By Lyle Rexer, NY Based Writer; Curator and Art Critic
In a seventeenth-century Dutch engraving, I find what seems to me an image of Surrealism and its ambiguous liberations. The mythical Pandora stands in front of a Dutch doorway, offering her infamous box (more like a chalice). Out of it come virtues and vices in equal measure, tiny winged creatures that fly up to heaven or spread out to populate the Earth and take dominion everywhere, an eruption of archaic anxieties into the bourgeois Dutch world.
Surrealism is the great Pandora’s box of modern art, still disgorging its wonderful and demonic contents, its unthinkable permissions, to artists like Carolyn Oberst. The Surrealist project was not just politics by other means -- a naked woman at your front door for no good reason except to disturb your day. It was psychic and artistic repatriation. Within the space of the painting or the confines of the object, the artist-provocateur unhinged images, signs, and materials from their conventional significances and let them float free, free to form new associations, more authentic and perhaps universal.
I take it as an axiom that the greater the detail and naturalistic fidelity of a Surrealist image, the less it has to do with the so-called real world. The point was not to record dreams but to provoke them. In liberating the elements of the picture, Ernst, de Chirico, Duchamp and the rest, liberated the artist and the viewer as well. We are free to walk the world and receive its strange gifts, the readymade markers of our identity.
Carolyn Oberst seldom played with dolls as a child, but true to her Surrealist precursors, she found them when she needed them, as the occasion for her most powerful images. Like the hidden signs of a new melancholy that forced themselves on de Chirico in the streets of Paris, the dolls have offered themselves to Oberst, theatrically, in tableaux, with the details of the scenes left blank, to be filled in by the goddess of psychic chance.
For Oberst, the dolls supply points of origin, access to the gendered past of a woman and the engendering past of an artist. I am thinking especially of, “My Room”, in which the doll, floating above the central image, seems to draw back a curtain on an archetypal childhood scene.
“My Room”, 2000, oil on canvas in vintage wood frame, 17.5”h.x16.5”w.
But this is not Tinkerbell welcoming us to the Magic Kingdom. The immaculate middle-class bedroom, with its Renoir prints and pink carpet, conspires to push the child artist into a corner, where she paints on carefully laid newspapers. The title should be, “Don’t Make a Mess”.
How the doll provoked this recollection (and took on the classic role of a fetish -- the projection and deflection of a fear) is a long story, but worth summarizing for the light it sheds on the origins of this art. It involves the bonnet, shoes, and fabric of the dress. Their reference to the style of what would be the generation of Oberst’s grandparents seems to have triggered the recognition in the artist of a chain of repression through which Victorian proprieties gave rise to the tyranny of middle-class taste in the 1950’s. The curtain raised by the doll is one of heavily patterned wallpaper, a curtain on the century that shaped her -- and us. The doll, says Oberst, unlocked all the anger.
Everything in the pictures flows from the dolls: settings, wallpaper patterns (redolent of period and social class), even the frames, which Oberst collects and uses to amplify her images. In her work we can see clearly how Surrealism transformed the notion of art making from creation to automatism and assemblage. Oberst is a collector, not so much of objects but of impressions, apprehensions, and subtle disturbances. Her projects come together, as she puts it, both physically and psychically. The mind is a laboratory of recombination and a theater of re-enactments, as Duchamp understood so well.
The other aspect that marks the lineage of these paintings is their ambivalence. They seem to oscillate between irreconcilable poles of feeling, like that image of Magritte’s in which a midnight street supports a daylight sky. “After Midnight”, imagines the moment after Cinderella’s exile from the ball, as she stands disheveled and stained in a ruined garden. There can be no awareness of innocence without the fall, no absolute divorce of pleasure from pain. The memory of absent pleasure is pain, just as surely as the absence of pain is pleasure.
“After Midnight”, 2000, oil on canvas in wood frame, 28.25”h.x18”w.
“Jamaican Doll”, originates in an impulse toward color and pattern, shaped by the myth of the tropics as a place of harmony between natives and nature. But the impulse is deflected by the doll’s image, a projection of fear and oppression. The wicker frame, painted with flowers feels like a cage. It’s a lethal souvenir for the tourist trade, a worm in the mescal bottle, moths in the alpaca sweater.
“Jamaican Doll”, 2000, oil on canvas in painted wicker frame, 31”h.x21”w.
I would characterize Oberst’s earlier work as Magic Realism, whose roots lie in folk art with its easily available strategies. In these paintings, however, she has found a dowsing rod of obsession that enables her to tap the wellspring of unconscious conflict and correlation. It’s an optical unconscious, to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin, not active until the work of art itself, the image of a doll, galvanizes it. Pandora’s box is there to be opened if, like Oberst, you are lucky enough to recognize it on your doorstep -- and are compelled by a need beyond desire to lift the lid.
Lyle Rexer is a contributor to Photograph Magazine and has written for many others: Raw Vision; Art in America; Aperture; The New York Times; Modern Painters; Parkett; Tate Etc. Books include: The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography; Jonathan Lerman: The Drawings of An Artist with Autism; How to Look At Outsider Art; Photography’s Antiquarian Avant-Garde: The New Wave in Old Processes.
Awards include: Rhodes Scholar, Arts Writers Grant Program, Creative Capital Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation, Oxford University, Merton College, University of Michigan
He is on the faculty The School of Visual Arts in the BFA Photography and Video, MFA Photography, Video and Related Media, and the MPS Fashion Photography Departments.