Debatin Peyton:

Copy-pasted from my other other blog, via a post on the Marc Jacobs documentary:

… there’s a lovely extended interview with Elizabeth Peyton on the DVD, one of my original art crushes, nevermind what Momus has to say about her work.

Although I found his description of a profile video of Liz (embedded on his blog) amusing:

“…the curator (looking, as curators often do, a bit panicked to have Kalm’s video camera turned on her) tries to explain her assertion that Peyton’s work mixes representation with conceptualism by saying that Peyton was married for ten years or so to conceptualist Rirkrit Tiravanija, and that they remain close, and that therefore, somehow, the Relational Aesthetics approach has rubbed off on Peyton, whose work (depicting, mostly, “iconic” 90s rock stars) is “an encounter” with her audience. (I don’t buy that for a moment, by the way)”

Bwahahahahhhh.

Ah, sweet artspeak, c’mon! That might wash with a bunch of 2nd year art students and their prof would know better than to link relational aesthetics with Peyton’s work. Puh-leez.

Complicit with idiotic celebrity culture? Check. But coming from a place of desire, at least, “about grace and beauty, (managing) to make even apes like the Gallaghers into these delicate, refined Wildean creatures ” as Momus put it? Check as well.

I think that the main strategy in her work is that she’s coming from/assuming (one is never sure) the position of “The Fan”. Looking at her paintings, the work oscillates between canned girlyness, honesty about desire while playing with gender roles. I mean- pretty wispy red-lipped dandies, whats not to love(who cares if yr straight, male, female or not)? I’ll take stylish pale and skinny gents over the hypermasculine Greco-Roman/Marky Mark cartoonish beauty myth anyday. Venus as a boy and all that.

I could get into the wilfully amateurish- on first glance-brushwork as well, and the materiality and surface of the paint and canvas—-see: Impressionism and all that blh-de-blah, and it’s not like she’s the first painter to quote art history of course…….

Coming from the photographic discourse angle, her work looks either like gestural, candid snapshots or else clipped from mass culture pop idol magazines—-where both aesthetics have clahed and melded anyway—-Then there’s the painterly tradition of the portrait sitting… etc etc etc

It’s one part wry and humorous, one part Sunday Painter, and one part Nylon Magazine. Why the art establishment jumped on her stuff….who knows.

So the thing is-Peyton’s work is the stuff of a zeitgeist that’s passed and yeah, it’s played, but it’s still playful and lovely to look at. As much as I like my clever in-jokey conceptualism or stark and stern minimalism, Peyton’s the first painter in awhile that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed…and I agree with some- her boys are kind of creepy as well.

Of course, Peyton seems pretty much doomed to keep making the same pictures over and over again. But when you’re raking in that kind of dosh and you’re buds with Marc Jacobs along with the art, fashion and cinema glitterati—well, whatever. A gig’s a gig. (via (;))