Elana Herzog first came to my attention
in the summer of 1991. An outdoor group show at Snug Harbor, plagued elsewhere
with an ’80s hangover of little structures, featured a peculiar grove
of wooden tables, each penetrated by a rooted young tree. Unlike a standard
’80s site piece, each table was built not of lumberyard stock, but
of several existing old tables cut up and cobbled together. The edges
of each composite table, both outside and inside, were cut into complex
organic shapes that were deliberate, not arbitrary. I had seen these shapes
before, but did not recognize them.
This project by Elana Herzog shone on several levels. It was relaxed,
economical and entertaining. It was provisional but pointed: It threw
a token ring of restraint around a life force that would either cast off
or devour that restraint within a year or two. Built with just one material,
wood, it embraced enough polarities to fill a chart. Most of all, it was
blazingly irrational. In laying out the issues of her career, Herzog helped
define the differences between ’80s and ’90s sculpture.
Herzog’s recent show at Black + Herron in New York brings the issues
of restraint and resistance indoors, inside the skin. untitled #8 (1993),
the oldest piece in the show, begins most viscerally with a sprawling
mass of tugboat ropes on the floor. A dainty fitted sheet stretches over
this mass, containing the edges. But only the edges—for huge holes
open up in the middle of the sheet. Herzog bastes elastic sphincters around
these holes in a token effort to cinch the heavy ropes in; but really,
only gravity keeps this piece from spilling its guts.
untitled #8 is as ridiculous and menacing as Medusa in a shower cap. It
tells us three things at once: (1) a threat exists within; (2) an attempt
is made to contain the threat but not address it. The containment may
be comic or cosmetic, but it will always be inadequate; (3) a delicate
truce is established which only inertia can preserve.
untitled #8 represents a classic psychological bind. Looking at this piece
as autonomous adults, we feel our own repressions more acutely. The real
shear comes when we recognize the work as infantile. At one moment we
identify with this impotent, incontinent mass; we remember our early dependency,
resentment, and fear. The next, we identify with the parent of such a
creature. Infant becomes monster: a promiscuous pack of unreasonable demands
and unpredictable wastes. Our cult of the adorable child disintegrates
like the floral sheath before our eyes.
The newer work in the remainder of Herzog’s show goes on to explore
the faint back trails between abject infancy and abject adulthood. No
longer does Herzog offer us wrenching dualities of dark nature and civilization.
Instead, she lightens up—so much so that we ask what’s wrong.
Three untitled works from 1994, #1, #3 and #5, present variations on #8’s
body-bag theme. Slack sacks are still the format, but what’s inside
has changed. #5 inverts customary sleeping arrangements. A plain white
sheet bundles a dark wool blanket inside itself like a fitted bodice;
the viewer peers through puckered holes like an orthodox groom. #3 (1994),
the clown of the show, lolls like a beached walrus on a pedestal. A hideous
orange bag of curtain gauze loosely stuffed with crumpled newspaper, this
work is lazy enough to find itself over a barrel. In response to admonitions
to tighten up its act, #3 plays the martyr, stretching spots of its own
skin on embroidery hoops.
Herzog’s work of 1995 abandons bulk entirely. #5 (1995) spreads an
archipelago of crusty little colorless husks across the gallery wall;
they look like hollowed-out blooms. #7 (1995) gives us generous bedsheet
swags, dripping with beads like hippie decor. In the rear of the gallery,
#3 reduces to one dimension: a red and pink trickle of beads down the
wall, a leaking dike, no Hans Brinker in sight.
With its paleness, listlessness, and refusal to deliver the proper dualities,
Herzog’s newer work can be infuriating. Indeed, in its Fall ’95
New York Report Card, Coagula Art Journal gives Herzog an F, dismissing
the show in two words: “Pathetic Poop.” My interpretation of
Herzog’s attitude problem, her sullen affect, is a little different.
Raised as she was among Manhattan intellectuals, Herzog’s filial
struggles are fiercer than most. What we are witnessing is an extended
silent tantrum against a New Yorker’s Jewish patriarchs: Clement
Greenberg and Sigmund Freud.
Guided by Freud, Herzog’s earlier work looks within for the enemy.
Her own life forces threaten to shatter their external structures. In
Herzog’s infantile world, we are bags of vomit, snot, and tears;
without limbs or even sphincters, we cannot help ourselves. Freud, of
course, saw women as abject creatures too—as mutilated men. Women
were defined by their dependency and lack. By eviscerating her sculpture,
Herzog is saying the enemy is not within; rather, the text within is what
makes us hollow.
The strategy of evisceration works remarkably well against the other patriarch,
Clement Greenberg, who dominated New York art theory through the 1960s,
when Herzog was growing up. The quintessential modernist, Greenberg declared
that art should only address its own materials and methods. All the myth
formerly contained by the artwork was displaced by Greenberg to the artist
HIMself, who became a hero in precisely military terms: a soldier of the
avant-garde. As understood down in the ranks, paint soldiers defended
the picture plane, producing only surface; depth belonged to sculptors,
who were to traffic in literal volume and mass.
Such rigors had two consequences. One was a detachment from personal and
social issues we still find in corporate art today. The other was an anxiety
about the purity of art expressed by Greenberg himself in his attacks
on decoration and kitsch.
Herzog’s response to Clement Greenberg is to paste the master’s
prescribed lack of affect over a cascade of furious refusals. Greenberg
calls for mass; Herzog gives us bulk. Greenberg calls for volume; Herzog
puckers planes. “PICTURE planes, like this wall!” cries the
master; Herzog retorts with desultory lines. In Greenberg’s call
for a soldier-hero, Herzog, like a Vietnam-era draft resister, refuses
to fight.
Echoing through Herzog’s work like the backwash of the Big Bang is
a peculiar historical moment. By the mid-1960s, the notion of progress
had become thoroughly confused. In the United States as a whole, progress
was the new name for Manifest Destiny, an imperialist motto and, more
recently, a consumer exhortation. To political liberals, progress meant
something else: large-scale social engineering ranging from Roosevelt’s
New Deal to Johnson’s Great Society. In the cultural sphere, progress,
as marshaled in the visual field by Clement Greenberg, was the ineluctable
triumph of abstraction over philistine representation.
The counterculture wave of the 1960s, which perhaps first broke not at
Stonewall or even Selma but in the riots in Watts in ’64, proved
that progress is not enough. Many stunned liberals retreated into a lifestyle
rarely recognized as reactionary: BACK to the land, BACK to private experience,
BACK to Eden. By 1969, Richard Nixon occupied the White House, Reagan
the California governor’s mansion, and counterculture had been sent
to summer camp at Woodstock.
Herzog’s most recent works are elegies to the 1960s. Plastics—the
bright future of a young Dustin Hoffman in the 1968 film The Graduate—weep
here in non-biodegradable sheets. Their circular openings—crisp geometric
forms Greenberg himself would certainly approve—accommodate nothing
but a liberal’s phantom limbs. What Herzog mourns here may be the
notion of progress itself.Lisa Hein
New York, New York
1995