A few years ago, I followed friends to a celebration, not knowing the occasion. Down the steps, at the back of the bar, people were making passionate speeches in honor of the birthday girl. "When I was pregnant, Lisa asked if she could watch me give birth," one woman said. "She had seen a close friend die of AIDS in the same hospital, and wanted to see someone be born there. She was incredible in the delivery room, rubbing my feet, giving me ice chips, welcoming this baby into the world. The birth was intense but she was fearless, always there. When it was over, I saw her photographing still-lifes of the afterbirth next to a can of Dr. Pepper."
The toasts to Lisa continued with equal intensity, humor and electric devotion. "My kind of person!" I thought. Once the dancing started, I turned to the friend I'd come with and asked, "Who's Lisa? She sounds amazing!" "Oh, it's Lisa Yuskavage!" she laughed, and pointed to a woman dancing to a disco beat in the center of the room.
The facts of Yuskavage's career are well known. She grew up in Juniata Park, a working-class neighborhood in Philadelphia, then earned a BFA in 1984 from the Tyler School of Art, followed by an MFA from Yale in 1986. She became a major force in figurative painting in the 1990s, amid a torrent of criticism from feminists who argued that her sexualized distortions of female bodies were detrimental to the cause—charges she refuses to refute or even directly engage. As a result, she often appears as a bad object in academic and critical circles, as either an incredibly dumb feminist or a brilliantly cynical misogynist. In 2007 the Washington Post published a "special report" titled "Lisa Yuskavage: Critiquing Prurient Sexuality, or Disingenuously Peddling a Soft-Porn Aesthetic?," where scholar Amelia Jones discussed actively disliking her paintings ("Everybody knows they're soft porn, because that’s the first thing everyone says about them") while feeling frustrated by her inability to pin them down ("I refuse to react in a way that could be interpreted as orthodox feminism"). Jones's consternation unwittingly echoes the statements that Yuskavage has made about her own work from the very beginning. Back in 1992, she told tema celeste magazine: "I offer no solution. I don’t believe there is one."
Through all this, I've come to see Yuskavage as existing beyond the goody two-shoes world of Art Since 1900, living and working instead somewhere over the rainbow, where artists are having a lot of fun and not toeing any party line. When her work is seen as a whole, what first appears as chaos becomes a richly polyphonic worldview. Now we can do just that at "The Brood," a 25-year survey that gathers diptychs, triptychs and a third form she calls "symbiotics" (single canvases engaging the concept of the diptych through intertwined figures). The show is currently at the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Mass., and travels to the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis in the spring. We met to discuss the exhibition, and her art in general, last spring in her Brooklyn studio.
In its entirety, Yuskavage's world is a grand comedy—rife with fantastical visions of both sunshine and shit worthy of François Rabelais. Her characters have Pantagruel’s appetite, humor and—most important—that giant’s heart. The artist’s presence with one friend as he died of AIDS, and with another as she gave birth, recalls the famous story of J.M.W. Turner strapping himself to the mast of a ship during a storm to experience the sublime. The difference is that Turner’s sublime was out there, in the vast tumult of a hostile landscape, while Yuskavage's is in here, at the core of our basic, vital humanity.
JARRETT EARNEST When you were a guest speaker in my class at the Bruce High Quality Foundation University (BHQFU) last year you talked about Giovanni Bellini, whom you described as "a man of deep feeling and great awe." I think that has something to do with your ideas about belief in art.
LISA YUSKAVAGE I've come to experience art like a séance. Over time you can meld minds with artists: you laugh and feel their humor, or you are shocked by their sadness and grief. The main thing that comes across in Bellini's paintings is the awesome potency and profound depth of feeling that made them. I've spent a good deal of my life looking at paintings, and what stands out to me is that, no matter when the painters lived, there are a lot of similarities among them. The work carries markers of the artist's inner life—be it Carroll Dunham's or Giovanni Bellini's—for us to connect to. I find that humanity in art very appealing because it just cuts away all the layers of academia. Scholarship can buoy understanding in some ways but after a point can also drag you down, away from the art. Since contemporary artists are not hired by, say, the Vatican, we have the freedom to ask ourselves what we believe in and then to assert that belief. It's actually a powerful liberty to own, and especially nice in our time when there are so many women's voices in the mix.
The best paintings of depositions, crucifixions and entombments are images that are familiar if you've ever buried someone you love. Just today, I saw an image in the New York Daily News of the brother of Moises Locón Yac, who was killed in the explosion on Second Avenue on March 26, collapsing in the arms of a Red Cross worker. You see the same configuration in paintings of Mary Magdalene mourning Christ. I remember things through great pictures. When I look at Renaissance masterpieces I recall scenes like the one on Second Avenue—the profound grief of families realizing that their loved ones have been killed.