I've been to Yuskavageland–an improbable zone at the intersection of the European painting tradition, religious iconography, porn, and, I'll argue, performance art. Most probably, given its origin in the early '90s, so have you. The creation of a painter with a director's sense of narrative and character, this alternate world is populated by an ensemble of defiantly hypersexualized babes seen through a mutable gaze that, while female, often postures as a male gaze for kicks.
Yuskavage was once famously accused of being "too much." To this we owe her artistic breakthrough. Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips's thoughts on being too much inevitably come to mind: "we are too much […] because we are unable to include so much of what we feel in the picture we have of ourselves." From this hot spot at the junction of psyche and picture-making emerge Yuskavage's pinups. They irritate and enthrall viewers precisely because they refuse to be pinned down. We're perplexed by their sexual orientation; are they hetero, lesbian, or bi? At once gorgeous and grotesque, frivolous and multilayered, debauched and coy, self-engrossed and pleased with themselves yet forlorn and longing for someone to regard them, Yuskavage's animated fictions do quite a number of things unambiguously. For one, they hook us. Like in-your-face human performers, they make us feel a discomfort in their presence which is impossible to dismiss. They beckon and confront us with the problem of looking, as in the flasher to the voyeur: "What are you looking at?"
Did I bring up the humor in Yuskavage's world, the dark, David Lynch sort? Not to mention its unsettling intelligence, manifest in its ability to hold, and open itself to, multiple, and often clashing, points of view?