MARY MARY
Alan Reid
Unbearable lightness,
the fashion industry
and ‘portraits of nouns’
—
by David Everitt Howe
Employing absurd pseudonyms,
the poet Stéphane Mallarmé secretly
moonlit as a fashion magazine publisher, editor and writer, filling
his short-lived bi-weekly La Dernière
Mode (The Latest Fashion, 1874)
with page after page of flowery restaurant and theatre reviews, advice
columns and commentary on fashion
lines. An analysis of a dress would
go on seemingly for an eternity. As
John Kelsey noted in issue two of
Made in USA (2000), ‘the appearance
of shimmering white silk ultimately
disappear[ing] in its own description [...] and something intangible like
death or infinity is suggested’. Ruffles
lead to thrills, hems to hyperbole; form
becomes content and content form.
Alan Reid’s works operate in
a similar way. They’re very fashionable paintings or, rather, paintings
of fashion so pretty that they seem
disposable. In reality, though,
there’s a lot going on. Chock-full of
references to art history and music,
these works elicit pleasure partly
because they force the viewer to
reconsider the notion that fashion
and design are somehow frivolous
and stupid compared to more
1
232
Howe, David Everett, Frieze Issue 158, October 2013
1
Standing Arrangement, 2013,
Caran d’Ache, acrylic and foamcore
on canvas, 1.7 × 1.2 m
2
Preposition & Fugue, 2013,
acrylic, caning and cut canvas on
canvas, 1.5 × 1.2 m
Baroque Chamber, or pockmarked
with geometric fragments of chair
caning, as in Giza, an oblique reference to Pablo Picasso’s Still Life with
Chair Caning (1912). Other arty
references make covert cameos: Jean
Arp’s moustache, made out of wood,
floats above cruciform, leopard-print
columns. In another leopard-print
work, Milieu and Ambiance, Meret
Oppenheim’s furry teacup, formed
out of canvas, cuts a deadpan joke.
Take it or leave it. Visual art, handily
neutered, makes sneaky appearances
as discombobulated, stray signifiers.
Easy, breezy, beautiful – art history
is left thin as air.
Preoccupied with the idea of
‘lightness’ for years, Reid cites
Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable
Lightness of Being (1984) as being
particularly influential, the author’s
ethos of living in the moment and
enjoying life to the fullest (with lots
of attendant sexual abandon),
functioning as a pointed critique of
Friedrich Nietzsche. That party
pooper’s notion of ‘eternal recurrence’
is the exact opposite of lightness,
in that he claims everything has
already happened and will happen
again. With no control whatsoever,
humans are thus, in Kundera’s blunt
words, ‘nailed to eternity as Jesus
Christ was nailed to the cross. It is
a terrifying prospect.’
It’s almost impossible to find
anything Nietzschean about Reid’s
paintings, unless Nietzsche had a
thing for pretty girls and croissants.
Rather, in as much as Reid’s work
is the exact opposite of Nietzsche’s,
the philosopher is everywhere
ominously in absentia, the yin to
Reid’s yang, waiting in the wings.
One wonders when the end will come
for Reid’s seemingly timeless, ageless
figures, for the ‘lightness’ that so
enthralls the painter. Pleasure is a
tricky thing. As in Fitzgerald’s novel
This Side of Paradise (1920) (to the
artist, the name of the protagonist
Amory sounds like ‘both “amour”
and “aimless”’) pleasure lingers then
leaves, tingeing Reid’s painterly
worldview with something strangely
sad and elegiac.
Alan Reid is an artist based in
New York, USA. In 2013, he had solo
shows at Patricia Low Contemporary,
Gstaad, Switzerland, and Lisa
Cooley, New York, where he also
co-organized the exhibition ‘Air de
Pied-à-terre’.
FRIEZE
NO.
158
OCTOBER 2013
Courtesy: the artist, Lisa Cooley, New York, and Mary Mary, Glasgow
IN FOCUS
‘serious’ disciplines – light rather
than heavy, as Jean Baudrillard
might say. To Reid, the two aren’t
mutually exclusive; they’re dialectically dependent. A dress isn’t merely
a dress, but something more. In
the end, everything, from writing to
revolution, comes down to looks.
Pleasing to the eye – almost
disarmingly so, like jaw-achingly
sugary sweets – Reid’s works are rife
with vacant, androgynous models
and aloof references to music and
poetry, sex and clothing, dresses
and decorations. It’s easy to get lost
in them. Seemingly plucked from
Weimar-era Berlin, or the 1920s
New York of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the
artist’s favoured figures are the most
waiflike of women, flapper-girls,
seductively gazing this way and that
as if looking for something to do.
Rendered with pigment and wax
Caran d’Ache pencils in wispy lines
and delicate tones, Reid’s blushing
figures are drawn so lightly as to be
fading out of existence. In Octopus
(all works 2013), shown last summer
at Patricia Low Contemporary in
Gstaad, Switzerland, a blonde with
perfect high cheekbones gazes into
an unidentifiable distance in faint
shock, the words ‘Hotel Bar’ writ large
on the canvas – a narrative to
nowhere. Shakespeare Performed
Nude, also included in the same
exhibition, features a Natalie Portman
doppelgänger gazing to one side,
her shirt a cool cream marked by bold,
criss-crossing black lines, as if a Sol
LeWitt grid had been transformed
into a dress design. The female
protagonist of Standing Arrangement
is dotted with foam-core croissants;
she’s so skinny, she could do with
eating a few.
Reid’s 2013 solo exhibition at
Lisa Cooley, ‘POEMS, Sans Souci’,
took Frederick the Great’s palace
outside Berlin, Sannsouci, as its
conceptual starting point. It was a
place where, in Reid’s eyes, Baroque
music took centre stage over visual
art. In this body of work, great
composers are read, not listened to
or looked at. Written out in foamcore as hyper-stylized script, the
names Beethoven and Bach stand
in for the composers’ likenesses;
as Reid noted, they’re ‘portraits of
nouns’. In To Cum at the Same Time,
the word ‘Bach’, in chunky, gothic
letters, floats over a background
of small, multicoloured dots. In
The Name of the Father, Beethoven
gets his star treatment in an Arts
and Crafts-style sans serif, running
straight down the canvas sideways as
a vertical column. Buttressed at the
bottom between two black and white
circles, the composer appears as a
thick dick with two cheeky, graphic
balls – looking good, Beethoven!
Elsewhere, Reid’s trademark females
appear, surrounded by floating
leaves and real porcupine quills that
have been stuck to the canvas, as in