Lady Pink by Germano Celant

See a color panorama of a Lady Pink mural as published in the brochure Lady Pink doesn’t make her way through the streets and alleys of a European city, where traditionally art has been part of the architectural and street setting. She travels by subway, in the meandering tunnels of a city-island—Manhattan—where art is separated from an everyday life that is dominated by the rapid pace of work, consumption, and the media. In this instance the hypothesis of unity between the creative condition and the urban dimension is a myth. In New York art has been made for art’s sake, the city for the city. This enforced separation has been called into question by the tribal activities of the graffiti artists who come as trespassers from a distant culture, following their own sense of spontaneity, perhaps determined by their fringe existence and their isolation. Using markers and spray cans they have tattooed the skins of trains, buses, and buildings, transforming them into works of public art. Lady Pink has developed her own unique relationship with the city, bringing the creative and the urban into coexistence, initially through illegal efforts. Together with Haring, Ramellzee, Lee, A One, Fred, TF5, CIA, MTA, and Crash, she has revived an artistic tradition that links these encrustations of spray with mosaics, frescoes, murals, and reliefs, and without asking for permission she has given aesthetic form to the squalid communications network of the city. The assumption of the city as a creative territory and the introduction of unasked-for colors and figures has made an impact, penetrating the public consciousness in a way that the artistic avant-garde has long failed to do. Art has been transformed into an urban landscape, enjoyed by millions of spectators and visitors—not from the world of the galleries and museums, but from the subway. The avant-garde has been concretized on a large scale and thus transformed, perhaps for the first time, into amass avant-garde. The result is a sort of stereovision, enveloping the glance in strips of walls and murals covered with names, the styles and figures of which convey an identifying signature. This is anonymous activity that contains an element of protest against the marginality and the intellectual unemployment of life; these letters and numbers are also a tribal statement of people who, as in Munch’s The Scream, want to cry out their anguish and solitude. But once this cry emerges and becomes distinct it becomes a portrait, a personal story, and one can begin to see the differences among the members of the tribe. Every sign, every arabesque and color, nurtured by individual experience, strips the mask of anonymity from the face of the author, revealing the individual face—that of Lee, Lady Pink, Keith, Fred. Then there are escape scenarios, typical of the urban victim fleeing the forces of order that have unleashed dogs and policemen. Individuals are transformed into heroes and heroines who, having survived by hiding out between cars and in the subway tunnels, become artists. No longer lost or frightened, the artist, rather than taking refuge in the neutrality of the group, now—without protection or fear—allows the full power of his or her work to explode. In works on canvas, like Lady Pink’s The Manic Depression, 1981, and The Tunnel, 1983, the anguish of nocturnal life and death is conveyed. This is accomplished in a world that believes itself to be beautiful and sensitive, but is in fact closer to the slaughterhouse and the dump, full of monsters and skeletons. These are the first figurative manifestations of a survival mechanism, where Lady Pink turns her attention to the debased reality of the individual caught in the urban web of deception, populated by cadaverous crowds and unrequited desires. Here, the only salvation lies in feelings of isolation, withdrawal into oneself, or transformation of oneself into an ambiguous being. It is precisely within the confines of her existence, as a woman and as an artist, that the signs of her creative identity emerge. It is as though she wanted to become, along with Jenny Holzer, with whom she has done collaborative projects, the Sibyl of the art world. Rather than record what is, her visions are predictions of future carnage, cemeteries of Coca-Cola and Campbell’ s soup cans in My Rack, 1983, where Lady Pink finds herself submerged and annihilated by a gigantic embrace. In another painting, Love Stinks, 1983, her sinking into the void is rendered more dramatic, for it is the confession of an emotional path without exit; the female hand, painted up for seduction, stiffens, and the cannibalism of passion is translated into nail polish and ash. The femme fatale who scratches with her filed nails and offers herself up with sweet-smelling creams is, in fact, horrid in her beauty, and is a declaration of Lady Pink’s severely critical position. The Black Dude, where the satanic expression of the Bronx dandy is in sharp contrast to the tiny figure of the girl-child, underscores her discomfort with male-female relationships. Yet it is always possible to chip away at archaic conceptions that are indications of cultural immobility. This occurs in Amazon, 1983, where the figure believes in autonomy to the death and is powerful enough to cast off her yoke and offer up images less frightful than herself. Dream or oracle? translated by Meg Shore Back to catalog page Galleries Directory | Levy Gallery Artists Registry | Publications & Artists | Email Moore College of Art and Design

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