Perhaps the obvious should be stated: Few artists' oeuvres operate like Jay DeFeo's: The Rose overshadows the rest of her work as if it were her own personal Vesuvius and the rest of the artist's affairs, including daily life, were something akin to the excavation, clean-up and rebuilding of Pompeii. In 20th century American arts, the closest equivalent to DeFeo's situation might be Ralph Ellison's. It's not as if they didn't do many other things, but.... To consider her awesome painting and Invisible Man together, works appearing within a decade of one another — both artists picking up, via uncanny antennae, the frequencies called "jazz"and "Beat"and putting them to deeply personal uses that could almost be called epic abstracted self-portraiture — would allow the racial and gendered reverberations of The Rose to be felt while it would materialize, in a manner as unlikely as it is compelling, all of Ellison's text's freighted history and verbal intensity in a visual form up to the task. Call Ellison's masterpiece The Rose, DeFeo's Invisible Man. Does such a momentary shift help anyone understand these strange works unencumbered by their own myth?

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When I asked some savvy artist friends what they knew or made of DeFeo, more than a few didn't know about whom I was talking until I mentioned The Rose, and even those who knew DeFeo by her and not her infamous work's name had little if any knowledge about what else she did. Very easy to overlook a simple fact: it's difficult to continue to be an artist. DeFeo did continue, when there was a ready and willing audience — and, just as importantly, when there was not. At the moment, too many young artists forget this, that a career in the arts can make up what gets called "life," and that it can take a long, long time for there to be a response, much less recognition; even odder, once there is recognition[,] it doesn't necessarily become notoriety. Young artists now have begun the game when the market rewards greatly and quickly. (Let me be clear: I don't wish to romanticize penury and struggle. All those kids earning instant top dollar — good for them!) But I hope they come to understand, sooner than later, what DeFeo put into practice, something like what Lee Lozano put in a word drawing (a maxim that should hang above any good studio door): "WIN FIRST DON'T LAST / WIN LAST DON'T CARE." Because of The Rose, DeFeo had earlier and more substantial critical and curatorial support than Lozano, but Lozano's maxim might be rewritten to throw light on other pitfalls: "WIN EARLY WHO KNEW / WIN AGAIN WHO KNOWS HOW."

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All an artist can do: the work she does. Everything else gets sorted out in an unpredictable fashion. When asked about her fame and how it changed the response to her work, the writer and classicist Anne Carson stated that one starts by sending out work and having it not read or rejected; one becomes famous and soon it's just a different form of not being read, since people will publish anything to have your name on the contributor's list. The challenge is to confront everything else DeFeo did — she worked over decades in many media, from ink, tempera, oils, and acrylics to collage, graphite and photography, among others — and to reckon with its import on its own terms — almost as if The Rose never happened.

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Consider an unlikely drawing by DeFeo: a work in graphite on paper (E2259) that depicts a rectangular box of generic facial tissues, perhaps Kleenex. The box floats in dark, shadowed space. To draw it, DeFeo has placed the box vertically on one of its ends, instead of keeping it on its usual manufactured base. Starkly decorating the tissue container, strong graphic line: it zips, comes to a point, and boomerangs back along another side of the box; it's not unlike a miniature Kenneth Noland chevron, and despite the fact that the drawing's in an enigmatic grisaille of black and white tones, I imagine the stripe to be an intense blue. The simple stripe design, which, it's suggested by the composition, continues to wrap around the entire box, is disrupted by a clear plastic oval, from where the tissues are pulled, centering the top of the container. One tissue, a delicate white explosion, escapes, tugged through the slit of the dispenser, into the void; its outermost tip seems to atomize into a fine, snowy dispersion. At first glance, this work might seem an anomaly — too Pop, too representational for DeFeo — and yet it's a domestic object, like so many of the subjects of her photographs, and its almost paradoxical force captures the expulsive energy that runs like an electrical current throughout DeFeo's career: think of the "sneeze" spraying out of the keyhole of an untitled work in graphite, ink and acrylic from 1974 (E1912) or the pointed, fortune-cookie fold of the charcoal and acrylic piece from the "Eternal Triangle" series from 1980 (E1377) or the bursting forth of leaves (or smoke) from the tree (or volcano) in one of DeFeo's great temperas from 1954 (E1408). The tissue, a bit of formlessness, balances the geometry of the box, already upended. DeFeo looked around her, taking in the structures of her environment, to find her subjects, even when the result was "abstract" and/or "epic." Even the unwieldy, seemingly unworldly Rose appeared again but domesticated, homemade, in a manner complicating any angst or existentialism of the heavy predecessor: as an actual flower in a photocollage (P0440) and as an electric fan in a gelatin silver print (P0369), both in 1973. Not a handkerchief, the paper facial tissue suggests private use — wiping a nose, removing makeup, cleaning up from jerking-off — conditioned by ephemerality. My grandmother used to keep a fresh tissue tucked in the lax elastic of the sleeve of her nightgown. DeFeo drew this box in the final year of her life.

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Starting in the early 1980s, DeFeo returned to painting in a series of compelling small works, some oil on canvas, but often oil on linen. If the "Alabama Hills" works are taken as representative, then the "hill" can be seen to have a morphological relation to the tissue pulled from its container — a triangular vector cutting into space. In Alabama Hills No. 14, 1986, a crag formed from brief, brushy, thick strokes and dabs rises to a peak; something like "snow" or "fog" swirls around its tip against the background sky of gray, blue, blue-gray, gray-blue, and steel. The nub of the linen caught in this background is completely occluded in the bumpy impasto of the "hill." In these late small paintings, DeFeo managed to present the sheer physical force of some of the works that grew out of and complicated The Rose via microtonalities and microtextures. Recall Incision, 1958-61, which Bill Berkson described as a "steep cliff-hanger panel of sludgelike impasto" accreted around dangling strings. DeFeo's late surfaces display scales and scabrous skins of pigment, painting's psoriasis and avalanche. It's tempting to see DeFeo's wit at work: her thick, sludgelike cliffs of paint as an intensification and retort to the "mud" or "soup" of "bad" or rote AbEx facture. The solidity of her paint's materiality — whether early and actual, as in Incision, or late and suggested — calls for some kind of reading. Was DeFeo suggesting a topographical or even geological negotiation of painting — as if painting's stratigraphy were as important as its frontality? Curious that few if any have observed her use of Van Gogh's solar and lunar accretions, whose crazed light DeFeo beams from her miner's cap to go spelunking; or her relation to an unlikely Minimalist ally, Jo Baer, whose early streamlined, uninflected surfaces denied mere frontality by forcing a viewer to confront the side of a painting, its depth.

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Oscillating between the dry and the wet, at times with such intensity that the effects can occur simultaneously, DeFeo's painterly mode conveys ash and embers piling up in an ashtray or fireplace as well as pie slices of marl, mulch, mud, loam or compost with gemlike flashes of emerald, amethyst, sapphire and ruby; arid shale as well as murky, bodily fecality. She merged the inorganic and organic.

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Since there has yet to be a complete retrospective of all of DeFeo's work, in this taut survey any viewer should be prepared to plant his or her feet as a member of a Corps of Discovery, with frontiers to be surveyed, mapped, diarized. See DeFeo as Defoe, her practice a new form of journalism: we are her Robinson Crusoes.

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New studies of her enterprise should include an examination of her ecologies; her methods of framing decomposition; her ability to carve night marble delivered from the imagination's quarry.

© 2007 Bruce Hainley

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