Fun City, o/c, diptych, 48 x 72", 1995
Fun City
The Paintings of Jonathan Weinberg
The Jersey City Museum
March 6-May 25, 1996
Fun City, o/c, diptych, 48 x 72", 1995
I first encountered Jonathan Weinberg's paintings
around 1987. This was at the end of so-called
Neo-Expressionism, that generally macho kind
of painting that was about nothing. Weinberg's
pictures shared with the Neo's a passion
for pigment and a figural visual language,
and nothing more. Where the Neo's rang hollow,
Weinberg was heavy, every painting filled
with many layers of meaning.
Weinberg is essentially an "old fashioned
painter," whose concerns are primarily
modernist. The grid is found in every one
of his works. The push-pull dialectic of
his surfaces reminds us of the best of Marsden
Hartley or Hans Hofmann. His subject matter
has been from the very beginning a poetic
meditation on gay identity, as seen through
abandoned buildings, dilapidated sex palaces,
bleak interiors. I am convinced that one
of the most powerful aspects of his art resides
in how beautifully, seductively he can paint
an essentially depressing subject-years ago
he painted a deteriorating public bathroom
stall, yet it was Bonnard-like in its painterliness.
In Weinberg's paintings all those layers
of pigment (and meaning) reside on top of
a solid structure-his drawing follows all
around the back and out the other side, and
always somewhere there is correspondence
with a motif. The colors themselves are piled
on obsessively and slowly, ranging from hot
pinks to deep blacks.
The paintings in Fun City are about death,
subtly so and through the way of lust and
loss. They are nothing less than painted
elegies.
Alejandro Anreus, curator
Clock, o/c, diptych, 48 x 72", 1994
Jonathan Weinberg, like any good modernist,
paints city paintings. His paintings reproduce
the antagonism between linear business of
the world and the parabolas of indulgence,
idleness, vanity. Painting and city compress
all this into dense fields.
The city makes infinite space for pleasure
by forcing pleasure to fit into bounded spaces.
It is in the unbounded filed that pleasure
truly becomes a scandal: where life pretends
to flow uninterrupted, pleasure will tend
to disrupt. In Greater America, boundaries
between places of work and places of play
are uncertain. In the city, the arenas of
abandon are marked off, as playgrounds, dog
runs, or the Deuce, 42nd Street.
Weinberg is a classical painter. He makes
painting do what it is best at. His paintings
work the same themes, formal and mythographic,
over and over again. A poet can't do that
so easily; discourse move forward, compelling
novelty. The effect of accumulation of these
paintings, the overlay, achieved in the memory
of the beholder moving through an exhibition,
or through the oeuvre as a whole, is huge.
The constant theme of the grid suggests somehow
that if all the paintings were literally
overlaid, one on another, a master text would
emerge with all the Weinberg themes mutually
commenting and dovetailing.
Modernist painting is city painting because
it defies the city from within. Painting
is always wearing its guilt, its consciousness
of its own functionlesness, its softness,
its free range. In the twentieth century,
as if in disdain of painting, the city reasserted
itself through architecture, in New York
above all, on an imperial scale. Painting
found itself again the lost child of mighty
architecture, much as it was in Roman antiquity.
Painting had to defend its borders; suddenly
the membrane between world and work meant
everything. Once it was breached, the world
would take over. The orthogonals of the frame
got internalized and modularized as the grid.
Painting took to fashioning alternative worlds,
what Kandinsky called Kleine Welten, or microcomsms.
Weinberg's paintings were painted in white-walled,
virtually windowless studios, in stacked
apartment modules. They are cities nested
in cities. His canvases, like the studio
itself, become privileged platforms for critique.
The argument of Weinberg's paintings begins
with the fleshy paint, soft, morbid paint,
unlike anything found in the city (except
for the inhabitants themselves). The luxuriation
in this painting, in cold blues and greens
unlike anything found inside the homey home
(except for the pooly adujusted TV screen),
takes all its pathos from the conflict with
the grid. The grid is the inorganic, the
principle, the policy. Paint flows around
and over the grid, paint as the strobe-and-neon-dipped
body in flight from shame, public opinion,
mortification. The more rigorous the grid,
the more creative the resistance to it, and
the more persistent the expedition back to
the somatic ground of discourse.
Weinberg's paintings replicate this persistence
in their fracture, in the gelled time of
their fabrication (the clocks that bend the
arrow of time into coils); but equally in
the orthogonals that drift away from the
straight and true, acknowledging and flouting
the grid in their drift. The source of this
latter formal idea is Cézanne, who rigidly
worked out perspective at the level of design,
then bent the lines in the final performance
of the painting. The pathos is the plight
of figuration trapped inside a discursive
field-like Weinberg's own painting practice
in tension with a logocentric academic career,
with its premium on clear and disciplined
writing and responsible research.
Hiedegger justified the work of art by casting
it as an alternative world that provides
a vantage point upon our own world. "To
be a work means to set up a world,"
he wrote. "By the opening up of a world,
all things gain their lingering and hastening,
their remoteness and nearness, their scope
and limits." The work of art is a fiction
that replicates world but in the process
"queers" it-shows how its structure
slopes, how its lines don't meet, how apparent
opposites don't map onto each other.
Weinberg is a gay painter whose work is constantly
retracing the bending circuits of social
subject formation and gender identity-not
only on the plane of iconography, but als
in the very structure and makeup of these
pictures. For all of their nostalgia for
high Modernism, Weinberg's paintings very
much belong to the age of AIDS. Of course,
it is lamentable that the old theme of the
antagonism between discourse and desire has
to be brought to our attention again through
the dense lens of a public health crisis;
and that those most beleaguered by AIDS/HIV
should be carrying the burden of message-bearing,
for example through media like painting,
still the most eloquent of forums. And it
is a scandal that the connection between
pleasure and death, which painting traditionally
draws as a hypothesis, as a thematic figure,
should now be taken up by the grid-like mind
of the fundamentalists and the bureaucrats
as if it were real, as if it were true.
Now New York City is sanitizing 42nd Street,
continuing the conversion of the city into
the furthermost suburban mall of Connecticut.
The city is losing its confidence in frames,
just as the culture industry is losing its
confidence in easel painting. The city is
losing its touch, its tactile awareness of
the membrane between Fun City and the Public
Library two blocks away, the membrane between
vice and virtue, abandon and restraint, the
soft barrier that protected them both. Jonathan
Weinberg's beautiful, argumentative paintings
try to perpetuate this urban containment
and elasticity.
Christopher S. Wood
Professor, History of Art, Yale University
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