Painting might be the most susceptible genre to trend in the visual arts. The usual arc goes something like this: A painter hits on an idea that seems relatively new or interesting and soon endless iterations of that technique or practice are popping up on every gallery wall. This is not a bad phenomenon, but it can often have the unintended consequence of fixing that initial painter's work to a certain fad-hopping period in contemporary art. All of this is the long way of saying that 53-year-old painter Lisa Yuskavage is so damned original, so provocative and epic and intimate and off-putting and exacting in her style, tone, and subject matter, that she has managed to avoid a million copycats (it would be nearly impossible to copy her), and a glimpse of her work past to present still feels as if it exists in its own eternal present.
Yuskavage rose to notice in the mid-'90s, during a particularly formidable period for figurative painting and women painters. But even then, she charted her own dark path, notoriously centered on young, zaftig female bodies with curves like guitars and, more often than not, enacting some mysterious rite that might be described as "Lolita witchcraft" or a Grimms' fairy tale mixed with someone's father's vintage basement collection of Penthouse. And this is precisely what is so mesmerizing and fascinating about Yuskavage's work: its seriousness and its play. No question, the New York-based painter has spent a lifetime studying European masters, from Rembrandt and Bellini to Vuillard and probably a number of altarpieces in Venetian chapels. But it also seems like she's tapped psychoanalysis, American porn, and a number of slightly hallucinogenic film directors. (Was Fellini's Satyricon [1969] an inspiration, I wonder? Or Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant [1972]?) A Yuskavage painting is a lurid, carnal, end-of-the-world or birth-of-the-world environment, and the relationships between subjects can often suggest pansexuality, masturbation, birth, abandonment, voyeurism, rape, or love.
Beginning this month, Yuskavage will present a retrospective-style survey of 25 years of her work—in 25 pieces—fittingly called "The Brood" at the Rose Art Museum in Massachusetts. In honor of the occasion, and just after her solo show at David Zwirner Gallery this past spring where men, or "dudes," finally made an appearance on her canvases, Yuskavage had breakfast in downtown Manhattan with her friend, the director Todd Solondz. If there are two bigger taboo-tacklers in the visual arts, I can't think of them. —Christopher Bollen
TODD SOLONDZ: Art has a smaller audience than, say, movies or other forms of mass consumption. But that doesn't mean the work doesn't have an impact in a way that transcends just a few cultural arbiters. Artwork can be a portal, a kind of rethinking and reseeing of the world as we live it. LISA YUSKAVAGE: I talk kind of ad infinitum about the example of Philip Guston. I was aware of his work as a very young artist. My first take was repulsion. I saw a retrospective of his at the Whitney in 1981, and I didn't know what I was looking at. I didn't like it, but I continued to investigate it. Something drew me to investigate it, and I eventually became addicted to the energies in his work. Then you want so badly to paint in that style. But I knew that would be a really bad idea. To touch that style was the kiss of death. It's like the call of the Sirens: You will crash. Guston's style is so powerful. And yet what is just as powerful are the things he said about the work and the battles he personally fought to make it. That was an incredibly important guide for me as an artist.