I.

Long before Clement Greenberg announced that Jackson Pollock's breakthrough paintings existed in the same space as the viewer, knocking down once and for all the barrier between illusionism and palpable fact, Marcel Duchamp said we ought to use a Rembrandt as an ironing board. Whereas Greenberg believed art should exist in the same physical space as the viewer, Duchamp believed art and the viewer should acknowledge their existence in the same world. Greenberg put his faith in the ideals of progress and the meaningfulness of art history, while Duchamp recognized that change and chaos were inevitable. For both men, the issue was sanctity. Greenberg believed in the privileged moment inhabited by both the abstract painting and the educated, enlightened viewer, while Duchamp believed that art ought to be a useful fact of our lives, rather than a form of sanctified decoration. Sanctity is one of the bedeviling issues central to both art and life; it is also very much an area that Anna Bialobroda has investigated through the medium of paint.

If we are not what we see or say but the changing product of what we do, then what is it that we routinely do and do not question? A nation of slimy nitpickers, embattled busybodies, or spoiled infants--what have we actually become? Despite their obvious differences, Newt Gingrich and David Geffen would have to agree that we are customers who pay to go to the movies. In 1990, Bialobroda completed a group of tall, narrow paintings in which she depicted a cropped view of a face in grissaille. Below this face was a dark monochrome ground on which the word, "exit," pulsed.

Bialobroda's "movie theater" paintings evoke the physical space reserved for voyeuristic viewing. However, instead of being the invisible ones who get to see what has been made visible, we are compelled to look at ourselves looking at a painting. Bialobroda has knowingly thwarted the viewer's supposedly omnipotent power. And within this viewing space, which has been equated with a movie theater's calibrated intersection of public and private desires, and thus an orchestrated omnipotence, we might begin asking ourselves: Do we identify with a character or characters in the movie or, in the case of these paintings, do we identify with the viewer or the viewed? Are we the ones who see or the ones who are seen? Might not the relationship between the viewer and the viewed be a struggle for power? Is this why the process of identification is so important to us? Or is it because we have started losing all sense of who "we" are, who the "I" is?

Both the grisaille tones and the coarseness of the faces--none of them are typically beautiful or handsome, that is to say assimilated--contradict the escapist message encoded within movies. The message of most movies is that, like Thelma and Louise, you can exist in that secure bubble of space and time that will hover forever above the Grand Canyon, that you can leave both your colorless lives and time's cruel passing behind. Movies and television have taken over the illusionistic space of 19th century academic painting; they are the machines producing the sanctuaries the general public craves.

Bialobroda's "movie theater" paintings, their cropped views, question film's sanctifying power. The viewer is confronted by stark, anonymous faces whose colors he or she may associate with an early era of documentary films, and a period of both vast migration and immense destruction. Confronted by these faces, these "others," we realize that we have have no idea who they are. We can neither speak to them nor hear them. An impenetrable silence exists between us and them, between the "I" and the "you."

We can imagine leaving the movie theater or walking away from a painting, but the faces cannot exit the painting. The purgatorial space in which they exist is an unforgiving realm that transforms its inhabitants into chiaroscuro light. The only way one can live forever in the realm defined by paintings or movies is to become bodiless, become a ghost. Bialobroda's ghosts exist in both the present and some other time; they are the memories haunting our present. That we cannot name these memories makes them all the more haunting.

II.

In the "Fair Game" series, 1991-93, which depicts two people kissing, Bialobroda adopted a term or phrase from hunting to title each painting. The paintings consist of black velvet stretched over a thick, box-like structures. While their box-like structure gives the paintings physical presence, their velvet surface transforms them into light absorbing black holes. Within this contradiction between the visual and the physical, the viewer senses both an agression and a passivity which echo the subject matter.

Restricting herself to a grisaille palette, Bialobroda used kitchen knives to apply the paint to the velvet's rich black surface. Bialobroda's use of black velvet and kitchen knives suggests the likelihood that the viewer should understand her painting method on both a metaphorical and literal level. Full of romantic and sexual connotations, the black velvet functions as an extremely sensitive surface that does not allow the artist to fudge the painting. She has to get the composition "right" or throw it away. These limits suggest that sex and romance are not necessarily acts of unlimited freedom, but decisions about the nature of one's constraint. While the kitchen knife evokes domestic violence, the black velvet evokes kitsch and sensitivity. Trust and the transgression of trust are integral aspects of the painting. Here it should be noted that Bialobroda was inspired to use a kitchen knife to apply the paint after she read that it is the most commonly used instrument in cases of domestic violence and murder.

All of these associations gain further resonance in light of Bialobroda's subject matter, which is two people kissing. However, the artist disrupts the sanctity of this private moment by having one of them looking directly at us, the viewers. At first, it seems that we have invaded their space, just as they have invaded ours. And yet, has this invasion been invited? And if so, who has done the inviting and why? What relationship do we have with the person looking at us? Is there some kind of collusion going on? Finally, how might this collusion bear upon the moment of intimacy we are witnessing? Bialobroda raises these questions but does not answer them. Her purpose is not didactic.

The shifting, changing disjunctures between mind and body, between doing and thinking, are one area Bialobroda investigates in these paintings. Who are we kissing when we kiss someone? What are we thinking? Is there a particular narrative in which we want this act of intimacy to take place? What does this narrative tell us about ourselves? As in the "movie theater" paintings, Bialobroda courts narrative in order to expose our own complicity in the telling. We are not separate from either the stories we tell or those we wish to tell. We are both the storyteller and the story we tell. We are left with a question: What story exists between the one who is looking and us?

Bialobroda uses a kitchen knife like a sculptor. The faces convey a physical presence akin to a rubber Halloween mask: they are a kind of thick, malleable skin with missing areas. By privileging neither the faces nor the black velvet surface, Bialobroda disrupts our reading of the figures. Where we might expect to see flesh or shadow, we encounter the black velvet, which, like a deep, empty space, absorbs all light. The faces are both insistently physical and incomplete, as if the skin has been cut away by the knife.

It's as if we opened the door to a room in which there is no light and suddenly realized there are two people embracing in the dark. We glimpse them before we are able to adjust to the change from light to dark, and they fully emerge from the shadows. However, this realistic reading is immediately contradicted by Bialobroda's grisaille palette, as well as by the likelihood that at least one of figures knows we have been there for a while.

The figures literally inhabit another world, one which is largely without any light. Have we entered this other world? Is it the place where nightmares occur? Or, the more likely scenario, has someone in this other world noticed us watching them and thus made us feel like we are part of that world? The expression is sinister and theatrical, someone is showing off. Why?

At the same time, by having one of the figures acknowledge our intrusion, Bialobroda is able to suggest that all of us are vulnerable, that no space we inhabit is sanctified. In this regard, Bialobroda's use of a knife goes beyond asserting a conjuction between violence and romance, and evokes the perilousness dogging every aspect of our lives. We are literally never safe, not even when we are in love, a fact we may not wish to acknowledge but which is certainly driven home each time we pick up a newspaper or watch the evening news.

III.

In a number of works in the "Targets" series, which was started in 1993 and is still ongoing, Bialobroda depicts a close-up view of someone aiming a gun. Both the figures and guns are done in bright, monochromatic color on a black ground, making the work theatrically cheerful and thus disturbing. We see, for example, part of a bright blue face and a blue gun, which is aimed at us.

As in all of Bialobroda's paintings, the viewer is confronted with questions about the nature of his or her relationship to art. Bialobroda effectively raises questions by destabilizing, as well as reversing, the privileged relationship between viewer and viewed. Thus, if art is a privileged moment of seeing, then what happens when that moment is inhabited by the half-hidden face of a potential murderer? And if we are not to confuse art with life, then why is the person in Bialobroda's drawings pointing a gun at us? Finally, if art is supposed to show us something about the relationship between recognition and looking, what do we see when confronted by this menacing figure?

Bialobroda's compositions suggest that a door has just been opened but does not tell us who opened it. We are standing face to face with someone pointing a gun at us. The monochromatic palette reminds us that we are not looking at something real, leaving us to consider for who or for what the figure is a surrogate. We may also wonder what this figure's relationship is to both art and life? If the realm this figure inhabits is art, what does it mean that we feel that we are either intruders who are standing on the threshold of the other's space or that someone is on the brink of intruding into our space?

Suppose we read the scenario another way. Suppose we have opened the door and allowed art not only to enter our lives, but to become, as Duchamp challenges us, as useful and necessary as an ironing board or any other utilitarian object. If we find Bialobroda's gun toting figures menacing, then perhaps we prefer art which is non-threatening to that which is threatening.

IV.

In her most recent ongoing series, which was started in 1994, Bialobroda depicts one or two grisaille figures on a woven ground. Cut from bolts of brocade or tapestry, the woven grounds remind us that women have played a central part in the development of capitalism, as well as echo the use of canvas, a woven cloth, in painting. The grounds range from abstract images (rows of circles) to representational images (a herd of wild mustangs in a Southwest landscape).

Each painting is titled with a word such as "Sugar" or "Honey," which suggests a link between food and terms of endearment, also raising questions about the relationship between consumption and friendship. In all of the paintings, the grisaille figure or figures have raised their hands in the air and are waving. The moment this person or persons inhabit is the one where two different people or groups of people have made eye contact with each other, and are now acknowledging that contact. While there is still a physical space separating us (or you) from them (or him or her), some kind of bond has been both established and acknowledged. It is a moment of trust and vulnerability.

Since she completed the "movie theater" paintings, Bialobroda has moved from a darkened, private world to the bright world of greeting one another in public. In each of the series she has worked on or completed over the past four years, she has explored the space between the "I" and the "you," between "us" and "them." This is the public, shared space Clement Greenberg tried to essentialize without regard to race, gender, and other determining factors. However, as we surely must know by now, this shared, changing space is as much a battlefield as it is anything else. Although Bialobroda is exploring issues which touch on the struggle for power and domination in relationships, she is not programmatic. The viewer is confronted with questions, rather than presented with answers. It is not a matter of being told how to conduct oneself, but a matter of examining one's own conduct. Instead of seeing an anonymous face on screen, we are seen by someone else. And that person has acknowledged our existence. The viewer is no longer the person who sees but is now the person who is seen. Who or what, we may well begin asking, has become visible?

lingo 4

Books in print by John Yau