Susanna Starr: Pass the rag
Susanna Starr, Untitled (Folded Handkerchief), 2008. Courtesy Marcia Wood Gallery.
It’s not uncommon for an artist to start with a material and end with an image. Cézanne turned some pigmented oils into apples and oranges; Picasso turned some sheet metal and wire into a guitar. It is less common, however, for an artist to stage the transition from material to image as a dramatic conflict. In Susanna Starr’s solo exhibition, Not So Domestic at Marcia Wood Gallery, the fraught and contradictory relation between material and image is the artist’s central concern.
Take, for example, Untitled (Folded Handkerchief). The thing looks like a hanky: it has a square shape and a floral border pattern. But Starr’s material—maple and mahogany veneer—is hanky-inappropriate. You almost don’t notice, though, because the veneer moves in deceitful ways. Instead of splintering and breaking, it undulates like cloth. When the veneer assumes the material capacity of cloth, it puts on a kind of performance. (We can talk about that veneer’s performance as a bigot would a drag queen: “It just ain’t natural.”) Both the material’s behavior and appearance, then, mean that the work reads not as an actual hanky but as the representation of one. Folded Handkerchief is both material (wood) and image (representation of hanky).
It’s not enough, however, to say that Folded Handkerchief stages the transition from material to image as unnatural and deceptive. To stop there is to ignore the cultural signification of the particular materials and image at hand. When wood turns into hanky, woodwork turns into embroidery, and a hard thing turns into a soft thing. Yep, you got it—masculine turns into feminine.
Susanna Starr, Untitled (Folded Doily), 2007. Courtesy Marcia Wood Gallery.
“It’s not where you end up, but how you get there that counts.” For Starr’s sake, I hope so. The way Folded Handkerchief transforms is interesting, but where it begins and ends is not. This is because Starr’s signification of the masculine and the feminine is totally cashed. Everybody knows that men are not outside in their lumberjack shirts chopping wood while women sit inside in their bonnets and sew hankies. What’s more, the means by which Starr imagines the masculine transforming into the feminine is so 1990—the year Judith Butler published Gender Trouble. Butler informed her readers that gender “ain’t natural,” to quote the fictional bigot, but a performance structured by cultural codes. In Folded Handkerchief, the material is the thing you start out with—the masculine given—and the image is the deceptive, feminine performer. (The veneer is the no-nonsense dude on the couch, hanging out and watching some TV. The hanky is the girl at the bar, all dressed up and pretending like she thinks your jokes are funny.) What I’m trying to say is this: Starr’s signification of the masculine and the feminine is not just cashed because it rehearses worn-out stereotypes, it’s cashed because it rehearses critical theory rather than complicating or expanding it.
But I said that “the way Folded Handkerchief transforms is interesting,” and I did actually mean it. There’s a lot to the movement from material to image. Starr’s work follows a lineage of really great, really hot women artists—like Lynda Benglis and Eva Hesse—who understand that the volatile passage from material to image is full of contradiction and absurdity. Benglis’ Bounce (1969) is a case in point. Although Benglis got down with some dirty material—she poured gallons of latex on to the floor—the resulting image is neither down nor dirty. The fluorescent, DayGlo pigments make the latex “seem to ‘bounce’ from the floor surface,” as Benglis puts it.1 With Bounce, the material is down, but the color is up. The clean, bright floating color generates a purely optical “image” that’s easy to extricate from the squishy mat of latex. Material (latex) and image (color) may be bound up in the same substrate, but they have no organic relation.
The same broken logic that disconnects material and image in Bounce is present in Folded Handkerchief. That disconnection is precisely what makes “the way Folded Handkerchief transforms” interesting. There’s an empirical narrative that explains how Starr, by shaping and cutting exquisite maple and mahogany veneer, started out with a material and ended up with an image. But when you’re faced with Folded Handkerchief, the sensible quality of that narrative is obscured. The hanky isn’t starting or stopping anywhere—it’s just chilling out on the wall while your brain moves. You could look at it and see material-wood-hard-masculine thing OR you could look at it and see image-hanky-soft-feminine thing. Who’s to say which comes first—where you begin or where you end? Or how many times you’ll go back and forth?
The viewer’s ability to oscillate between contradictory terms in the face of a logical narrative is what makes Folded Handkerchief absurd. The absurd: “out of harmony with reason or propriety; incongruous, unreasonable, illogical. In modern use, esp. plainly opposed to reason, and hence, ridiculous, silly.”2 Indeed, some would argue that it is not “the viewer” but “women-in-general” who have a unique ability to oscillate between contradictory terms in the face of a logical narrative. It’s a stereotype, but it’s my favorite stereotype. It’s called “whimsy” or “being flaky.” (While I was writing this, Cindi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” came on the radio twice.) The potential of Not So Domestic is in its formal absurdity. Starr offers a productive definition of what it means to be “girly”—not to sew hankies but to be capable of meaning many things at once. It’s more fun that way.
1 S.R. Dubrowin, “Latex: One Artist’s Raw Material,” Rubber Developments 24, no.1 (1971): 12.
2 Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v. “Absurd.”
Susanna Starr’s Not So Domestic is on view at Marcia Wood Gallery through February 13th.
I’m glad you let me know Starr rehearses critical theory; I had no idea. The cool-looking nineteenth-century woman’s hanky in the picture (my grandmother had them) that she, as you say, is being like a woodworker in manipulating eluded me completely in terms of gender, and Starr didn’t mention her theoretical underpinnings. I just thought of her as somebody who makes wood veneer do impossible things that wood isn’t supposed to do except maybe in the Cross going soft for Christ in Pange lingua gloriosa…so I had simply pegged her as the appropriate gallery companion of Venske & Spänle making stone look soft. I was so busy admiring the op-art effects et al. of Starr’s wall pieces that I never thought to ask her the right questions in terms of her theory rather than her superskilled practice—which I don’t think of as being gendered any more than that of the aforementioned wife-and-husband team of stonecarvers. Like you say, now that we are two generations into the world of artists whose practices defeat gender stereotypes, being able to turn a supposedly macho material into something requiring the skill of a brain surgeon is not much of an illustration of anything except the capacity of artists to surprise us.
Thanks for commenting Jerry! I agree that both Starr and Venske & Spänle are making their materials do things that are unnatural. And I think both share a kind of humor that’s based on the startling juxtapositions. …?
I was also pretty absorbed by the sexiness of Starr’s handiwork, and the wood grain, and etc. I think it’s hard to think about the work in terms of binaries (whether they be material/ image or masculine/ feminine) because the work is so unified, too. Everything is on one substrate and there aren’t really any isolated compositional elements. It’s more like “one big work” than “a little bit of this and and a little bit of that.”
I don’t know if Starr would talk about her work in terms of theory. That was my extrapolation–she may disagree.
Ok. Off to cultivate my inner capacity to survive. I mean surprise. Um…
I’m personally bored by Starr’s “art”, and not just because it rehearses tired feminist theory. In terms of design, it’s fantastic, sumptuous–but where are the ideas? Skill (no matter how impressive) equals craft. Even if we pretend this work can be considered art, it’s so hackneyed and dated no one should care about it.
I think that skill and craft have tons of potential to be vehicles for ideas. Skill and craft ARE ideas…manual labor carries all sorts of cultural signification.
I get really nervous when a negative critical judgment is the criteria for calling something “not art.” It seems like there must be a better definition of art than “it’s stuff I like.”
I have to say, I’m uncomfortable with the discussion of Starr “rehearsing tired feminist theory.” I do think that she does that–I wrote it. But there is also a distinction between what is tired in the more carefully thought out realm of art/theory and what is tired in the more spontaneous realm of daily life. People don’t really walk around thinking that “gender is a culturally constructed performance,” for example. People want to talk to me all the time about how men and women are essentially different. I’m always having to figure out how to tell the hair dresser (or whoever) that I don’t actually think that women are from mars and men are from venus. I sometimes feel like being a feminist is something of a trap, because it means having to repeat boring ideas that are (unfortunately) understood in theory but not in practice. Anyway, I just don’t want my suggestion that Starr rehearses critical theory to be heard as a suggestion that gender oppression is no longer happening.
I like them for their form and design, but good (and, ideally, innovative) ideas should be present for something to be considered “art.” This criteria moves art beyond the realm of simplicity inherent in statements like “it’s stuff I like.” If negative critical judgments shouldn’t determine what is not art, it follows that positive critical judgments shouldn’t determine what IS art. And so if critical judgments play no role whatsoever in determining art versus non-art, then what does?
I just asked the girl in the drive-thru window at McDonalds the Exact Same Question!!That’s like,sooo Weird!
Totally weird! What was her response?
she said, “art is what important institutions, media, and people say is art. meaning, art is discursively produced. would you like fries with that.”
I thought her response might be more considered since she very well may have a degree in philosophy or another humanities field! Conversations and arguments about the nature of art are important because they help move art, and by extension, culture, forward. We can look around us every day and see what happens when “important” institutions, media, and people make the calls. Take the cue from the Faulkner quote that inspired the name of this blog and burn away, Atlanta!!!!