The Beauty of Tragic Times: An Interview with Susanna Coffey |
By Emile Ferris |
A
series of paintings which were exhibited at Maya Polsky Gallery this past summer
focused on the human cost of militarism and war.
In �Fall,� Susanna Coffey portrays herself wearing a backwards-turned baseball
cap. She stands in front of a city being bombed. A raging fire glows orange,
sparking smaller fires. Dark drips of paint angle down the canvas, deftly recreating
falling flak. The figure�s blue eye-makeup is a stolen hue. It is the blue of
the deceptively peaceful evening shadows. It is the blue of the columns of chemical
smoke rising from the bombardment.
The tension of witnessing the attack is heightened by the fact that we are looking
beyond a rigid face. This is a person who disregards the despoiling of the world
behind her. Whether or not we can hear the screams in that distant city, we
know that there are screams. Uncomfortably, we locate ourselves mirrored in
Coffey�s proud and dispassionate stance.
It
is no coincidence that many of Coffey�s works parallel the devastation of structures
with the disintegration of the individual. Susanna Coffey�s origins make her
a painter who innately understands the integrity and significance of place.
�My father was a construction worker on roads,� Coffey said. She believes that
this early experience inspired her choice to become a painter.
�It�s the love of materiality and construction, because paintings are like fantasy
constructions...I always knew I wanted to be an artist, from my very early years,
and maybe it has to do with the making of things, being around when people were
making roads and bridges and mountains and tunnels... It was amazing to watch
the people who did things with their hands and machines. It was very rich and
exciting.�
At the age of nine, Susanna Coffey recalls seeing the Willem DeKooning painting
�Excavation.� Until that time Coffey says she had never seen �an image of energy.�
�Something about that [painting] merged with my love of the jazz music and it
seemed true to me. The thing that I loved about the construction sites is that
they were about matter and movement of matter. They weren�t images per se, like
a horse or a duck; they were essentially abstract. I think children love realism,
and for me realism was located in an explanation of the spatial phenomenon of
energy�that life is, and children know that life moves and shifts and that there�s
wind and water. Children know all of that and are fascinated by it. However,
there are very few images that communicate that, because a picture of a stream
doesn�t do what a stream does, but a De Kooning might.�
In
her twenties, Coffey attended the University of Connecticut. �It was the seventies,
the death of painting. Minimalism: Carl Andre and Donald Judd were very important
and being written about. I liked that work very much,� states Coffey. But to
her, the idea of using non-art materials for art was not new.
�The rusting Cor-ten steel and the fact that after a detonation, there�d be
a pile of rocks the same size and shape of the hole. That is very beautiful�the
proportions and the wearing away. I�d always seen the beauty in looking at the
sky through culvert pipes. I thought, �what�s the big deal? It looks like art
to me.� It didn�t seem at all ground-breaking and I understand in retrospect
that it was, but it wasn�t for me.�
�I entered the art world in this odd way, and then I chose to be a painter which
was different than what was going around me at the time�it was a time a little
bit like this time.� Coffey adds, �Painting dies all of the time.�
Yet if one were to judge by Coffey�s work, painting seems very much alive.
Much
of Susanna Coffey�s surfaces have the quality of chiseled stone or exactingly
poured cement. Contoured segments of color, each artfully bounded, are, in their
aggregate, like the bricks in an exquisite wall.
�I paint a color and a shape in a location. Like some kind of idiosyncratic
survey map [but] the image isn�t my working interest. It had to do with what
kind of image I�m going after and the meaning.�
In her paintings Coffey employs her signature use of a centrally positioned
foreground figure, an icon who is pivotal to our interpretation of all other
elements portrayed. The face she illustrates for our scrutiny is most often
her own.
In �Self Portrait (cast),� Coffey�s face is transformed by virtue of odd illumination
into a guilefully leering mask. �My work is inspired by West African figurative
sculpture and masking tradition,� she says. �To make an image of a human is
in part to determine what it is to be human.�
Coffey says that she is �inspired by the idea of the head as a metaphor...a
signifier that can express the way that we are psychological beings...beings
of spiritual aspirations, we are creatures of history and lineage, we have a
collective identity as a species, and we are animals. In each painting, I�m
after the way that I might fit into or be closer to one or other of those things.�
Coffey�s exploration of facial expression and distortion is equal parts self-examination
and self-sacrifice. As any spiritualist might, Susanna Coffey becomes the conduit.
�I just let the work work on me. Whatever it wants, I�ll do.�
Consequently,
her powers of observation penetrate many levels beyond the corporeal. Susanna
Coffey�s recent paintings open a window into the beauty of tragic times.
In the work �Conveyance,� Coffey emerges, haggard and ghostly, from an atmospheric
cloud of gray dust. The figure�s expression illustrates the overwhelming weariness
and despair of the survivors of 9/11.
�My studio is very close to the World Trade Center in New York, and I was there
when it happened. I was very fortunate that I wasn�t hurt.�
After the bombing Coffey did volunteer work, �like every other Type-A New Yorker.�
She served as a bicycle messenger, as well as a coordinator for people who were
looking for the remains of their loved ones.
�I was just having the first-hand experience which I intellectually understand
to be true of many, many people of the world, that war is chaotic. You could
stand on top of a building and see the parts, the ruin... you could feel the
death.� By being unspecific about the location of the catastrophe, Coffey makes
this a universally pertinent image; an event that can happen anywhere in the
world.
Ultimately
the experience of living through 9/11 comes full circle when viewed through
the eyes of a builder�s daughter. Susanna remembers her father commenting about
the erecting of the twin towers. �My dad would talk about the �I� beams... he
watched them brought into the city.
�Both of my parents were veterans of World War II.� Susanna�s father �joined
when he was too young. He became a lieutenant [and] was in both theaters, in
Asia and in Europe, and he was there on D-Day. My mother was a combat nurse
in a jungle hospital on the Burma Road, so she saw unspeakable things. All the
adults of my [parents�] generation, if they weren�t veterans, they were holocaust
survivors, or they were Asian people who�d been incarcerated. They were people
who were damaged by the war...there was really no victory, and there�s not a
sense that you ever win, or that there�s a culmination or that it�s ever over...Everybody
around me was traumatized by this period in time. It was very formative to me.�
In the painting titled �Self-portrait (Cassandra will),� Coffey seems to be
presenting herself as a modern version of Aeschylus� Cassandra, the visionary
whose prophecies were cursed by Apollo to go unheeded. In the play Agamemnon,
Cassandra, who has been abducted from the ashes of her vanquished homeland,
sees the Furies roosting on the roof of her victorious captor�s home. She intuits
images of the crime that her captor Agamemnon has perpetrated. Cassandra sees
that Agamemnon�s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia will earn him a violent
death. As when she cautioned against allowing the Trojan horse into her city,
Cassandra discerns that within the arrogance of the powerful is harbored their
defeat.
Coffey�s
expressive face, as painted in �Self-portrait (Cassandra will)� alludes to an
unspecified and terrible realization. As is often the case in Coffey�s recent
paintings, her figure could as easily be looking at us, her viewers, as she
could be taking in a sight of the Trojan horse or the roosting Furies.
Positioned in the painting as if she were on a plane above the viewer she stares
down in mute horror. If she is reviewing the crimes of war, then her appalled
face indicates that she considers her viewer party to that conquest.
When Coffey made this painting, was she pondering the loss of so many Iraqi
and American lives? Was she as horrified as Cassandra had been by the greed
which motivates such an unprovoked and bloody attack?
Having foreseen the folly of the war on Iraq, Coffey herself �demonstrated and
did all those things, but hardly anyone [else] did, and the war just went on
as if it were a video game and was going to be over in six weeks, and it seemed
clear that this wasn�t going to happen and that there would be many, many repercussions.�
�In
the beginning of the war I was collecting all these images from the New York
Times. I was just so disturbed by their beauty and I was so appalled by the
coverage of the war, which was so ass-kissing, so really jingoistic. You knew
how much suffering was going to happen on the part of our soldiers and the Iraqi
people, everyone in that part of the world and everyone in this part of the
world. War is like a pebble in a pond.�
In another work, �Embedded,� Coffey points to the ways that militarism is increasingly
integral to our culture. Coffey portrays herself as a sexually ambiguous figure
whose skin meshes in an almost snake-like way within a pattern of military camouflage.
The subject�s hair is closely cropped and he/she stands at attention. A dark
stripe of shadow bisects the subject, seeming to partially darken its vision.
By blurring these lines, Coffey forces upon the viewer a number of questions.
The painting�s emphasis on hidden uniformity parallel America�s history of poorly
hidden geopolitical agendas.
Coffey asserts that there is a corrupting influence on all who participate,
even passively, in conquest. The image is perceivable as either militarized
combatant or militarized civilian in order to depict the concept. As she puts
it, �there is a culpability by presence and, regardless of one�s intentions,
sometimes one is culpable.�
Coffey�s
sense of �culpability by presence� began very early in life. �My mother was
from Alabama and [we were] in a bus station there and I�d just learned how to
read�I was like five or something�and I saw a fountain that said �colored,�
and of course colors are better than not colors for a child. I ran towards the
fountain, and then I remember people grabbing me and pulling me back and I understood
that something was wrong, that something was very fucked up and that there was
some kind of evil logic involved with the words �white� and �colored� and these
water fountains....�
Coffey asserts that �politics are not impersonal, because that�s the place about
which we all have such strong feelings about how the world treats us. As artists
wishing to make work that is political, we must rely on our capacity to relate
difficult truths by employing the finest �building� skills.
�Beauty is the thing that allows us to wrap our minds around even the worst.�
F.H. Sellers Professor, Painting and Drawing, School of the Art Institute of
Chicago
BFA magna cum laude, 1976,
University of Connecticut
MFA, 1982 Yale University
Recipient of The American Academy of
Arts and Letters Award
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation Fellowship
Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award
F Newsmagazine
September 2004