Essay by Brice Brown
“She was a mess, and she was a goddess” *
Essay by Brice Brown
What are we to make of Carl Plansky’s larger-than-life painting, “Self-Portrait as Montserrat Caballé-Green Dress,” depicting a bewigged and bearded man in an emerald-green dress with thick, meaty arms –– the right raised in exultant triumph, the left delicately poised –– whose gaping, circular mouth seems to be emitting some downright bombastic sound (a sound so powerful it has instigated a queasy churn of the painting’s yellow ground)? Is it just campy drag homage to a prized opera diva, a didactic statement on gender-bending queer theory, or a pun on pop culture obsession with celebrity? Something of each, perhaps? And how do we reconcile this enigmatic, slightly kinky subject matter with Plansky’s Rubens-meets-Soutine style of painting?
However superficially transgressive these paintings may at first appear, their power doesn’t derive from polemical maneuvers or the gimmicky one-liner, because the cross-dressing switcheroo isn’t the propelling force behind these works, especially when considering only a handful are actually of Plansky in diva drag (one portrait, in fact, features artist Grace Hartigan as American soprano Eleanor Steber, while another isn’t an operatic diva at all, but a slightly melancholic image of Joan Mitchell, a mentor to Plansky in many ways). Even Plansky admits the choice to paint himself as a diva, instead of a divo, was because they “wear prettier gowns.”
No, the allure of these paintings is that of hero-worship for the monstre sacré –– an unassailable, irreproachable, and almost superhuman personality. These highly appealing characters have an unexplainable tractor beam effect on people: flawed yet inspirational, tragic yet perseverant, they elicit emotional dedication and frightened awe. These figures might even be notoriously controversial while still universally loved, like Michael Jackson. Yet we can’t get enough of them, cheering them on from the sidelines as champions with reservoirs of courage that we, the audience, would probably lack in the face of such scrutiny. Plansky’s monstres sacré are the famed bel canto opera divas, human songbirds balancing acrobatically-produced columns of brilliant, often crushingly delicate sound with a campy, over-the-top theatricality verging on outright farce.
But for Plansky, the diva represents more than just a big personality. She is the grand narrative, the sweeping landscape, the dramatic brushstroke, the flurry of color, and the poignancy of sound. She embodies Plansky’s dogged commitment to the cathartic visual and emotional experience, one transcending both craft and concept. In so doing, the diva comes to perfectly represent Plansky’s notion of the Hero in an age of the anti-Hero. And by painting himself as a diva in drag, as the monstre sacré¬-cum-hero, Plansky is actually turning himself, stroke by stroke, into the object of his obsession. It is self-affirmation and self-mythologizing, a powerful and visceral recasting of the artist as creator.
In the bel canto tradition, each note is treated like a pearl, and a song is a string of these pearls. Extending this metaphor, each of Plansky’s marks –– an arsenal containing a range rivaling the diva’s coloratura –– can be considered as individual units adding to the crescendo of the whole. The brushstroke is the equivalent of the musical note. Plansky demands that attention be paid to each mark, for in his hands, each mark acts almost like a surrogate monstre sacré, a tiny mirror constantly referencing back to the diva’s strength and vulnerability. In “Self-Portrait as Montserrat Caballé-Green Dress,” the diva’s dress is composed of rubbery yet resilient marks, taut yet tamed, packed together legato, smooth, slow to build. Her red face and red left hand are bright pizzicato, quickening the painting’s tempo; her right index finger a punctuated scherzando. Shimmering around her head and right arm are crisp white lines vibrating, alto, a barely controllable aria. The wig, a coda.
* Wayne Koestenbaum The Queen’s Throat: Opera, homosexuality and the mystery of desire (New York: Vintage Books, 1994)