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dilemma is that artists, no longer able to sustain an uncritical belief
in painting’s viability as a visual language, find that only one alternative
to using outmoded pictorial strategies inappropriate to a media-drenched
contemporary world is to give oneself over to cynicism and irony,
using appropriation rather than futilely attempting to be “original.”
Strategies for painting, or for the “end” of painting, thus include
the elimination of all images or figure-ground relationships; borrowing
from existing (largely media) representations and recontextualizing
them; making neo-expressionist canvases by means of radical, non-art
gestures (Andy Warhol’s urine paintings are one example); or appropriating
images and/or styles from other eras and cultures (Gerhard Richter’s
“abstract expressionist” canvases or the nostalgic images of McDermott
and McGough are cases in point). |
| Critic
and painter Thomas Lawson frames the predicament as “a message from
all sides [that] there is no point in continuing to make art since
it can only exist insulated from the real world or as an irresponsible
bauble.2 He sees hope, however, in the work of a number of artists
“that can be classified as painting…but that most be seen as something
other: a desperate gesture, an uneasy attempt to address the many
contradictions of current art production by focusing on the heart
of the problem-that continuing debate between the “moderns” and the
“postmoderns” that is so often couched in terms of the life and death
of painting”.3 Pardo’s work, while clearly addressing this issue,
is concerned with its viability in a larger social sphere; thus the
“dedperation”and “uneasiness” Lawson senses is absent from his work,
replaced by a complex and open-ended humor, and a reservoir of faith
in the paintings’ power to be emotionally and intellectually affective. |
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For many artists and critics alike, some aspects of modernism continue
to have validity, particularly its adversarial nature and its belief
in its own enterprise; Pardo himself takes enormous pleasure in the
act of painting, and finds continued enjoyment in looking at the works
of the early modernists. At the same time, he grew up reading political
theory; the ideas of Karl Marx were to post-Batista school kids what
the Dick and Jane readers were to American children in the 1940s.
Pardo’s early education therefore predisposed him to a highly critical
and analytic view of early modernism, even as, in America, he was
nurtured and educated by its products. This ambivalence informs and
animates the Late 20th Century Still Life project. Ultimately, larger
social issues in the work are reinforced by strategic ones, but take
precedence over them in the immediate experience of looking. |
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Just as questions about the viability of painting reflect a crisis
belief that accompanies the challenge to modernist paradigm, so too
is another crisis belief addressed by Pardo through the act of memorializing
friends- and strangers- who have died of AIDS. For him, the vases
are both a celebration and an act of mourning, at one specific and
general, a testimony of the value of the human life in all its manifestationsBut
this reading isn’t immediately apparent, since the still life has
been the generic subject matter of an easel painter for centuries,
and Pardo’s commemorizations aren’t literal. Perhaps the reason these
generic still-life paintings evoke such a variety of strong responses
is that, on a number of levels, they raise challenging questions of
belief: is it possible to make a painting today that is more than
an esthetic strategy? Is there a way to make a work that is at once
morally and esthetically engaged?. |
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Can a work of art, in any way, make a real difference in the world?
Marcia Tucker Director of The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New
York. 1.An early painting installation, done as a thesis project in
1976, presaged the present work in surprising ways. Pardo “lifted”
colors from the Impressionist galleries at The Metropolitan Museum
of Art to use as background wall colors on which a fragmented nude,
each part framed in a heavy black rectangle, was deployed. 2.Thomas
Lawson, “Last Exit: Painting,” Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation,
ed Brian Wallis (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art and
Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984) p. 154. 3. Lawson, p.164. |
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