Spero's Curses

Homage to New York (1958), the work of a thirty-two-year-old, Chicago-trained figurative painter, parodies the mute bravado of the New York School. did this painting, Nancy Spero observes, a tombstone right in the middle, and then on each side are two heads with dunce caps and rabbit-like ears, and their tongues are sticking out. And on this phallic-like tombstone . . . are the initials of the artists who were prevalent then. . . . On top I wrote, 'I do not challenge,' and then 'Homage to New York' below.1 Produced, coincidentally, around the same time Marcel Duchamp cast a deadpan self-portrait inscribed With My Tongue in My Cheek (1959) a work often interpreted as a cunning critique of Abstract Expressionism's heroic posturing Spero's parody conversely is expressionistic in tone, mimicking in its liquid, gestural application of paint the self-conscious performance of alienated, dumb virility that had become a defining characteristic of late-modernist painting. Duchamp's tongue-in-cheek caricature renders the artist inarticulate, autistically self-silenced, gagged by his own tongue. In a gesture of defiance that parodies the urgency of selfexpression in a mode of painting whose funeral Homage would celebrate, Spero's

Art · Art history · Inscribed figure · Literature · Painting · Portrait · Tone (literature · Visual arts · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Photography and Visual Culture · Visual Culture and Art Theory

• The Laugh of the Medusa

  Hélène Cixous, Keith Cohen et al.•Signs: Journal of Women in…•1976

  Add to list