration. As the categories interlace and open up in the process, Stark gives you a very strong sense that all these aspects are different dimensions of one practice and one life.

At the same time, however, this practice and life is home to many voices. In this, as in many of her works, Stark proceeds by time and again incorporating ideas, quotes and excerpts from other people’s work. This gesture of appropriation, as much as it echoes an act of stealing, also communicates a sense of appreciation. The personal space opened up in her work is in fact a public space. In it, the powerful position of the author is displaced by a form of conviviality with the ghosts of other artists, writers, friends or lovers. Image credit: Frances Stark ‘‘Structures That Fit My Opening’ and Other Parts Considered to the Whole’. Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Daniel Buchholz.

- Michelle White -
Frances Stark, //Push//, 2006 Latex, printed matter, linen tape and stickers on panel Courtesy of Marc Foxx, Los Angeles

Frances Stark regularly investigates the labor of the creative process by merging her practices as a writer and visual artist. To wit, she has handwritten passages from meaty modernist texts in faint script as mediation on the theoretical weight of words. In San Antonio, Stark recently presented manuscripts and paperwork spread out in the middle of the gallery from a book she was editing at the time. The artist has also bemoaned short deadlines as well as the ego’s contradictory pull to say “yes” to invitations despite a lack of time, as expressed in a letter to Miami-based critic Gean Moreno in **ARTL!ES** issue No. 51.

Stark’s current show at the Glassell School of Art consists primarily of wall assemblages—works on paper and panels made from fragments of handwritten notes, pieces of postcards, term papers from her students and pencil sketches of outlines of essays and diagrams for book layouts. This material evidence of intangible things that happen in the mind, the ephemera that forms patterns and mosaiclike compositions, is all held together by thin strips of linen tape.

Compulsive and meticulous, the construction extends Stark’s familiar intercession on creative exhaustion. At the same time, this work is more personal and formally quite different from previous offerings. For example, with the exception of a few pieces, text is less prominent. Here Stark is using direct and graphic representations of domestic space—and the proverbial pile of junk mail by the front door—as metaphor for her battle to overcome both the material and quotidian stuff that gets in the way of creative production. The most literal example of this is //Push//, a chain of quilted gallery announcements that explodes through the skeletal frame of the artist’s storefront studio door in Los Angeles. Against a bare white background, the annoying mail symbolically disrupts the clarity of the structure’s //tabula rasa//.

This motif also takes form in the repetitive use of the console table. In Stark’s four-part, paper-on-panel series //Consoles and Mirrors and Flowers//, depictions of this half-baked piece of domestic furniture that collects what you don’t want to deal with ranges from clawed, truncated tables with ruffled chrysanthemums to a mod shelf with a lean iris. The series is a funny homage to a liminal domestic and mental space and a fitting illustration of the exhibition’s title, //Structures That Fit My Opening//—a phrase, in all of its fabulously sexual innuendo, that regards the conflict between the commonplace and heady thoughts as not necessarily an impediment but a necessary and potent fixture of everyday life. The reconciliation of mental retreat and the demands of doing mundane things like paying the electric bill is also present in Stark’s PowerPoint presentation, which shares the exhibition’s title. In a deadpan, didactic format, text pulled from literature rolls across the screen along with the artist’s self-deprecating thoughts on artistic inadequacy, as well as her conflicting roles as an artist and a plain, ordinary person. Photos of Stark’s bedroom occasionally disrupt the text and trains of thought. In one image, the artist’s socked feet peep over the top of her laptop in the foreground; in the background, a dresser overflows with body lotion, paperbacks and perfume bottles.

By translating thought processes into visual terms, it is not surprising that Stark has become well regarded in academia—a group, to over generalize, that is receptive to thinking about the unsung effort and material distractions that define cerebral activities. A colleague aptly described Stark as an “artist’s artist,” and as I sit here and fight with the meaning of my own words in service of someone else’s thoughts, Stark’s sympathetic stab at this dichotomy is refreshing.

My problem is her failure to take full advantage of her subject matter. The discursive space she creates by conflating intellectual acts within a domestic framework could open up a rather hermetic conversation on “women’s work,” gender politics in the art world, the formal hierarchy of craft and divisions of types of labor in studio practice—all issues that hover on the surface as memories of the artist’s previous concerns. But in the work at hand, there are few conceptual points of entry. Albeit revealing and interesting for a specific audience, this keeps the work a personal reflection, and that is a shame because it has much more to say.