Border Crossings Magazine

In a conversation Lisa Yuskavage had with Chuck Close in 1996, she came up with a characteristically colourful way of describing her tendency to put her talent to such poor use: “like a nun with a foul mouth.” Raised in a working-class, Catholic home in Philadelphia, she briefly entertained the possibility of becoming a nun, but ultimately decided to go to art school. Whether she retained the other half of the description she offered to Chuck Close, only her intimates can know with certainty, but there are critics of the art she has produced since the mid-’90s who wouldn’t be surprised to hear the figures in them utter language as colourful as the canvases they inhabit.

Viewing Lisa Yuskavage’s painted world is a confusing experience. We are presented with all manner of possible gazings, from the teasing liquidities of girl on girl, to the delicate performance of looking and touching that constitutes the act of masturbation. Hers is a woman’s world (more accurately, a girl’s world), where chronology hasn’t caught up to groinology. And while the upper bodies of her females don’t match the extravagant proportions of the women in the art of her friend, John Currin, there is still a noticeable degree of exaggeration in her paintings. She is capable of pushing certain portions of the body beyond conventional depiction. “I have an interest in full-throttle, full-on engagement,” she says. “I like the idea of overwhelming.”

Early in her painting career, she let her tributary side show; there are works that have the sensual insouciance of Bonnard, like Sleeper (Fragile), 1984; or the cheeky concupiscence of Balthus, like Girl with Skewer, 1996, and Cookie, 1998. In these works, Yuskavage was trying out both styles and subjects: she has been concerned in equal measure with how she paints and what she paints, although she would have us believe that “all my paintings seem to be about painting.” They are also about looking and desiring; it’s just that we’re never really sure how much tongue we should have in our cheek when we focus our attention on the operation of desire in the work. It would take an unusual degree of objectivity to appreciate only the aesthetic qualities of paintings like Shirtwaist and Nipple, both from 1999 and both lifted from the uncomplicated domain of soft-core porn. Nor would she be satisfied with that narrow a reading. She doesn’t think anyone should ever be praised for their technique; being a painter without technique “would be like saying you’re a pilot but you don’t know how to fly a plane.”

Yuskavage has remarked that one of her intentions was to combine Rembrandt with colour-field painting, to which she might have added, and the sensibility of early Penthouse magazine. Among her most notorious paintings is Screwing Her Pussy on Straight, 1997, in which a very busty blonde, naked except for a shrug, pays reverent attention to her very bushy nether region. The interior is a reprising of Bonnard; the subject mimics Bob Guccione; and the mark making pays tribute to Rembrandt. The final picture is classic Yuskavage.

In offering a counter-argument to the baser provocations that arise from her work, Yuskavage asks us to consider that what we’re looking at is the exact opposite of what we think we’re seeing. What if, in gazing at the way the heavy-lidded Tiffany, 2002, cups her breasts, or at the self-absorption of the blonde who has her hand inside her panties in Dusk Delight, 1998, we are “looking in on something that is purely intimate,” rather than at something occasioned by the presence of the viewer? In soliciting this kind of reconsideration, she may be engaged in “fighting the losing battle for the possibility that all things, even opposites, can exist in the same thing,” but it is a battle she is prepared to wage. Her sense of painting is that it is an “unbroken history, when I look at art I realize I’m communing with the dead.” It is in the context of communication of this nature that she can claim the patchworked aesthetic that constitutes her practice: “painting is taking parts of the dead and making a living thing.”

Yuskavage has made clear her admiration for the paintings of De Chirico, especially his “Gladiator Series” (she has her own paintings with the same name). Her assessment of what he was able to achieve in this bizarre body of work is a description that could as easily be applied to what she has been doing over the last dozen years: “They’re kind of horrible, kind of beautiful and they’re kind of perfect.” They’re kind of Yuskavage.

Lisa Yuskavage spoke to Robert Enright by phone from New York on May 24, 2007.

BORDER CROSSINGS: People seem to be perplexed by your work. Are you surprised by their constant vexations?

LISA YUSKAVAGE: I’m not sure what to say. I’m so in the midst of what I’m doing that I’m not really paying much attention. Making the work is so central to my being, it captures so much of my time and attention, and I’m so involved in the present and what’s coming that I don’t look back. That’s an honest response to the question. The other thing is that it’s a real privilege to have anybody care at all because there was a period of time where I didn’t have that. You know the old joke, as long as they spell my name right. In my case, that’s quite a challenge. But it feels invigorating to be a part of a dialogue and what’s wonderful about the way the system is set up is that I’m not out there. I’m sequestered and I’ve worked hard, learing how to protect myself from what people say. 

BC: In all the criticism I’ve read about you, the one consistent thing is the high regard critics have for your painterly skills. I assume that the quest for beauty in a painterly way has been something that you’ve pursued?

LY: I would say not a quest, but a struggle with beauty. There’s a quote by the scientist, Gregory Bateson, that seemed hokey when I first read it, but it stuck with me. It’s something like, “Art is a man’s quest for grace, sometimes his ecstasy in partial success, sometimes his rage and agony at failure.” I think when I read the quote I was particularly aware that as much as I may have wanted beauty—“grace” is a better word—I knew I didn’t have direct access to it. Because the thing I could paint was the failure of that. There are paintings like Rorschach Blot  or Bad Babies that were, for lack of a better word, vulgar.   (See Issue 103 to read the full interview.)