Essay by David Cohen
Audio Visual
Essay by David Cohen
Willem de Kooning famously quipped that “flesh was the reason that oil painting was invented.” In Carl Plansky’s portraits of six operatic divas and one from the art world, a sense of corporeal presence is palpable. But he adds another raison d’être to the medium he handles with such ebullience: sound. There is the music of his idols filling the studio as he paints. There are the poses in some of the paintings that imply vocal sound emitting from the singers themselves. In the case of lyrical abstract painter Joan Mitchell, the art world diva in the series who was a friend and important mentor to Plansky, recollected banter and “bitchy” put-downs are heard ringing in his ears. His painterliness is as much audio as visual, in other words, adding volume in two senses.
Plansky likes to paint what he sees. Or, put better, to see what he paints. When he works in the landscape, for instance, he ties the cross bar of oversized canvases to trees, enabling him to work directly at the scale that is most meaningful for him. His tendency is to paint big, with fat brushes and fulsome gestures. “Small paintings are harder and take a lot longer because I can’t throw myself into them,” he has said. * The founder of Williamsburg Paint, he enjoys a lifetime supply of materials, enabling him to treat them with gay abandon. And yet the physicality of his diva paintings, with their over life-size scale, impasto, brazen color and bravura brushstrokes, actually belies absence. However much we feel that we are meeting these dynamic women “in the flesh,” the subjects are imagined – constructed from media images or reconstructed from memory.
Only one of the opera singers, Aprile Millo, was worked solely from photographic sources. The other paintings – Callas, Callas Paints Her Self-Portrait, Grace Hartigan as Eleanor Steber, Self-Portrait as Anita Cerquetti, Self-Portrait as Montserrat Caballe, Black and Pink, and Self-Portrait as Montserrat Caballe, Green Dress – use live models to play the divas: the artist Ülgen Semerci, then a student of Plansky’s at the New York Studio School, posed as Callas; another painter-mentor-friend, the late Grace Hartigan, as Steber; and for the rest, the artist himself. Plansky explains his decision to cast himself in practical terms of not finding suitable models able to strike the right poses. “I ended up shaving, using theatrical make-up, painting my face from a photograph of the singer.” Despite going to these lengths – draping himself in upholsterers’ velvet, for example – or perhaps because of them, there is no attempt to further disguise, in paint, the artist’s own features as observed. He is what he is: a masculine, hulky fellow dressed up as a diva.
Earlier in his career, Plansky had noticed a tug between the opposing forces of symbolism and actuality. His early work, from his time at the New York Studio School and shortly after graduation, was focused on still-life, worked in a tight, precise style. “I had no idea what to paint. I was never interested in my own thoughts, and was more interested in the world around me and what I can see.” The set-ups were of purely formal concern, with no personal or psychological investment in the objects chosen. Their formal tightness felt like a compensation, to the artist, for the messiness of his personal life. “I was afraid to make a mark that I didn’t understand. I didn’t trust my feelings.” It was only when he began to paint landscape that the artist began to detect emotional content. “I had the idea that I could look at the landscape and get lost in it, and maybe find myself.” Initially, he developed imagery from memory or imagination, “dark, brooding things,” woods at dusk, influenced by listening to Schubert Lieder.
As he moved from generalized wooded areas to the depiction of individual trees, he needed to work in actual landscape, to depict specific trees. This return to direct observation, however, did not diminish the sentimental aspect of his painting. When his dog, Betsy, died aged 20 he buried her under what he had taken to be a dead tree, and miraculously, the tree came to life again. He began to realize, however, that his paintings of individual trees were surrogates for the figure. Werther, 1985, was a seminal painting in this process: the subject “started out as a tree and ended up, unapologetically, as a figure. It was not even a pose, just a figure.” It was around this time that he started working in the studio from models, sketching them, typically for Plansky, on full size canvases. Working smaller, he found, turned the figures into puppets or dolls, where you “don’t feel the space.”
The series of figures that immediately preceded the divas explored themes of sexual anger that related to a period of crisis in the artist’s personal life: male figures, clad in S&M apparel such as hoods and harnesses, were dispatched in harsh brushstrokes and an unloving palette. These, he has said, were “painted very angrily, but when it eased a bit, I still had some of the same energy,” which led him to his portraits of his favorite singers.
The operatic diva is a potent metaphor for Plansky’s own journey into painterly expressionism, his discovery of “marks that he can trust.” Opera is the epitome of romantic feeling contained by classical form. The singer’s powerful instrument and capacity to project archetypal emotion entail channeling her own vulnerability with consummate technical finesse. Mad scenes and death throes test composer and performer alike in controlled loss of control. “Me as Montserrat ended up as Lady Macbeth for some reason, still very angry,” Plansky has noted. The freedom of brushstrokes and colors to denote energy, sound, libido, while also grounding a real figure in credible space, represents a dualism comparable to a coloratura soprano’s emotional meltdown.
Plansky’s projective identification with his divas expands the iconography of the self-portrait in masquerade. These images belong to a long tradition of artists hamming it up in their studios, from Rembrandt to Cindy Sherman, but the crossing of gender represents a departure. (Of course, sopranos are no strangers to trouser roles, though none are depicted here.) There have been artists, like Larry Rivers, who cross-dressed – but recreationally. Duchamp cultivated his feminine alter ego in Rrose Sélavy. R.B. Kitaj’s Self-Portrait as a Woman, 1984, a self-portrait in title and facial features alone, is a historical statement about gentile women with Jewish partners who were paraded in the streets by the Nazis. Jonathan Borofsky has presented his bearded visage with a feminine sex doll body in equally weighted political terms. Each of these artists uses the self as a bargaining chip in their wager with alterity, playing on the Rimbaudian “Je est un autre.”
Planksy seems to be doing something else. If the aim of masquerade is to unsettle, to subvert the security of identities – whether social or sexual – or to experiment in a radical transformation of the self, Plansky’s cross-dressing seems rooted in opposite intentions. In his own person he gives himself something real, present and familiar to look at while exploring his subject, which is as much the sounds and the emotions and the narratives of opera as the glorious, talented individuals – the divas – to whom he is beholden for encapsulating, and releasing, those forces. His subject, in other words, is as much the music as the musicians – the woods as the trees.
* all quotations are take from Carl Plansky’s lecture on his work at the New York Studio School, March 11, 2008.