Be Spectacled

Bradford and Wethli at ICON

By Chris Thompson

“Katherine Bradford/Mark Wethli: New Paintings” is at ICON Gallery in Brunswick through September 22. Call (207) 725-8157

“COMPOSITE,” 2001, ink on xerox copy, by Katherine Bradford

A woman pounds her fists on the table and screams victoriously. You’d think that she had accomplished something Herculean, even Gandhian, heroic and noble, against all the odds.

She has, in fact, immortalized herself by managing to swallow five live, wriggling earthworms, advancing herself to another round of “Fear Factor.” For 15 minutes she’s queen of a world that is worth $50,000 and a few months of her bikini-clad image rerunning during prime-time.

In 1967, in his rarely read but often-quoted book The Society of the Spectacle, French theorist Guy Debord used the term “spectacle” to name this intoxicatingly insipid image-saturated society in which we live. He was insistent that the “society of the spectacle” is not merely a conglomeration of images, but a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.

Katherine Bradford and Mark Wethli’s current exhibition subjects the realms and languages of the spectacle to tag-team scrutiny. For visitors aware of their histories, the present show might seem a logical follow-up to their 1996 appearance together in a duo show at Rockland’s Farnsworth Museum. For others, their work initially appears to be art worlds apart. Wethli’s tight lean geometries and high-keyed color analyses speak with a directness that is playfully confounded by Bradford’s thick, textured, lusciously painted transitions and detours between imagination, narration, and memory.

But the palpable differences between their work adds to the impact of their convergence, one that Wethli expresses thus: “The best measure of a realist painting is how it works abstractly. The best measure of an abstract painting is how real it is.” What sounds like a circular argument is a way of encircling two crucial questions for any painter: what are the terms of the painting’s invention, and how effectively are they being managed?

In the case of the works presented by both painters in this show, their respective modes of invention are directed towards ways in which the realm of the image can be put to the service of more humane considerations. Wethli’s paintings constellate around his project (with Kyle Durrie and Cassie Jones) to design a large mural, based upon T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, for the new MidCoast Hospital in Brunswick. “Study for Four Quartets” presents a small-scale map of the mural’s four panels, which taken together revisit the perennial theme of transition between the seasons, birth and death, growth and decay. Wethli explains that, as in Eliot’s text, the mural’s focus is at once upon the fleeting nature of all things, as well as upon those “compensating forces of art, literature, faith, and nature” that provide us with some of our continuities through life’s moments of elation and despair.

The meticulous design of the mural appears as the provisional achievement of the rest of his works in the gallery, which read as the results of a methodical program of formal experimentation devised in order to come to terms with the nature, size, scale, and, perhaps most importantly, the function of this mural. This, as Wethli notes, is “to evoke the purpose and character of the hospital itself as a place of healing but also the site of some of life’s most significant transitions.”

Interestingly, the more coldly analytical Wethli’s visual strategy seems, the more it permits precisely the kinds of flights of fancy that we are conditioned to dissociate from “geometric abstraction.” In his “Small Swift Birds,” a juxtaposition of two skewed fields of alternating color becomes a meditation on the pleasures of place: one checkerboard field representing the frosted blue of an August morning in Maine (where Wethli lives and works) alternating against the bright yellow of a finch’s breast, the other capturing the play between the turquoise waters of Florida (where Wethli studied) and the deep pink of the flamingos that congregate there. Such visual metonymy provides a fitting mode of engagement with theme of existential transition presented by “Four Quartets.”

Bradford tackles this by way of our inspiringly goofy wobblings toward enlightenment. Discussing her painting “Woman Flying,” Bradford explained that the image of the faceless woman in a superhero costume and cape, just barely conquering gravity, “is part of a series whose central theme is that of a solitary and awkward person aspiring to grace, to connection, to another dimension altogether.”

If a super(s)hero falls to the ground and there is no one around, does she make a sound? In her book Gravity and Grace, philosopher Simone Weil reminds us that the noble soul always has her ignoble moments: “I must not forget that at certain times when my headaches were raging I had an intense longing to make another human being suffer by hitting him in exactly the same part of his forehead.”

Bradford’s “Composite” (pictured) presents a grid of six color xeroxes of “Woman Flying.” To each one she has added black ink-drawn figures of spectral museum visitors — echoes of artist Kara Walker’s silhouettes. As with her other works, “Composite” is rooted in a moment where a narrative from a parallel world coincides with and haunts our own in a way that is both hilarious and threatening.

Debord described the spectacle as “the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity.” Bradford’s work operates as a consistent non-cooperation with this empire: she points with tireless inventiveness at the emperor’s nakedness, so even as his birthday suit becomes increasingly distressing, the joke keeps getting funnier.

Chris Thompson can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com.