Nicola Tyson
Supervert's review of an exhibit of paintings by contemporary artist Nicola Tyson. Originally published in Artforum Magazine (Summer 1995).
Exhibit at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York
Nicola Tyson excels at figure studies — not depictions of the human figure as such, but as it could be. Like a balloon artist Tyson twists the human figure into novel arrangements of stumps and limbs, directing an inner pressure to erupt in unexpected evaginations and bulbous erections rather than leak out through the hairless little holes which denote misplaced anuses, vestigial urethras, or other orifices of obscure purpose. In Self-Portrait: Early 1970s (all works 1995), a figure — isolated against a flatly painted background suggestive of the corner of a room — stands with her feet pointed in the direction of the viewer but her head aimed in the other direction, truncated arms groping blindly like the feelers of an insect toward the background. From the midriff of the body protrudes a lump of flesh that could be a pregnant stomach or a grossly swollen ass, evidenced by the ambiguous brown crack at its bottom. If self-portraiture presupposes an empirical relationship between the work and the world, how do we reconcile the figure in the painting with the artist, whose head and feet probably point in the same direction? Perhaps the answer lies not in the solution but in the problem, in a too-simple notion of empiricism. We have no way of knowing that this is not what the artist sees when she looks in the mirror. It's the same principle as when someone who's obviously thin thinks that he or she is fat: empiricism mitigated by individual consciousness.
While in the case of a self-portrait it's natural to refer to the figure with feminine pronouns, in general Tyson's work confounds such applications of "he" or "she." The diptych 2 Figures, Six Heads does suggest a bipartition of the sexes — the figure in each panel has arms that culminate in heads, although one has an additional head topping a stalk of flesh that originates like a penis in its crotch, while the other has a head that swirls around on an elastic neck to stare into a sexless crotch, site of the famous "lack" — but in a way that suggests no hierarchy: both creatures have three heads, it doesn't appear to matter where they sprout. Most often, as in Tyson's virtuosic drawings, sex characteristics combine and recombine as though every figure were a polysexual Mr. Potato Head. It's a sexuality on display, however, in no drawing or painting do two or more figures fuck. Do they hesitate to perpetuate their mutant genes through reproduction? Each is truly one of a kind — in the 120 drawings presented in this exhibition alone, no figure ever repeats — and this itself makes it difficult to speak of gender, since there's no possibility of generalizing or forming a genus. Perhaps the obdurate individuality of these figures — defined not by particularized faces, as in traditional portraiture, but by singular combinations of vegetal torsos, insectoid legs, monstrous genitalia — comprises a deliberate attempt to unleash the power of the freakish, to go beyond genders, classes, categories. Perhaps Tyson's self-depiction is just this: not a portrait of the artist as a young man or woman, but as an anatomical wonder.
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