Story of a Body

‘Eccentric Bodies,’ on view at Mason Gross School of the Arts Galleries, presents the body as a canvas of experience.

By: Ilene Dube
   In Bailey Doogan’s charcoal drawings, a shapely woman with a voluptuous head of hair obscuring her face examines her naked wrinkled flesh. The images are titled, appropriately enough, "Self Exam in Nation."
   "Our bodies are full of stories," Ms. Doogan writes. "They are detailed maps of our experiences. This corporeal topography of hair patterns, veins, scars, calluses, wrinkles and flesh (both smooth and crenellated) speak of a life lived."
   It is part of Eccentric Bodies: The Body as Site for the Imprint of Age, Race and Identity at the Mason Gross School of the Arts Galleries in New Brunswick, on view through Aug. 3. The exhibit includes work in various media by seven "artists with a feminist gaze," according to curators Judith Brodsky and Ferris Olin, directors of the Feminist Art Project.
   "Their work contradicts the conventional ‘male gaze’ of artists since the Renaissance who have painted the nude as sexually passive and available," Ms. Brodsky and Dr. Olin write in the exhibition catalog.
   The idea for the exhibit came to them when viewing the self-portraits of Brenda Goodman. In this New York-based artist’s paintings, the line between body and canvas is blurred; just as the body is the canvas of the bearer’s experiences, the canvas shows all the body has been through. Indeed, Ms. Goodman’s paintings take center stage — literally — in the cavernous gallery space.
   Although they are not arranged in chronological order, they tell a story, at least to this observer: the story of a body. The artist only titles these "Self-Portrait" with a number and a year, because she doesn’t want to give it away; she wants us to look and work and see and interpret.
   "Titles put paintings in a box and make it too specific," she says. "Different people see different things, and if you title the painting you limit the interpretation."
   In the first, we see the artist from behind, unabashedly naked, holding a paintbrush loaded with yellow paint, standing back to look at one of her canvases. Just as the artist stands back, the viewer gets up close to examine the surface texture and experience the lusciousness of the colors, the qualities of the paint: how it adheres and drips and drizzles. The artist has built up the paint so thick, in parts it resembles 3-D flowers.
   In the next painting, the flowers and drizzles are built up even more, and the same texture-effect is used to create folds in the flesh of the self-portraitist. Moving along, we see the nude self-portraitist in her studio, staring at her past in the form of completed canvases. The one she seems to be confronting is the self-portrait she painted 11 years earlier, in which we see a white ghostlike feature-less creature who stuffs her face with swirling round disks. The artist has said she painted this while dealing with weight issues, and has called it the cookie monster.
   Passing several more paintings, we see a body in a coffin as the artist looks on. There appear to be several standing coffins with Edward Munch-like ghosts hovering about. Or perhaps they are Jean Dubuffet-like ghosts; Ms. Goodman says she has been inspired by Dubuffet, as well as de Kooning, Guston, Soutine and Gorky.
   "You have this affinity with certain artists and there’s a reason why you’re influenced by them, because there’s something of them already inside you," Ms. Goodman says in an interview with artist David Brody in the catalog.
   Further along, the artist, covered in textured white paint, stands with brushes fully loaded and her head covered in a grayish veil, tiny beady eyes peering out.
   It’s not easy painting yourself naked, both physically and emotionally, and even Ms. Goodman felt vulnerable at first, which is why she hid behind the veil. But after several paintings, she gained strength and was able to removed the mask and face her audience.
   "In some cases I cut off the heads altogether," she says. "The head no longer added to what I had to say."
   Next up, the bloated white textured body seems to have acquired an antique patina, its ripples and wear the main feature. The face and arms recede, the background is burgundy, and she holds a red rag — has she cleaned up the bloody period of her life, or entered menopause?
   At this point we are feeling great empathy for the character we’ve become acquainted with. The head turns black and crusty, except for the red mouth where perhaps the guts are spilling out. Her arms cross over, as if to protect what’s left of her, and she is surrounded by a mob of black-veiled heads with pink holes for the orifices of eyes and mouth. The tortured creature in the next painting is just a head with a beady eye and mouth.
   "If people just want to look at a pretty painting and don’t want to confront emotions — they shouldn’t view my work," says Detroit-born Ms. Goodman, 63, in a telephone interview. "Artists today use irony to cut off feelings, and I’m not into doing that. I want to remove the barriers and veils that keep people from experiencing emotions. You can’t accuse me of not being from my heart and real. I see so much fake art and I want to do the opposite. It’s brave to paint what’s not popular in the art world."
   She’s back to a full figure, white and featureless and more crusty than the barnacles on a rock at the beach. Her guts — or reddish organ-shaped globs of paint — are spilling from her head, and there are four ledges, or steps, with built-up paint formations; the stairway to heaven? The background is a wonderful vision of an ochre-colored hell.
   Finally, one hopes, there is respite for the tormented soul in the afterlife, where a white creature floats out at sea. (At first it looks like an ice floe, but on closer inspection it is the white bloated body we’ve come to know.) On top of her stand three black penguin-like creatures, or three wise women in black, and all around are creatures that could be anything from pelicans to mourners to aliens.
   In the final scene, a white creature, or ghost, lies on a white bed and another white figure comforts her. A small yellow creature seems to beckon, while another creature hides under the bed. A black figure hovers over her head, and other stooping figures in both black and white hover nearby.
   This painting is about Ms. Goodman’s mother who was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1972, when Ms. Goodman was 29. Her family did not freely show affection and emotion, and Ms. Goodman and her mother were never comfortable talking about the cancer, and so when her mother died, Ms. Goodman recollects, she just sat there and watched, not knowing what to do.
   Over the years, thinking about it, Ms. Goodman wishes she would have held her mother’s hand. "…as long as I was painting this way I felt I could revisit places in my life that needed healing," she says in the catalog.
   The artist seems to traverse freely between the conscious world and the inner world, or to be in dreams awake. "I don’t think of myself as a surrealist," she says from her summer studio in the Catskill Mountains, where she spends June through Labor Day. "My dreams are boring, so I rarely use elements of my dreams, but I do use the unconscious. My anxieties are in all my paintings, but I paint so they can be interpreted on other levels. If it were just cathartic, that’s not what painting should be."
   She says some viewers apply art historical constructs to her paintings, comparing paintings of the death of the virgin to the ghost-like painting of her mother, but "I have no clue about it." Afterward, she’ll go and look at the paintings hers may resemble, but while painting, "I dip deep into my consciousness and am also digging into the bigger world. It comes from working out emotional and spiritual issues."
   Some of the other work here includes female torsos by Linda Stein made of keys, leather belts, wire, sterling platters, louvres, car parts, stones and chains, or made of comic strips to represent Wonder Woman or Borat; and sensual black-and-white digital prints, gargantuanly sized, by Princeton-based photographer Ernestine Ruben. Central New Jersey is lucky to have Ms. Brodsky and Dr. Olin bringing us the cutting edge of artwork by women artists, but this writer, for one, has seen enough of French artist Orlan’s skin being vigorously punctured by needles for the sake of art.
Eccentric Bodies and Brenda Goodman: Self Portraits 2003-2007 are on view at Mason Gross School of the Arts Galleries, 33 Livingston Ave., New Brunswick, through Aug. 3. Gallery hours: Mon.-Fri. 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; (732) 932-2222. More paintings from Brenda Goodman: Self Portraits 2003-2007 are on view at the Mabel Smith Douglass Library Galleries, 8 Chapel Drive, New Brunswick, through Aug. 3. Gallery hours: Mon.-Fri. 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; (732) 932-9407; www.libraries.rutgers.edu