STUBBORN BEAUTY
by
Douglas Messerli
Merion
Estes Unnatural Disasters, curated
by Howard N. Fox / Los Angeles, Craft and Folk Art Museum, September 30,
2018-January 6, 2019, the openings I attended were on September 29th
and September 30, 2018
You
must see this piece, on the artist Merion Estes' Unnatural Disasters, which opened in September at the Craft and
Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles (an increasingly important museum in a city with
many great institutions), as an appreciation rather than a review, particularly
since it was curated by my companion, Howard N. Fox. I already did review a
smaller show of her work in Hyperallergic
Weekend in March of 1917.
As I mentioned in that earlier writing,
Estes, an early participator in the Art and Decoration movement, uses store-bought
patterned fabrics made in Africa, Indonesia, and Japan, applying acrylic paint
to many of them, while adding collaged art, or decorating them with stencils,
glitter, and other materials, resulting in wild swaths of color which almost
always first present themselves as objects of utter beauty—and, no, you can’t
get away from that word in observing her works! So intensively complex are her
resultant images that it is truly difficult to separate the wonderful original
fabrics from what she has applied upon them. As Constance Mattison describes Estes’
artworks:
…They are rapturously
beautiful, employing dazzling aesthetics…
Yet at the same time while the eye takes in
the pleasures of these works, Estes’ art, upon closer observation, presents a
kind of paradox. When we begin to make sense of what Fox calls these
“waving
flags for beauty,” we begin to perceive something else is going on, that the almost
Edenic-seeming natural worlds which she presents us of that world
contains something wrong. For example, in the stunning featured painting, Cooling Trend (from 2017), we perceive
that the yellow, coral, red, and green patterns that make up most of this work
are representations of climate heating, a landscape filled with dragons, black
ravens, several suns that seem to be reproducing small microbes like a
contagion of cancer. The only truly hopeful element of this work is a narrow
white swath in the very center of piece, where tiny minnows seem to be happily
surviving in the “cooling trend.” In short, the very vibrancy of this piece belies
the sad truth of the oceans’ and rivers’ destruction.
Other works are more obvious in their straight-forwardness. If one might first notice the lovely elephants marching through the veld in Desolation Row (2013), we also immediately recognize the terrifying human-like image of a dead tree that dominates the work and, even more, horrifyingly, the collage of flames into which the miniaturized pachyderms are destined. In between them lies a frighteningly black-laden cloud of footprints, bones, and other fragments that suggest the end of such former beasts’ lives.
Similarly, if the lovely waters of Storm Watch, with their swirling blues,
reds, and yellow ochre, we quickly recognize these as noxious waters
threatening the already skeletal ship in the upper right, a vessel flanked by a
phalanx of ravens set across dark oranges and almost sickening yellows. Yes,
this is also a beautiful work on first sight, but we realize that for any
humans in this scene, the storm is nearly over, and like the crew of The Flying Dutchman, the sailors and the
passengers may already be dead.
As Max F. Schulz writes about her work,
while Red Tide (2003), with its
pinkish reds, bands of blue, and almost cartoonish yellow blob with black
eye-like features, might at first appear a bit like a dizzying mix of sprightly
imagery:
The painting depicts the
yearly bloom of phytoplankton, a single mic-
roorganism, which reproduces daily
through cellular division to create
massive populations that can
stretch over thirty-miles in places. The
extraordinary life force of
this annual explosion of algae for several
weeks or more each year on
both California and New England coasts
[more recently on the Florida
coast] perversely sucks up the ocean’s
oxygen and blocks the lower depths.
The result is massive death of
fish trapped in waters under the
bloom.
As Fox writes of the almost electrifying Smithereens (2012):
The surface is a visual explosion
of energy: a latticework of flame-like
reds and oranges suffuses the
upper portion of the picture, as spider-
like
black spikes, evoking smoke and ash, interpenetrate the “flames.”
The lower portion depicts
bulbous, swirling waves [they are pieces of
printed fabric collaged onto the
painting’s surface], referencing the
tsunami that destroyed the power
plant and precipitated the nuclear
catastrophe. The marine life that
perished due to the disaster is repre-
sented by the dozens upon dozens
of fish eyeballs staring out from the
painting; those ocean inhabitants
might well have survived the
tsunami of the Fukushima
disaster, but they did not survive the radi-
ation and toxins released into
the habitat. Their eyes stare out at us like
witnesses to a guilty misdeed.
If
Estes’ works are, in some senses, beautiful depictions of the natural world—and
they truly are—we have now come a very long ways from the 19th
century male-dominated Hudson River School painters. No, Dorothy, we can never
ever return to the wheat-fields of Kansas.
This artist’s works present us with not
just a paradox, but represent a kind of conundrum: how to see the beauty in the
very destruction of the world around us, or, perhaps more accurately, how can
we find in the complete devastation of our planet any beauty?
Perhaps by using the very fabrics upon
which she presents her concerns, Estes has found a kind of deep beauty created
by human hands, minds, and visions that project a world far more wiser than the
one in which we live.
I have now been to see this show three times,
and each time I have been immediately wowed by the stubborn beauty of her work,
and yet have teared up for the messages that these amazingly- alive images convey.
Why Estes’ remarkable work is not better known, I cannot comprehend. It seems
necessary, almost, if we are to survive.
Los Angeles,
November 18, 2018
Reprinted from Art Là-bas (November 2018)
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