Exposure to just one work by Jay DeFeo could lead to wildly different understandings of her practice. A viewer seeing a work on paper such as Study for Loop Series of 1974-75 might imagine that the artist is interested in classic abstract form, not afraid to include spatial illusions of depth, and concerned with the media-specific capacities of paint (in this case acrylic) to create a variety of surface effects. Coming across Unknown Image from 1971 a different viewer might suppose that DeFeo's interest in abstract form stemmed from life studies, as suggested by the very objectlike loop abstracted into a wavering linear form in its reflected image below. Together, the two loops form a figure eight— creating a somewhat surrealistic treatment of reality through representation. I would hazard a guess that both viewers would never imagine that the same artist produced Untitled, 1975, a gelatin silver print of another work, a painting in progress from DeFeo's Where the Swan Flies (Loop System) series (E1309 ). The photograph shows an arrangement of paper towels applied to the painting's surface to "mask" and protect the central image while DeFeo painted its edges. Printed to exaggerate the lights and darks that create its hollow center, the photograph includes another example of the oval form that is the uniting motif in all four works.

As demonstrated in this description of just five work that encompass Abstract Expressionist-influenced painting and a humorous and eccentric treatment of staged photography, DeFeo's work can only be truly appreciated when viewed collectively in its many and various forms. This, of course, is a fact made doubly fascinating given that DeFeo, debatably more than any other artist, is known almost entirely for one painting, the monumental The Rose, 1958-66. The subject of a film (Bruce Conner's The White Rose), a book (Jay DeFeo and "The Rose"), and the source of much art mythology, The Rose is arguably many different works within one painting, as the artist herself has described the various forms and stages involved in its eight-year production. Though the almost foot-deep passages of paint are testament to this process, only the final image remains today. Solely through the examination of DeFeo's other works in a variety of media— her drawings, paintings, photocollages, and photographs (including photographs based on other of her own works)— can the artist's remarkable practice be understood (and the underlying history of The Rose made apparent).

As evidenced by the four series in this exhibition, the movement from mundane forms to their treatment as partially abstracted shapes is perhaps the most surprising aspect of DeFeo's work, a process that oddly defies categorization. While the use of objects like a tissue box, a vacuum cleaner, a cup handle, a putty eraser, and a shoetree might imply a kind of Pop sensibility toward the place of the objects themselves in contemporary society, DeFeo's use of these things raises questions about whether she was interested at all in their everyday usage, or was instead more attracted to their found and projected resemblance to formal shapes and to metaphoric or symbolic form. DeFeo's own statement seems to suggest the latter reading.

"Over the years, I have worked either from the subjective world of my imagination, finding the image through my response to and manipulation of the materials I work with, or worked from the objective world of reality, discovering the image among the relationship of forms in common objects that I use for models. The process becomes a play between my control over the materials and an open and permissive attitude toward technique, allowing it to mold the image as it will. Hopefully, even the most literal works transcend the definition of objects from which they are derived. I enjoy the paradox of developing something quite organic while using inorganic models."

Despite DeFeo's downplaying of the object-ness of the found source materials, there are certain associations within each that must have furthered her attraction to the objects beyond their ratification of a particular form or idea that had pre-existed in the artist's mind and was made manifest in their inherent qualities. Many of the things that DeFeo chose for attention are resonant of a human, physical, even nigh-autobiographical presence. The bodily associations of images that have appeared in DeFeo's work such as the shoetree, for example, are erotically charged, as are the torso and legs of a mannequin. The physical association implied by the cup handle, a form molded to conform to the demands of the body, also suggests an intimate relationship to the object at hand. In the Eternal Triangle series the putty eraser is similarly physically charged in its drawn, painted, and photographed forms— its malleability resembling that of flesh. The eraser carries further connotations particularly resonant to DeFeo's method, suggesting both failure and production: her drawings, as well as her paintings, are as much a process of removal as accumulation and thus the eraser plays an almost equivalent role to the pencil or brush. Her dental bridge and teeth (in a photographic image the former appears on a table with an added note reading "My model...out of my own head!") contain a physical association that is the stuff of dream analysis. And in the Reflections of Africa series, while the oval hole from which the tissues materialize in DeFeo's many studies of a rectangular box clearly evidences her long-term interest in the spherical form and an emergence from it, there is also a tangible contrast between the hard cardboard edge and the pliable, feather-light presence of the tissue.

Though most of these shapes have a simplicity and immediately graspable formal aspect, the vacuum cleaner in the Eureka group of works is an exception in DeFeo's use of props or found objects. It appears in photographic works, photocollages, and is reworked in graphite and paint. In the photographs (P0511) (P0643) one senses the delight DeFeo derived from the contrast in the vacuum cleaner's smooth metal surface molded to form convex and concave curves and the complex meeting of the different elements and materials in its totality (pliable air-filled bag, articulated wheels, tubular connections, and staff-like handle). In a photocollage (E2338), DeFeo extends the central line of the upright handle below the wheels so that the vacuum cleaner begins to take on organic, plant-like associations. Transformed again in a series of works on paper (E2845) (E1735) (E1734) the bulbous central portion is treated with rough cross-hatching, suggesting a swiveling movement, as if the turning head of the vacuum cleaner has taken on human form and, a la Francis Bacon, suggests a fast action like the violent taut twist of a knee or the spin of a ballerina. Working back from a graphite and acrylic work from 1974 (E1735) to a photograph from 1973 (P0643) (though there is no evident straightforward progression in these works), it is again quite extraordinary how DeFeo incorporates all these conversions into her oeuvre.

The conflation of the mundane and the significant along with the contradiction of image and text is a trope used by DeFeo in her titles. The title of the Eternal Triangle series, the extensive series of works depicting putty erasers, suggests some kind of spiritual meaning in the eraser's triangular form or a possible reference to a triad of lovers. The works themselves, such as Untitled (Eternal Triangle series) from 1980, often depict a kind of tentlike form with a mysterious darkened interior -- one is not only unable to see what lies within, but the sense of scale in these works is deliberately unclear, the form representing something alternately monolithic or petite.

Another conundrum is DeFeo's choice of title for the series of works that originated from her studies of the tissue box, Reflections of Africa. Certainly the title gives no clues to the object of this series' origin. One is left to simply assume that this title might have something to do with DeFeo's memories of a trip to Africa, a continent she had visited in 1987 where she achieved her ambition to climb a major mountain by hiking up Mount Kenya. The lack of any literal relationship of title and work leads one to consider the other possibilities for the title, its implications and even the resonance with DeFeo's own biography.

The abstraction of DeFeo's titles functions as a further distancing of her subject. Along with the use of divergent media, the interplay of depicted object with both formal concerns and metaphorical associations, the titling adds another twist in the curious and sublime oeuvre that DeFeo has left behind for her audience to ponder.

© 2008 Jens Hoffmann

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