A commonplace on the contemporary scene is that context has a tremendous influence on how we experience works of art. Anyone who ever has seen a traveling exhibition at more than a single stop of its tour already knows something about this.
But, to go a step further, the same exhibition viewed in a foreign country looks even more different, giving all sorts of new impressions and making them seem acute.
A large part of the difference comes from how the art interacts with its cultural setting, for we carry into a gallery or a museum not only ourselves but also the dust that clings to us, which is to say, a bit of the atmosphere and history of the city. Last month, at the opening of a retrospective exhibition of paintings by Chicago artist Ed Paschke, the dust was from Paris. And as the city lay glimmering around the Centre Georges Pompidou, it continually gave of itself to Paschke`s art, in the process taking away some of Chicago.
Paris always has tested artists, and it tests on its own terms. The arguments-and alibis-beloved among Chicagoans count for nothing there. On esthetic matters in France, there are only the (sometimes xenophobic) opinions of the French.
French critical writing on Paschke has been plentiful and surprisingly positive, considering his work might well be taken as an affront to French taste. In the early years, such words as ”aggressive,” ”violent” and
”hideous” recurred with regularity but most often in descriptive passages carrying no value judgment.
Edouard Roditi epitomized the general level of insight when he wrote in 1977 that Paschke`s ”highly sophisticated and somewhat scurrilous style offers us a very personal and colorful alternative to the painfully impersonal, pallid and trite manner of most hyperrealists.
”At the same time,” Roditi continued, ”Paschke suggests the same kind of nostalgia as (Richard) Lindner for the brashness of honkytonk nightlife on New York`s Third Avenue, Chicago`s North Clark Street and Main Street in downtown Los Angeles that delighted those of us who made a habit of `slumming` there some 30 years ago.”
Equally positive, if less precise, were the many rhetorical articles that gave the image of an artist ”haunted by the nocturnal city, neon, taverns, travesties.” But these were part of the international tradition of the accursed poet/painter, which spread across Europe at the end of the last century.
The particularly French view revealed itself in enumerations of sources, one writer finding that Paschke`s color ”extrapolated the coloristic logic of the chromolithograph,” another citing the influence on his work of the music hall.
Perhaps as characteristic was an embedded antagonism toward the United States, for critics also saw Paschke as ”a grand accuser” at ”the dawn of the age of (President) Carter” or felt he depicted ”America as if it were one of the circles of Dante`s Inferno. . . .”
All this-plus Speyer`s continued support on behalf of new work-helped form the climate greeting the Paschke retrospective. However, a little noticed incident at the dinner following the opening showed an added degree of resistance.
In proposing a toast, James Wood, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, emphasized how contemporary painting receives its severest trials in Paris, with the implication being that Paschke`s had emerged unscathed. Nearly 150 guests then rose to their feet, leaving seated a member of the museum`s public relations staff, visibly disturbed by the idea that Paschke`s work had received-or, indeed, merited-French approval. The same distaste was common to Michel Nuridbany`s notice of the exhibition weeks later in the daily newspaper Le Figaro.
”From (Cy) Twombly to (Frank) Stella by way of (Richard) Serra, Americans overrun everything,” Nuridbany wrote. ”Yet those are some good artists, but Paschke! How did this artist of the 20th order . . . come to be shown (at the Pompidou Center)? Were there any, as one says modestly,
`pressures`? The galleries associated with museums from beyond the Atlantic, did they have the power to exercise their law up to that point?”
Here is a vision of the forces in American art imperially bullying until the Pompidou Center becomes a mere annex of museums in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. ”Too much, it is too much!” the author bellows, and never again mentions Paschke`s art.
The review by Jean-Louis Pradel in the weekly L`Evenement du Jeudi is very much the opposite, praising Paschke for inventing ”a visual
counterculture that vies with the generalized voyeurism of the media in order to push ambiguity almost to its most extreme consequences.”
Pradel extols the painter for firing ”point blank on all the taboos”
and for being ”attentive to the diversity of minority or popular culture.”
Paschke, he writes, is in line with the Chicago Imagists but also has a strength that comes from being part of ”a realist tradition that prohibits itself nothing.”
This time, however, the Pompidou Center can show such a painter only because an artistically exhausted New York no longer dictates importance:
”One rediscovers the sure values of the `60s and the `70s that, out of New York, had enjoyed a notoriety Europe neglected by dint of only being attentive to the little elitist Europa on the shores of the Hudson River!” Pradel relates the vision of crumbled power in a tone not far removed from gloating. By comparison, Philippe Dagen, in the daily Le Monde, has no political ax to grind. He clearly cites the artist`s indebtedness to photographs, describing accurately how Paschke uses color and light to go beyond them.
”The process is efficacious in spite of the artist`s systematic usage,” Dagen writes, ”and restores in a convincing fashion the atmosphere of the nightclubs and the corridors of the subway that are for Paschke what the Moulin Rouge was for Lautrec and New York was for Warhol.”
For Dagen and some other French critics, Paschke is a ”conscious practitioner from the second generation of Pop Art” whose work pales only when compared to paintings by originators of the movement.
Michael Gibson, critic of the International Herald Tribune, is neither French nor filled with a nostalgia for earlier American art. Nearly a decade ago, he found Paschke ”an entirely original Expressionist whose idiom is altogether contemporary.”
Gibson`s recent review builds to a discussion of how the industrial world no longer presents ”any set pattern of behavior that comforts men and women in their identity-sexual or otherwise.” The interest of Paschke`s work lies in how it touches upon questions of identity through ”a persuasive dreamlike quality,” the very stuff of art. ”That the dream is sometimes close to a nightmare,” he writes, ”should be regarded as a stimulant to inquiry-not as an invitation to despair.”
Whether Americans-in America-will describe the work any more positively is very much open to doubt.
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”Ed Paschke” continues at the Musee national d`art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, through Feb. 11; an enlarged version will appear at the Dallas Museum of Art (May 13-July 15) and the Art Institute of Chicago
(Oct. 13-Jan. 2, 1991).
