Philippine Daily Inquirer
by Lito Zulueta
The other works are pure mixed-media abstraction that builds on Lindslee’s old strengths in composition, color contradistinction and scale
The ABSTRACTION OF LINDSLEE takes a figurative turn in a nonfigurative, that is, very literal, fashion in “Animan, opening May 26 at T’he Drawing Room.
The show consists of Lindslee’s standard mixed media, but this time, the media consist not only of paint and scrap but also of sculpture and taxidermy. The last is a new development in Lindslee’s art, providing a counterpoint and a critique to the abstraction.
In the taxidermal works, animals are placed in certain situations that are said to depict the human situation. In the installation “Sleep for Sale,” a swan-white duck sits on a white pillow that rests on a dark-colored board or platform. The fowl’s whiteness is broken by splotches of Lindslee’s usual industrial colors; her feathers are ruffled in some parts, with a few quill-like feathers strewn about.
The whiteness may refer to the beauty of dreams (dreams may be described poetically as a flight with swans) while the colors may conjure the drabness of life.
So why should steep be for sale? Perhaps because in the hurly-burly of assembly-line existence, with its deadline and stress, sleep may yet be the scarcest commodity, the one singular luxury.
The poultry allegory is extended to piggery in “Pork Chop Explosion, in which a pig stands above a painting of Lindslee with some of the colors on its hooves, snout, hinds and back. The gesture of the sWine makes it appear busily finishing the painting, like Pollock dripping paint on his canvas.
We don’t know if the artist here is recognizing the incidental artistry of animals (like Thai elephants painting on a board) or depicting the animal instinct that Sometimes drives the artistic process.
Industrial critique
But to extend the industrial critique and the metaphor on domesticated animals, the artist may be saying the art business has made swine of some artists, battening on the high stakes of the industry, but not realizing they have been domesticated by the art market.
In this sense, the wild colors of the Fauvists,for example, do not really symbolize defiance of established conventions but co-optation. Artistic subversion has become cultivated, like developers reclaiming the wilds. Artists have become fattened pigs.
The critique seems to have been expanded Chicken Art,” in which a chick stands in the middle of a mixed media on canvas, beak pointed down to the right end painting where there’s a sculpture of a fleur-de-lis.
The title connotes the art of the faint-hearted and the small-minded, embodied by the puny chick that can only stand mute and helpless at the artistic flowering below. Of course, the fleur-de-lis may also be the “chicken art” itself, an artistic convention and a shop-worn cliché that the chick may either aspire for or look down on. The other works are pure mixed-media abstraction that builds on Lindslee’s old strengths in composition, color contradistinction and scale (the dimensions are at 5×5, 4×8 or 5×8 ft). Some of the works are titled Abstraction, as if to complement the taxidermal-sculptural installation paintings.
Tangible figures
The addition of tangible figures to the abstract works enhances the critique of abstraction: that while abstraction seeks to achieve a purity of art that is wordless and narrativeless, of which the most supreme example is music, the formalist absolutism is exposed as futile or impossible by the tangibility and solidity of the world that art seeks to depict. Seeking to achieve a purity of art, abstraction settles for indeterminacy.
The taxidermy easily invokes the combine works of Rauschenberg, the most famous of which is perhaps “Monogram” (1955-59, now with the Stockholm Moderne Museum), in which a stuffed goat with a rubber tire around its middle is splashed with paint much like action painting.
Together with Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg signaled the move away from Abstract Expressionism, and that signal Lindslee seems to have taken much to heart in his new works. Lindslee’s Animan”