is created by its distinction from a self. They create each other
and sustain each other's existence. Each makes the other what it is.
Thomas McEvilley 2
The nine artworks in Yvonne Sage: Conversations form a cycle of images comprising a conversation within the intertext enacted between the several works. Like the perduring conversations it mirrors, this cycle is open-ended, and like those other conversations, this cycle pre-exists our entry into the room in which it occurs.
When we walk into a room and see someone we know, our recognition, our identification of the individual is immediate. Immediate, in both the ordinary sense of being seemingly instantaneous, and in the philosophical usage of that which is not mediated by concepts. Even when we do not know the individual whom we encounter on entering a room, we nevertheless form a judgment of the individual, the result of what Ernest Gombrich has termed:
'physiognomic perception' which carries strong and immediate conviction. We all experience this immediacy when we look into a human face. We see its cheerfulness or gloom, its kindliness or harshness, without being aware of reading 'signs'. 3
Though this judgment is rapid and perhaps nearly instantaneous, it is mediated by concepts, however unaware of reading signs we may be. When we walk into a room which is a gallery, we enter into a reading-place of signs,4 a reading that for figurative artworks entails performing an act of physiognomic perception, an act that applies the viewer's experience of human gesture to the viewer's response to representations of the figure.
In Sage's paintings, while the representation of the figure is partial, provided by head and shoulders, or by head alone, the presence of the figure is enhanced by the strong figure - ground relationship established by the shaping of the panel: the bas relief wood panel is literally a figure against and physically distinct from the ground of the wall. Head and shoulders comprise a synecdoche for the whole figure, a metaphorical doubling of the image qua image as representation of the person. The manifest flatness of the layered segments of the wood panels reiterates the flatness of the ground/wall, in tension with the chiaroscuro in which the volume of the figure is developed. This tension is inherent in the conflicted response, shifting between regard of the object as physical entity of flat planes approximately parallel to the wall plane and the object as representation of the figure into the illusion of presence.
Prior to the consideration of viewer response to these works, and antecedent to any application of Rezeptionsästhetik 5 is the facture of the work, which necessarily entails the manifestation in articulate form of the connotative content of facial gesture. 6 The manifestation in articulate form of gesture does not necessarily entail a preconception of that content antecedent to the facture of the work; it may as well entail the co-location of content and form through and during the process of facture of the work. In either case, the articulation of form in the work presupposes the artist's experience of human gesture. This experience has a tripartite formation: kinesthetic knowledge of the gesticulations reflexive experience of embodiedness, knowledge obtained through observation of the gesticulations of others, and acquisition of culturally conditioned and transmitted formulations of conventions of gesture. 7 Gesture may be analyzed into two components: that portion which is ascribed to nature, and that portion which entails the use of available cultural conventions. 8 The former gesticulations are regarded as spontaneous, involuntary and perhaps preconscious, ahistorical; the latter gesticulations are regarded as contrived, volitional, historical. In practice, in both facture and response, the natural and the conventional interact and blend, motivated in part by a tendency to regard the conventional as natural.
Though Sage presents us with the Gestalt of head and shoulder, the conventional configuration of the portrait bust (sometimes supplemented with additional elements, e.g., the telephone in The Addiction, the bottle containing a small portrait head in The Brother), concentration is on the face as principal locus of signification, inflected by the nuance of gesture of the shoulders. This is not surprising: from the mirror stage, 9 the locus of co-constitution of self and other, we concentrate on the face of the other as primary site of the significations of expressis verbis, to adopt the Renaissance term for gesticulation.
Signification in these works is not concerned with the representation of a particular individual, but rather with a type of individual, a segment of the social formation as universal embodied in the individual. Concern with type rather than token 10 entails a shift from portraiture, in the sense of depicting what is singular about an individual, to a more general caricature, in the sense of entailing depiction of what is characteristic of an individual as representative of a type. This shift is an abstraction, a move from the particular to the general, though as manifest in the quasi-subject of the artwork, the general is necessarily embodied in a particularity of form.
The shift from particular to general is analogous to the movement from the description of form in the artwork, to the analysis of the thematic content of the work, to the interpretation of the artwork as symptomatic of a cultural moment. 11 As such, Sage's works are trenchant and witty observations of the roles assumed by persons in intersubjective relations. More, these works are explications of the interaction of form and medium in the constitution of content, and installed together, are an explication of the interaction of works to produce an intertext, as a visual analog of conversation.
Opposite the gallery entrance and installed on the same wall, Trophy Woman and The Lover form a dialogue within the larger conversation of the works in the exhibition. Trophy Woman, with deer antlers affixed to the coy tossed head, appears as a therianthrope, a part animal part human figure. The smiling , parted red lips revealing very white teeth are quite human (and resonant with the mouth in de Kooning's Woman I), not withstanding the affixed horns, inviting a pun, assimilating woman as object of desire with trophy deer as object of desire. On the wall, Trophy Woman qua physical object becomes an analog to a mounted deer head, a trophy on display. The Lover, to the right of TrophyWoman, has the head slightly averted, with gaze seemingly introverted, disconnected. His neck is conspicuously absent, subsumed by big shoulders with bulging deltoids and covered by jaw and chin. As with Trophy Woman, The Lover is an object of desire as an abstracted type. Together Trophy Woman and The Lover enact a perennial mating dance, performed in timeless suspension on the gallery wall, perhaps a contemporary echo of the Upper Paleolithic dancing shaman wearing antlers atop head on the cave wall of Trois Frères.
To the right, the west wall of the gallery has three works, forming a family group of four figures: mother, father, daughter, son. At the left, in The Facelift, the upper forehead of the female figure is separated by a gap from the lower forehead, to which it is connected by wires. The areas above the eyelids are abraded with sgraffito through the paint film, as also the area between the eyes and cheekbone. The abrading of the paint film is a reminder that oil painting is an erasive medium, in which the ground of the canvas or panel is erased (and is itself erased) by sequential application of the trace of the pigment. 12 In the center of the group, Dallas Men presents a single male figure in left-facing profile, middle aged, hair receding a bit, with gray suit, red-violet tie, and a jaunty fish leaping from the pocket of the jacket instead of a handkerchief. The fish, presumably dead and smelling, is nevertheless more animated than the fellow to whose sartorial splendor it contributes. In The Brother, a woman frowns, glancing with left eyebrow raised to the small male head contained in a glass jar, hung separately on the wall with the mouth of the jar covered with paper. The tormenting brother, both arms raised with fists clenched, mouth opened to yell, is reduced in scale as if a bug in a jar; caught in his sister's gaze, he is a specimen within the work mirroring (and reversing) the work itself as a specimen of sibling rivalry.
On the left of the north wall of the gallery, the figure in The Loss frowns, head elongated with eyes placed high on the face. Three padlocks hang on a heavy wire necklace, referencing closure to events that nevertheless hang on, perduring like the albatross of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, weight and presence. On the right of the north wall, The Addiction, with the addition of a telephone handset connected by a cord to the telephone handset held to the head of the head and shoulders portrait, models conversation mediated by the instrumentality of the telephone. This mediation connects the partners of the conversation while maintaining the physical distance between them, a distance made desirable with the earpiece of the distant handset emitting a green snake's head, mouth open to reveal a sharply pointed red tongue. Like Giotto's image of personified Envy 13 with a snake emerging from the mouth and bending back to the head from which it emerges, the snake in The Addiction is a metaphor for venomous speech turning back on the speaker . The association
between the tongue and the appetite is noted by Baruch Spinoza, in his Ethics:
Human affairs would be much more happily conducted if it were equally in the power of men to be silent and to speak; but experience shows over and over again that there is nothing which men have less power over than the tongue, and there is nothing which they are less able to do than govern their appetites.
The only work in the exhibition in which the principal element is not a head and shoulders portrait, Inflate/Deflate presents an image of a heart both as physiological organ and as metaphor for the locus of emotion at the center of the self. From steel wires emanating from a red wound in the heart seven male heads hang, with seven wires emerging from behind the work to terminate without attached heads, an absence that at once implicates both loss and deferral of completion. Regarded in its totality, Inflate/Deflate combines the representation of the heart, positioned as vulnerable by the title, with an image of the female as spider devouring a succession of mates. The image is resonant with representations of the Indian goddess Kali, wearing a necklace of skulls. The carnality of the image is expanded by the title; Inflate/Deflate suggests the systole and diastole of the heartbeat as embodied temporality, a temporality distended into the swelling and fading of desire with the hope of its fulfillment and the failure of its fulfillment. In this rhythm of sequential substitution of lover for lover, of referent for referent, the associative chain of the optical unconscious 14 operates.
Installed on the wall immediately to the left of the gallery entrance, Safe Sex consists of a small male head in a plastic bag. Beginning and ending the installation, Safe Sex frames and adumbrates the unfolding conversation between the artworks of the exhibition. In the intertext between title and image within each artwork, as within the intertext enacted between the artworks, the conversation opens to the viewer's response and engagement within the conversation. It is a conversation that is at once a representation and a critique of the social formation. This is what artworks do: externalize a way of viewing a cultural period from within the period that in turn engages the viewer in the discursive field opened by the artworks. To enter the discursive field opened by the artwork is to enter the conversation. Conversation is more than a verbal discourse between persons; it is a metaphor for the enterprise of cultural production. Thus Michael Oakeshott:
As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves. Of course there is argument and inquiry and information, but wherever these are profitable they are to be recognized as passages in this conversation, and perhaps they are not the most captivating of passages. . . . Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where the winner gets a prize, nor is it an activity of exegesis: it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. . . . Education properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasion of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation. And it is this conversation which, in the end, gives place and character to every human activity and utterance. 15
This is the first in a series of annual exhibitions by Brookhaven College Art Department faculty members in the Studio Gallery at Brookhaven College. Each summer, a member of the Brookhaven College Art Department faculty will present an exhibition or site-specific installation in the Studio Gallery. This series of exhibitions serves several ends: to maximize use of the gallery space on a year-round basis by providing artworks as an instructional resource for summer classes, to provide an exhibition opportunity for and encouragement of professional activity by members of the Art Department faculty, and to present the work of our faculty to the college community and to the public in a greater depth than is possible in the Annual Faculty Exhibition, where the limitations of space and the group exhibition format precludes installation of more than one or a few works by each faculty member. Active professional engagement with the discipline is crucial to effective teaching, and Brookhaven is fortunate to have a studio art faculty that maintains a high level of professional activity; this series of exhibitions will make that activity more accessible to our students and the College learning community, and to the larger audience in the communities beyond the College.
It is with pleasure that we present this exhibition of paintings by Yvonne Sage. She received the B. F. A. and the M. F. A. from the University of North Texas, and has taught drawing, two-dimensional design, painting, art seminar and art appreciation courses at Brookhaven since 1980.
In June through August 1997, Marla Ziegler will exhibit recent work in ceramics in the Studio Gallery.
- E. H. Gombrich, "On Physiognomic Perception," Meditations on a Hobby Horse: and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (New York: Phaidon, 1963), p. 50. Return
- Thomas McEviley, "The Romance: A Paradox," Art and Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity (New York: Documentext, 1992. Return
- Gombrich, ibid., p. 47. Return
- The gallery as a reading-place of signs is variously thematized: e.g., in Allen Kaprow's 1962 environment Words, in Joseph Kosuth's 1972 installation at Leo Castelli Gallery, and in the exhibitionA Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1989. Return
- For an introduction to reception theory, see Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Ann Arbor: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). Return
- There is considerable evidence that facial expression, at least in the expression of fundamental emotions, is universal and transcultural. See Paul Ekman, Emotions in the Human Face (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); for an account in th popular literature of the work of Ekman and others in this area, see Jeanne McDermott, "Face to Face, its the expression that bears the message," Smithsonian 16:12 (March 1986), pp. 112-116, 118, 120, 122, 124. Return
- Formulations of conventional gestures are both generally culturally transmitted and a traditional aspect of the education of artists, now frequently in the context of life drawing, but in earlier contexts often associated with theories of physiognomy. The lectures of Charles LeBrun (1619-1690) to the Academie des Beaux Arts are notable though hardly unique examples; though the lectures are lost and aare now known only as interpolated reconstructions, LeBrun's drawings survive. See LeBrun, Resemblances, introduction by Edward Sorel (New York: Harlin Quist, 1980). Return
- This follows a long tradition of distinguishing signs as natural and cultural; for an exposition particularly relevant to the artworks in this exhibition, see Moshe Barasch, Giotto and the Language of Gesture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). See also J. R. Knowlton, "The Idea of Gesture as a Universal Language in the XVII and XVIII Centuries," Journal of the History of Ideas 26, pp. 495-508. Return
- For the notion of the mirror statge, see Jacques Lacan, trans. Alan Sheridan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1981), pp. 227, 257, 279. Return
- For the 'type' versus 'token' distinction, see C. S. Peirce, Collected Papaers of Charles Sanders Peirce, IV, eds. C. Harshorne, P. Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933); cf. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), p. 131, n.3. Return
- The structure of this movement is that of iconological analysis as proposed by Erwin Panofsky; see Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Harper & Row, 1939, 1967), pp. 3-31. Return
- Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Indianapolis University Press, 1983), p. 92. Return
- Giotto's Envy, Invidia, is located in the lower register of the left wall of the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, part of a cycle of personified virtues and vices. Return
- Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1993), p. 137 et passim. Return
- Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Metheun, 1962), pp. 198-199. Return
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