藝術評論》The Body Politic－Marlene Dumas的華麗與詭譎

Marlene Dumas，《中午的自畫像》（Self Portrait at Noon）

原文：The Body Politic: Gorgeous and Grotesque
作者：Roberta Smith (2008/12/11)
編譯：Fango Huang (2011/9/15)

具象畫家Marlene Dumas曾被說是一位只會帶給人非冷即熱兩種極端感受的藝術家，但其實並非如此。她於紐約現代美術館（Museum of Modern Art）的展覽「測量你自己的墳墓」（Measuring Your Own Grave），即是以一種中生代（midcareer）藝術家的審視，來屏除冷熱極端，帶給我們溫暖的感受。

Marlene Dumas，《測量你自己的墳墓》（Measuring Your Own Grave）

如同此展覽那令人毛骨悚然的標題所指出的，Marlene Dumas的作品傾向於直接瞄準胸口（solar plexus）。融合了政治與藝術，並與影像製造的複雜性纏鬥，人類的靈魂、性慾、藝術之美、傳統繪畫的男子氣概（masculinity），以及社會壓迫的醜惡。但是這場展覽並沒有完全地解答出，到底在這些作品之中傳遞了多少這樣的概念。

這場展覽啟示了一個事實，雖然這位別具天份的藝術家創造了一些頗吸引人的圖像（riveting images），但是大量觀看下來，她的作品反而便變得淺白而單調（monotonous）。實質上，她並沒有使主題多樣化，或者說是因為她25年來對於攝影照片的根基，使她的習慣沒有產生改變。所以當你站在她的畫作前，判斷她的作品是否有資格稱作為原創的時候，會有太多太多其他依賴照片（photo-dependent）的藝術家湧入你的腦海裡。她的作品太過傾向於近25年來模仿作品（pastiches）的想法與策略，主要有「觀念藝術」（Conceptualism）、「挪用藝術」（Appropriation Art）以及「新表現主義」（Neo-Expressionism）。

Marlene Dumas的作品有著慘白或是彩色的題材，並且通常是兩者同時兼具。包括了懷孕的女人，甚至是看起來像畸形的嬰兒；被謀殺的幼童、以及自殺和遭受死刑的罹難者（通常是女人）；蓋上頭罩的囚犯；孤獨悲慘的青少年；停屍間的屍體……等等。每個影像都被放置在一個極為慘白且抽象的空間當中，伴隨著色彩的豐盈以及表面作用的美觀修飾，得以窺見「抽象表現主義」（Abstract Expressionism），或甚至是「色域繪畫」（Color Field）的痕跡。

Marlene Dumas，《死掉的夢露》（Dead Marilyn）

而令人注目的縮寫（striking abbreviations）以及模糊的曖昧性（fuzzy blurs），讓我們在作品中看到雙重的意涵。這個女人是正在熟睡，還是已經死了？赤裸的孩童手上那道鮮紅的痕跡，到底是顏料抑或是鮮血？許多諸如此類令人感到疑惑的例子，讓你在嚴厲、充滿暗示的肖像與畫法和程序之間不斷地游移，但過了一會兒，你也許會開始察覺到自己被操弄了（manipulated）。

Marlene Dumas，《畫家》（The Painter）

而其他的畫作便直接了當地瞄準了「官能主義」（Sensationalism）。《死去的女孩》（Dead Girl）呈現一位死去的青少年頭部與肩膀的部份，鮮血在她的臉龐上流動。但在某些Marlene Dumas肖像畫中的痛苦，卻是敏感而又難以捉摸的，彷彿是一道無期徒刑，因此更具有說服力。在《Moshekwa》一畫中，那張堅毅的黑人面孔，幾乎要布滿整張畫布，伴隨著一種氛圍，透過改變皮膚的色調製造出強烈的感受，從他的前額可以看到濃厚暗紫色的華麗修補，就像是個莊嚴的標記，作品至此達到了最高峰。

Marlene Dumas，《Moshekwa》

這些作品有時傳遞出一種原生（raw）與存在（existential）的力量，像是一位近乎裸體、懷著身孕的女人，她那充滿陰影、刺穿人心的、如野獸般的臉龐（slightly animalistic face），並大膽地擺出膝跪姿勢，似乎唯恐我們會忘記那意義的模稜兩可。這張油畫作品Marlene Dumas將之命名為《懷孕的影像》（Pregnant Image）。

Marlene Dumas，《懷孕的影像》（Pregnant Image）

Marlene Dumas於1953年出生於南非，1976年移居荷蘭至今。縱使她的名字常出現於各地藝術收藏家的必買清單之中，並且曾在2002年曼哈頓新當代美術館（New Museum of Contemporary Art）展出，但比起在美國，她在歐洲更是廣為人知。而這次的展覽是她在美國有史以來最大規模的一場展出，也是她在紐約的第五場個人展覽。這項展覽係由Connie Butler所組織策畫，她在去年暑假剛開幕的洛杉磯當代美術館（Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles）擔任當代繪畫部門的主管。

Connie Butler無疑地順從了Marlene Dumas對於作品擺置的看法，她將作品依主題式展出，進而取代了Marlene Dumas不甚喜愛的編年式（chronologically）。然而，這樣的安排卻另外給人一種印象，那就是在如此廣大的展出空間裡，卻只是用來呈現近幾年的作品。這彷彿像是在宣示，美術館並不想讓六樓這偉大的展出空間，讓人隨隨便便就可以拿任何東西都來展出，而必須是成熟（mature）、精巧（finished）且具辨識度的（recognizable）作品才行。

觀眾們可能會被早年作品朵造成的混亂給弄糊塗了。所以取代藝術的，似乎是Gerhard Richter、Luc Tuymans或是Ida Applebroog。不要直到逛到三樓繪畫展場的最後才去做汲取發展的想法。

Marlene Dumas，《等待》（Waiting (For Meaning)）

在這兒，一個簡單的玻璃櫃裡，你可以遇見一個非常年輕的小藝術家，移動迅速衝破她自個兒的精力界線，就從這張描繪選美佳麗畫風直率的蠟筆畫開始。Marlene Dumas從小在開普敦（Cape Town）附近的一座農場長大，10歲時畫了這張作品。早年的作品呈現出她對於繪畫和漫畫的天賦、兇猛的、天生關注於女性的特質，以及對於生活和藝術中肉體面向的早熟興趣。

從1972起，關注於胸部和女陰的特寫，不禁讓人想起Eva Hesse對「性」（sexually charged）的抽象概念，以及Joan Semmel對於交纏、裸體的戀人的不朽觀點。這些都僅僅是一個年輕藝術家對於自身身體改變的紀錄。

作品中的佼佼者，是一幅取名為《Claes Oldenburg的早餐》（Breakfast for Claes Oldenburg）的作品，創作於1975年。那時Marlene Dumas正在開普敦（Cape Town）的藝術學校裡學習，這是一幅具有致敬意圖的作品，作品中的鑿溝（gouges）和飄動痕跡（fluttering marks）可以看作是立體主義（Cubist）的接班，再加上點描派（Pointillist）的點，以及以生俱來的繪畫天賦。

來自Vogue雜誌中的一頁，時尚模特兒的身影被一系列的黑色筆畫所抹去，創作於1977年，當時正是美國年輕女性藝術家們開始結合女性主義（feminism）與攝影（photography）在一起的時候，生疏地表示拒絕拋棄繪畫。接著迸發急速的成長，在一旁，一幅巨大的拼貼結合了Winnie Mandela、Patrice Lumumba的遺孀Pauline Opango、以及Malcolm X的遺孀Betty Shabazz的新聞剪報，這張作品創作於1982年。第一幅我們看到的繪畫創作，則是1984年，這顯現出Marlene Dumas的過去十分努力，如同她今日所做的。

此展覽的一致性暗示著這一位太早就定型的藝術家需要更長遠的發展。Marlene Dumas藉由在各種不同的主題之間轉移來偽裝自己的停滯（stasis），她的繪畫只具有表面性的藝術特質（superficially painterly）。攝影的基礎架構通常會太接近於表象，這讓一切看起來都過於簡單。更糟的是，這讓主題（subject matter）變得至高無上。

Marlene Dumas，《吻》（The Kiss）

有時候她的職業──包括她的工作和她健談的角色──像是一個擴大的概念藝術計畫（Conceptual Art Project），企圖去轉移繪畫這件事以及雄性特徵，縱使其被放置於熟悉的藝術化自我的框架當中。

Marlene Dumas說：「我畫，因為我是一個女人。」以一種回應男性藝術家男性訴求的語調。而在目錄裡的引言和詩，同樣地，她似乎如同許多她與男性相似特質的那般自戀（self-involved）或甚至是自負（pompous）。有時，她可以侃侃而談繪畫的物質性（physicality）和繪畫的心理作用（psychological effects）；又有時，當她論及觀者讓藝術更臻完整，以及解釋的曖昧性，她崇拜所有藝術裡固有的想法，至少是從杜象（Marcel Duchamp）開始。

猶記得Robert Longo扭曲的人形，以及對到底他們是在跳舞還是被射殺的那種無止盡的推測。在展覽前頭的文字面板，邀請觀者們參與意義建構的過程。我認為那就是我們一直在做的。

仍然地，一個觀者的停滯（stasis），可以是另一個人的無情的忍耐（relentless perseverance）。Marlene Dumas對於裸露或者弱勢女性身體的強調，可以解讀為是數百年來男人缺乏理解的表現所得到的一種報應，同時也是一種對於抽象（abstraction）所做的假設中立（supposed neutrality）。

Marlene Dumas，《玻璃淚》（Glass Tears (for Man Ray)）

她的一些作品透過讓女人脫離現實（disembodied）或者用抽象來掩飾，以保護女人自身。作品《Magdalena (Out of Eggs, Out of Business)》中，在一個類似Mark Rothko的深紅色域裡，有著兩條長至及膝的辦子的悲慘女性比起幾個粗略的人形都還來得卑微。她仍然無法說服大家這種手段是完全異於孟克（Munch）的。

Marlene Dumas最好的作品也許就在前頭，並且她正朝向一個更為巨大的變化。一位Louise Bourgeois的模特兒，她那再發性的女性主義題材，已經顯現在一連串引人注目的不同型式中。Marlene Dumas近期的作品有著充滿希望的徵兆，例如：2006年的作品《Moshekwa》(2006)、今年的作品──帶點Nan Goldin味的──《中午的自畫像》（Self Portrait at Noon），以及2003年的作品《純潔》（Immaculate）。

最後，一個緊實小巧、縮小的女性軀幹與生殖器圖像，超越了染料繪畫（stain painting），並且提供了一種更具質感和支配性建設的繪畫。對於我們的好處是，Marlene Dumas已經自己完成了許多重大的課題，但對於她熱愛的職業──繪畫本身──則是尚未做到。


延伸閱讀：
- Wikipedia: Marlene Dumas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marlene_Dumas target="_blank"
- Death Becomes Her (Slide Show) http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/12/12/arts/1212-DUMA_index.html
- Bromirski’s Flickr: Marlene Dumas (set)

Art Review | Marlene Dumas - The Body Politic: Gorgeous and Grotesque

Self Portrait at Noon, Marlene Dumas

From: The New York Times
Author: Roberta Smith
Published: December 11, 2008

The figurative painter Marlene Dumas has been characterized as an artist who leaves you either hot or cold, but that’s not necessarily so. “Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave,” a midcareer survey at the Museum of Modern Art, cuts right down the middle. It left me warm.

Measuring Your Own Grave, Marlene Dumas

Ms. Dumas’s work tends to aim for the solar plexus, as the show’s morbid title suggests. Fusing the political and the painterly, it grapples with the complexities of image making, the human soul, sexuality, the beauty of art, the masculinity of traditional painting, the ugliness of social oppression. How much it delivers on these scores is a question that this exhibition doesn’t quite answer.

The show suggests that while this amply talented artist has created some riveting images, her work becomes monotonous and obvious when seen in bulk. She has not substantially varied her subjects or her habit of basing her images on photographs in about 25 years. And when you stand in front of her paintings, far too many other photo-dependent artists come to mind for the pictures to qualify as original. Her work tends too much toward well-done pastiches of ideas and tactics from the last 25 years, primarily Conceptualism, appropriation art and Neo-Expressionism

Ms. Dumas’s stained and brush-worked canvases are lurid in subject or color, and usually both. The subjects include pregnant women; rather monstrous-looking newborns; murdered children and victims of suicide and execution (mostly women); hooded prisoners; forlorn adolescents; bodies in morgues. Each image is served up in a blank, abstract space with handsome trimmings of lush colors and surface action that have their history in Abstract Expressionism and even Color Field painting.

Dead Marilyn, Marlene Dumas

Striking abbreviations and fuzzy blurs make us look twice. Is that woman asleep or dead? Has that naked child been playing with red paint or is that blood on its hands? In many instances such doubts keep you moving between the harsh, suggestive imagery and the brushwork and process, but after a while you may begin to feel a bit manipulated.

The Painter, Marlene Dumas

Other paintings go for point-blank sensationalism. “Dead Girl” shows just the head and shoulders of a fallen adolescent with blood streaming from her face. Yet in some of Ms. Dumas’s portraits suffering is subtle and implicit, a life sentence and therefore more convincing. In “Moshekwa” the resolute face of a black man fills most of a large canvas with an aura intensified by the shifting tones of his skin, which culminates in a gorgeous patch of dark purple glowing from his forehead like a mark of nobility.

Moshekwa, Marlene Dumas

Sometimes the paintings convey a raw, existential force, like the shadowed and piercing, slightly animalistic face of an enormously pregnant and mostly naked woman, defiant yet posing on her knees. Yet, lest we forget that meaning is ambiguous, and that the work is a painting, Ms. Dumas has titled it “Pregnant Image.”

Pregnant Image, Marlene Dumas

Born in South Africa in 1953, Ms. Dumas has lived in the Netherlands since 1976. Although a regular on the must-buy lists of collectors everywhere and the subject of an exhibition at the New Museum in 2002, she is more widely known in Europe than in the United States. This show is her largest in this country and only her fifth solo show in New York. It was organized by Connie Butler, the Modern’s chief curator of drawings and an Ahmanson Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where it opened last summer.

One thing is certain: Ms. Butler has done Ms. Dumas no favors by installing her work thematically instead of chronologically. The arrangement creates the impression of an overlarge gallery show of works done over a few years. It is as if the museum didn’t want its stately sixth-floor galleries to feature anything but the mature, finished recognizable product.

The public could be confused by the messiness of early work. So instead the art seems to have sprung from the forehead of Zeus or Gerhard Richter or Luc Tuymans (or Ida Applebroog). Not until reaching the back of the drawing galleries on the third floor do you absorb any idea of development.

Waiting (For Meaning), Marlene Dumas

Here, in a single vitrine, you’ll encounter a very young artist moving very fast out of the gate on her own steam, starting with a brusque crayon drawing of beauty contestants. Ms. Dumas made it at age 10 while growing up on a farm near Cape Town. The earliest pieces broadcast a gift for drawing and caricature; a fierce, inborn focus on women; and a precocious interest in the physical side of life and art.

Close-ups of breasts and the female pudenda from 1972 bring to mind both Eva Hesse’s sexually charged abstractions and Joan Semmel’s monumental views of entwined naked couples. They could also be simply a young artist’s record of her changing body.

The standout is a small, oatmealish oval of canvas, cotton wool and paint on paper titled “Breakfast for Claes Oldenburg.” Made in 1975 when Ms. Dumas was in art school in Cape Town, it is an apt hommage whose gouges and fluttering marks also suggest a Cubist relief, complete with Pointillist dots, and a natural pictorial intelligence.

A page from Vogue magazine with the fashion model erased in a series of black, smeary strokes dates from 1977, just as young female artists in the United States were beginning to combine feminism and photography; it rawly indicates a refusal to leave painting behind. Then a sudden growth spurt: nearby, a large collage combines scaled-up drawings based on newspaper clippings of Winnie Mandela; Patrice Lumumba’s widow, Pauline Opango; and Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X. The piece dates from 1982. The first paintings on view date from 1984, and show Ms. Dumas working very much as she does today.

The consistency of this show suggests an artist who settled too early into a style that needs further development. Stasis is disguised by shifting among various charged subjects that communicate gravity in shorthand. Ms. Dumas’s painting is only superficially painterly. The photographic infrastructure is usually too close to the surface, which makes it all look too easy. Worse, it makes subject matter paramount.

The Kiss, Marlene Dumas

At times her career — including her work and her voluble persona — seems like an extended Conceptual Art project intended to turn painting and its maleness on its head. Yet it is framed in a familiar artistic ego and bluster.

“I paint because I’m a woman,” she has said, in a tone that echoes the macho claims of male painters. And in quotations and poems in the catalog she seems just as self-involved and even pompous as many of her male counterparts. Sometimes she can be articulate about painting’s physicality and its psychological effects, yet saying it doesn’t make it so. Sometimes, when she talks about the viewer completing the art and the ambiguity of interpretation, she fetishizes ideas implicit in all art at least since Duchamp.

Remember Robert Longo’s twisting figures and the endless conjecture of whether they were dancing or being shot? The text panel at the front of the show invites viewers to participate in the process of constructing meaning. I thought that’s what we always do.

Still, one viewer’s stasis could be another’s relentless perseverance. Ms. Dumas’s emphasis on the naked or otherwise vulnerable bodies of women can read as retribution for centuries of less attuned representations by men and also for the supposed neutrality of abstraction.

Glass Tears (for Man Ray), Marlene Dumas

Some of her works protect women by making them disembodied, cloaking them in abstraction. The abject female of “Magdalena (Out of Eggs, Out of Business)” is little more than a few cursory features and two knee-length strands of hair enveloped in a Rothko-like field of dark red. Yet she doesn’t convince that this approach is all that different from that of Munch.

Ms. Dumas’s best work may lie ahead, and in the direction of greater variety. A model is Louise Bourgeois, whose recurring feminist themes have been presented in a succession of markedly different forms. There are hopeful signs in recent works like the “Moshekwa” portrait (2006); the frowsy, Nan Goldin-ish “Self-Portrait at Noon” from this year; and “Immaculate” (2003).

This last, a compact and foreshortened image of a woman’s genitalia and torso, goes beyond stain painting and allows for a more textured, controlled buildup of paint. To our benefit, Ms. Dumas has made several major themes her own, but she has yet to do the same with her beloved métier, painting.


Related Links:
- Wikipedia: Marlene Dumas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marlene_Dumas
- Death Becomes Her (Slide Show) http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/12/12/arts/1212-DUMA_index.html
- Bromirski’s Flickr: Marlene Dumas (set)