The Puzzling Aesthetics of Elizabeth Murray

Those who know me would probably agree that I'm a minimalist at heart, no matter how messy my room is. The first painter I fell in love with was Barnett Newman. Then came Agnes Martin. Then Brice Marden. Then Sue Williams, especially the squiggles-on-white stuff. You get the picture. I have a love for line and open spaces, rich color and aching simplicity.

So it was no wonder that, when I went to Elizabeth Murray's mid-career retrospective at MoMA this winter, I would fall in love with "Pink Spiral Leap" (1975). But the rest, of course, puzzled me entirely. I decided that I didn't like looking at her work. I decided I could appreciate the art historical references -- Cubism, still lives in general, Frank Stella, maybe even... dare I say it?... Keith Haring. I also liked -- even loved -- that she was humorous. But I still felt like I was left with something that is just too Martin Lawrence Gallery for me to handle!

And that triggered a different kind of interest: I started to get excited about her work because it punctures my personal notions of visual propriety.

Reading Carroll Dunham's article, "Shapes of Things to Come," today was enlightening (it's from Artforum's October 2004 issue). It was nice to look at the paintings again and be confused because I think confusion is precisely the nerve that Murray is trying to hit. What her work reveals is an energetic courage that completely changes the boundaries of what a painting or a sculpture can be. She does that Duchampian thing of saying "Look at art this way" without using products from the real world, just her own representations of them. She likes cups. She likes paint brushes. So she paints them and then blows them up, sucks them in, puts them through any number of wacky run-arounds to get to strange, jolting forms. Put a different way, she's collaging together different notions of art history within her art-making and expressing them in strictly formal ways. I suppose that's how I'm looking at Murray's work at the moment. I think that's what makes it difficult. I think that's why I'm starting to warm up to it.