Editor's Note - I Love Dick

Many of my favorite powerful women friends are tending towards the hating end of the spectrum when I ask them what they think of I Love Dick, the new 8-part Amazon series directed by Jill Solloway. I direct them to this or that review, almost all overwhelmingly favorable, but Facebook comments sum up their consternation with comments about the Chris character being just so uncomfortable to watch. Solloway has put herself to the task of defining the female gaze in this show, and one thing Chris is not going to allow is to be made into the object of any *#$@& male gaze.

Most of you know by now I Love Dick is based on the book by Chris Kraus, played by Kathryn Hahn, inspired by her infatuation with the media theorist Dick Hebdige, now a Donald Judd-esque character named Dick Jarrett, played by Kevin Bacon. Chris is holed up in Marfa, TX, having accompanied her husband, Sylvere, on his residency there after the Venice Biennale rejected her film. After one conversation with Dick at a reception she becomes obsessed with him and starts writing a series of highly unladylike letters addressed to him, that she eventually turns into her art and plasters all over town. She has made Dick her muse, and he doesn’t like it one bit. (“It’s humiliating,” he says.)

Kathryn Hahn plays Chris as a highly verbal, highly emotional, uncorked headcase, but she’s wonderful- my kind of woman. She’s the id in all of us who were brought up not to rock the boat, to be gracious, self-effacing and even demure where need be. Not so Chris. She won’t be silenced, and she won’t lie about her passion either, to her husband or to Dick: it’s precious and she nurses it like a woman unscorn-able, with no concerns about how others might see her or what the object of her affections might think of her. But she’s super vulnerable too, and can feel the pea under the mattress as well as any princess.

Beyond that though, there is something for every member of the art world here, television and movies pretty much always getting us wrong (think Daryl Hannah in her super sized loft studio playing a starving artist in Legal Eagles, or how in Red, the Mark Rothko character primes his canvas with red paint rather than white, necessary for maintaining luminosity of later layers of paint). Along with earthworks there is conceptual and performance art, and a single brick laid on a pedestal like a piece of perfect form (“A straight line is perfection,” says Dick), and the Institute itself is filled with minimalist painting and sculpture that, by the end of the show the African American female curator Paula (Lily Mojekwu)- sick to death of all that dry and withholding (read “male”) work, replaces all of it with work by Mickalene Thomas, Kara Walker and Glenn Ligon, among other distinctly non-withholding artists. Hoots from the audience in our tv room!

But it was the ending that I really loved-spoiler alert! Kraus finally finds herself alone with Dick in his farmhouse, his attraction for her made plain at last. As they mutually engage in wild fondling, Dick murmurs lustily, “Oh you’re so wet,” but it turns out that she’s started her period and all that male-thrilling vaginal wetness is really menstrual blood. Rather than going with it and wrapping himself in all her various juices Dick instead excuses himself to go clean up, at which point Chris takes a breath, picks up his ten-gallon cowboy hat, puts it on her head and walks out of his house, into the dawn, blood smeared all over her inner thigh.

Ladies, any of you who have had a guy get turned off at your lady-time – take heed! Blood is life and Dick is only a fledgling in that deep sea of knowledge.

-- Julie Heffernan

Editor's Note - Art Abroad

The editors of Painters on Paintings are traveling this summer and thought we’d share some observations on the art we’re seeing abroad. Virginia is attending Documenta in Athens and Kassel and will be painting in Berlin through August. Julie will spend a month at the Bau Institute arts residency in Cassis, France. Here are some musings on Frida Kahlo from her recent visit to Mexico City.

According to a Mexican acquaintance of mine Frida Kahlo is considered south of the border, nothing more than kitsch, in the same vein as Norman Rockwell here, her popularity a signal that her work shouldn’t be trusted since it is simply too likeable. She offers so much to so many different interest groups: mediocre paintings for beginning painting students (Marxism will give Health to the Sick) and great paintings for the connoisseurs (Broken Column, What the Water Gave Me), upbeat quotes for the footless (“Feet what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?”), a brilliant fashion sense for Rei Kawakubo and Ricardo Tischi of Givenchy, profound sorrow and rejection in love for the double-crossed and cuckolded alike (Diego screwed her sister!), and affairs with Trotsky for Oberlin students. What else do you need from an artist to win the love of everyone but the suspicious intelligentsia?

I went to Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul while on a recent trip to Mexico City and found myself regretting that I had ever heard about her haters from my colleague, wondering why crossover art tends to trigger so much disdain and whether Kahlo might just be that rare thing: the artist that is truly popular and serious. If I wasn’t convinced by the work (which I am) I became so by her kitchen. She filled it with ceramic pots and painted the floor bright yellow with blue and yellow wooden counters. She and Diego rejected conventional stoves, using instead a huge clay pot with a wood fire beneath it-- the indigenous chimenea--which infused everything they cooked with the fragrant nuttiness of pecan wood, or the delicate sweetness of mesquite. And there was a recipe for mole on her kitchen wall that had more flavors and spices than I ever could have imagined combining within the same pot.I’m aware that Kahlo isn’t lacking in fans. I just want to put it out there, as Mary Oliver says, that it’s ok to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. And in 2012 Patti Smith had the press conference for her first show in Mexico City at the Casa Azul. So, there you go, doubters - no one could ever accuse Patti Smith of being kitsch.