Wendy Given's new paintings, such as "A Spoon Full of Sugar" (2000), are long strips of images that read from left to right.
WEEKEND PREVIEW Friday, Aug. 4, 2000
Private universe lurks beneath cartoon surface
By Jerry Cullum
FOR THE JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION
Wendy Given, who has just moved from Atlanta to Los Angeles, became well known during her half-dozen or so years of exhibitions here for cartoonish figures that superficially resemble children's art. But her animal figures have always gone beyond the too-cute-for-words world of cartoons to embody something more psychologically complicated. And yet, even if her work is really all about human discontent, lovers of kitties and doggies and bunnies seem to adore it. Maybe this is because all of us pour our human dramas into our dealings with animals.
In any case, Given's acrylic paintings and watercolors with oil pastel are a whole lot more than absolutely dandy cartoons. They're sophisticated works of art that,wear their aw-shucks appearance as a supremely effective disguise.
The new paintings in this show work like cartoons in that they're long strips of images that read from left to right. But the story implied by the sequence is anything but obvious. There are lots of cats, half-full glasses, tableware, maraschino cherries, bottles marked "XXX," eggs frying in a skillet, houses, dogs and rabbits, plus the occasional shark. They all have associative meaning, but not even a Freudian could make glib connections between the elements of Given's private but intensely seductive symbolic universe.
Her technique, though, makes us want to hang around and learn more. The vigor of her style, whether it involves gestural strokes or lines incised into the background paint, gives her most casual looking markings a sense of logic and authority. These compositions feel personal but not arbitrary, not even in the stripped-down world of the works on paper, where only one or two images are juxtaposed.
On the other hand, they remain largely indecipherable. A line of five cherries recurs in two paintings; in one, four cherries are blue and a larger one is red; in the other, four are red and one is blue. Other repetitions, such as rows of glasses with varying amounts of liquid in them, also seem to be shorthand for a complex situation. Given writes that these works satirize absurd personal experiences "while sparing the viewer the gory, boring and tedious details." Since the art-world trend is the presentation of numbing quantities of literal biographical detail in as scatologically confrontational a form as possible, Given's politeness seems to belong to another era.
On the other hand, tales of traumas redered at an aesthetic remove have the capacity to slip past the inner censor and wake us up from within. Though Given's imagery doesn't use familiar Freudian language, it works the way Freud told us that dreams work: It condenses painful things and replaces them with something that is easier to contemplate. And though these paintings are still only promising but exciting beginnings, that process is also one of the things great art has always accomplished.
The verdict: Darkly irresistible; simple, but anything but childlike.
Jerry Cullum is an Atlanta writer and the senior editor of Art Papers, a magazine of contemporary art.