Word: rothenberg
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...Rothenberg did her first horse, a pallid and watery sketch, in 1973, and it is hard nowadays to remember what an unyielding prejudice against any kind of hand-painted figuration existed in New York 20 years ago. Abstract art -- in particular its last whole-cloth style, Minimalism -- had done away with all that. It had also shaped artists' expectations about format: split and abutted canvases, "primary" X shapes, the whole pictorial rhetoric of the canvas as object...
...then, awkwardly and unexpectedly, with Rothenberg's gee-gees leading the field, figures started recolonizing the bare stage. Partly they did so in response to performance art, which had absorbed the body images that abstraction had driven out of painting. (Trained as a dancer, Rothenberg tried performance herself in the early '70s.) Partly it was just out of inarticulate need -- the need to reconnect with the world, through self-description that didn't exclude pathos. Auping is certainly right in seeing the horses as disguised self-portraits, or at any rate as "presences" that stood in for human presence...
...quarterings, which made them seem more heraldic than natural. (Though the vertical split line that bisects Cabin Fever might be read as the finish post at the end of a horse race, it's probably just a relic of Minimalist style.) The opposites didn't amalgamate well. As Rothenberg herself put it, "My formalist side was denying my content side." And so "I began tearing it ((the horse)) apart to find out what it meant...
Literally "tearing it apart." Rothenberg's paintings over the next few years were all about dismemberment, blockage and fright. She is one of the younger artists who took heart from Philip Guston: in the early '70s, Guston, an abstract painter for years, had returned to the figure with a controversial set of seriocomic paintings of Ku Klux Klansmen, which laid the ground for his formidable "late" style and often featured stray boots, feet and arms...
...same spirit, but without the levity, Rothenberg started butchering her horse image: haunches, fetlocks and heads scattered on the ground of the canvas, with no gore but a lot of implied anxiety. Most of them started from small doodles, envelope-size, and the large paintings retain the cryptic and improvised look of drawings; in fact, since so much of Rothenberg's work is about linear figure and ground, it is hard to say where drawing leaves off and painting begins: for her, a drawing is something on paper, a painting something on canvas, and that's that. Her charcoal drawings...