Petah Coyne

By Suzaan Boettger 9/1/10

View Slideshow Petah Coyne: Untitled #738 (Monks I), 1992, silver gelatin print, 33 by 49 inches. All photos this article courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.; Untitled #638 (Whirlwind), 1989, rope, wire, tree branches, muslin, acrylic paint, soil and mixed mediums, 111 by 60 by 63 inches. ;

New York With their predominantly black hue, somber tenor, elaborate accumulations of cumbersome matter and amorphous shapes, the Petah Coyne sculptures installed at MASS MoCA could be aptly characterized as "a tide of darkness." That phrase, from the final line of a story by Flannery O'Connor, evokes the elegiac mood pervading Coyne's work over the past three decades. Yet curator Denise Markonish, knowing Coyne's regard for the overall import of O'Connor's fiction, instead chose to use the tale's title for the name of the MASS MoCA show, "Everything That Rises Must Converge." That assertion reflects O'Connor's belief, as a devout Roman Catholic, that the Good will converge in the Godhead-a confidence that surmounted the deeply flawed, even bigoted nature of the characters she examined in her Southern Gothic stories. The redemptive struggle of O'Connor's people is paralleled in the way Coyne's newer sculptures, less ornate and melancholic than her earlier works, push upward, physically and spiritually, from base materiality. The recent pieces suggest a desire to ascend, free from the weight of the quotidian world, toward a state of beauty, purity and-dare we say it?-transcendence.

Inverting the usual ratio of objects to photographs in a Coyne exhibition, Markonish selected 18 mixed-medium sculptures made since 1989 and 42 silver gelatin prints from 1992-2002. While Coyne's sculptures, in their material and thematic richness, seem to be the products of a dedicated and intellectually mature artist, her photographs, even those dating from the later stages of her career, reflect a more casual sensibility. The uniformly out-of-focus images-for example, Untitled #1043 (Full Frame Skirt), 2001, a close-up of a whooshing skirt, or Untitled #738 (Monks I), 1992, showing a row of monks running through a forest-are like blurry snapshots enlarged to speckled graininess in a bid for abstract gravitas. Mourning the passage of time in the manner of late 19th-century Tonalist nocturnes, the grayed images convey some of the same sense of loss as Coyne's sculptures. But compared to those built-up, thought-through works, the photographs appear like quick glimpses-offering only a familiar, instantaneous take on the transitory nature of life.

Among the sculptures, examples from the present decade predominate, bracketed by a few iconic earlier pieces and a huge tour de force that the 57-year-old artist completed in her studio shortly before the opening. The earliest works take us back to the raw propulsive energy of late 1980s Neo-Expressionism, and the playful quality of these semiabstract, vaguely figurative forms invites countless fancies, most of them dark. Untitled #638 (Whirlwind), 1989-a pendulous black-painted conglomeration of clay, muslin and wire, covered by fine black sand (the residue from pig iron casting)-might be seen as a denuded Christmas tree caught in the eye of a cyclone and ringed with wiry lines of force and ornamented with clods; or it might be viewed as a scrawny witch in a cape, stirring a pot so frenetically that globs of dark magical gruel splatter out. Although the huge and hideously bulbous Untitled #670 (Black Heart), 1990, bears a slight resemblance to a Valentine heart, it looks more like an inchoate fusion of botanical, geological, corporeal and excremental components-a malevolent dream made manifest.

Once Coyne shifted to using white wax in the mid-1990s, her work became florid to a degree that recalls Oscar Wilde's maxim "nothing succeeds like excess." Pliable and delicate-looking, this material, which appears ephemeral, was in fact specially formulated for her to be exceptionally stable. Since the wax-drenched sculptures dominated Coyne's oeuvre for about a decade, Markonish's survey should ideally include a number of the Versailles-gone-mad works, in which chandelierlike forms sport flocks of taxidermied birds or sheaves of candles amid lacy wax-covered branches. The decision to include only a single white construction skews the show heavily, and misleadingly, toward the "tide of darkness" esthetic.

Moreover, Untitled #1093 (Buddha Boy), 2001-03, the sole white wax sculpture shown, is atypical-its mood withdrawn, its potential optimism subdued. Except for the masses of its head, shoulders and torso, the short statue-on-a-pedestal at the core of this piece is almost impossible to discern beneath the thick layers of melted, oozed, swathed and dripped wax. The work is further draped with strands of artificial pearls, covered with silk flowers (themselves dripping with congealed wax) and punctuated by numerous candlesticks. These rococo flourishes festoon a figure standing in a static frontal pose, amid a pool of wax that resembles a long gown, with flowers scattered on the surrounding floor like offerings from devotees. The feeling would be unambiguously reverential, if the seeming acts of piety had not distanced, weighted and greatly obscured the statuette. An elegy for the lost sage is implied, since in Buddhist cultures (Coyne has spent time in Japan and avidly reads contemporary Japanese novels) white is the color of funereal garb and other emblems of mourning.

Buddha Boy may appear to be the material obverse of Coyne's dark bundled works, much as its decorative fluidity seems hyper-delicate in contrast to their brooding, rough-hewn expressionism. But the two types of sculpture share several key characteristics: an extremely detailed and laborious facture (executed with the help of many assistants), visual exaggeration and the thematic evocation of loss. The emotional intensity of both approaches would be even more evident if Markonish had replicated the original presentation of the sculptures in dense, forestlike clusters in midsize rooms. It would be great to experience again even a portion of the enchantment of Coyne's "Fairy Tales" exhibition at New York's Galerie Lelong in 1998: black and brown horsehair pinned on the walls in arabesques or braided into tumultuous rivers that spilled across the floor around bowing, praying figures. The sparse installation at MASS MoCA generally eschews any attempt to re-create such spatial compression, focusing instead on each piece as a discrete object.