Word: paintings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Today, faculty members paint a different picture of sociology at Harvard, saying that the department is grappling with disagreement over the proper focus of sociology as a discipline, less than ideal inter-personal relations among department members, and its small size...
...illuminations of Goethe's ideas about the Urpflanze, or "primal plant"; or of the extraordinary images of tiny natural structures taken in the 1920s by photographers like Karl Blossfeldt, in which a seedcase can rear up like a Gothic tower, suggesting all manner of analogies to architecture. But Winters' paintings evoke this quintessentially Romantic idea of the very small as metaphor of the very large without being very explicit about it. The paint surface is too rough for that: heavily worked over, it is long on touch but short on info. At the same time, its muddy strength has little...
Winters thinks of the thick paint as "one of the tools and devices associated with expressionism"--but no more than that. He objects to being tagged as a neoexpressionist. "Whatever else it is about," he insists, "my work is not about the self. I want to get at something outside myself; one gets sick of looking at indulgent expressionist pictures that suck all the air out of the room." He prefers to think of his paintings as "diagrams that describe the way the world works," but one has to take this with a grain of salt. Actually, they come...
...that Joan Miro opened in the 1920s. And like those dreambugs, Winters' fungi and spores have a distinctly human air. In their aggregation, they refer to social structures: hives, crowds, nests, colonies. They suggest hierarchies and sometimes conflict. But all this is decidedly muffled, submerged so far in the paint that it hardly works as allegory. Winters does not want to make his images specific: "I want them to trigger multiple readings, so that they somehow function above and below language, not exactly on the line." But some of his titles, like Dystopia (the reverse of Utopia: a failed society...
Above all, Winters' paintings are not illustrations, either of things or states of mind. They are rather too indefinite and physically aggressive for that. The heavy paint erodes the form; it is the foe of exact morphology, and it works against clear, taxonomic definition. This builds a layer of frustration into the image: it seems perverse to take objects that are only, or mainly, of scientific interest and handle them in a way so calculated to frustrate scientific curiosity. The dandy's thumbprint lies lightly on this show, a sign that both Johns and Marcel Duchamp have been there before...