Carol Ross - John Coplans

November 23rd, 2006 - January 29th, 2007

Fondation Dina Vierny - Musée Maillol
61, rue de Grenelle, Paris VII

Carol Ross and John Coplans º Intersecting Œuvres
Marcia E. Vetrocq

John Coplans and Carol Ross first met, Hollywood-style, at the Whitney Museum in 1970. Fifty years old, the South African-born Coplans was a charming if pugnacious man who reveled in tales of his Second World War soldiering and was an equally combative veteran of the postwar era's cultural skirmishes. He had already stormed through several careers as an artist, educator, curator, writer, and critic, and was one of the founders of the magazine Artforum, whose editorship he would assume in 1971. Half his age and suburban-bred, Ross was a neophyte painter who knew little of the New York art world's manners and machinations, and didn't recognize the seductive man whose lunch invitation she accepted. Editor and artist remained together for more than two years, as Coplans molded his willing Galatea into a more worldly and self-aware individual. When that first season of the relationship faded, their paths diverged for more than a decade. This exhibition of seven photographs and two sculptures originated in the sometimes-wayward currents of their subsequent friendship and love.

Meeting again in New York in the mid 1980s, Ross and Coplans were each at a creative crossroads. In the aftermath of a protracted period of solitary work in rural Pennsylvania, Ross had become technically and expressively stymied, a gestural landscape painter who had exhausted her subject. Coplans, ever the astute teacher, began to work closely with her on paintings with ink and collage, guiding Ross toward abstraction with informal drawing sessions, urging her to create more freely and to edit more critically. Ross's mentor, meanwhile, was in the throes of his own metamorphosis. Dismissed by the publisher of Artforum in 1977, Coplans had resumed writing and curating, and had accepted a job as director of the Akron Art Museum. He abandoned all that in 1980 to pursue what would be his final vocation: photography.

Coplans would recall as the turning point a stormy Ohio afternoon in 1979 spent with Lee Friedlander. Not a photographer, he nevertheless joined his famous guest in a shooting session with a nude model. Struck by his own inclination to deliberately position the model compared to Friedlander's rapid-fire arrangement of her poses, Coplans launched a slowly paced serial project, photographing his own hands, feet, and back with the aid of a shutter timer. Over the next few years, he vainly sought a compelling subject outside himself, making portraits of couples, crisscrossing the U.S. as a street photographer, even journeying to Cairo for more exotic fare. By 1984, Coplans had come full circle and returned to his own body. Still exercising considerable premeditation, and shooting few frames, he photographed his aging torso and limbs, which were sometimes tensed or extended in strenuous poses reminiscent of the life drawing studio, and at other times displayed in ways that defied all convention. Self-Portrait—Torso Front II offers a bleak landscape of rolled and sagging flesh that also reads as a scowling face. In Self-Portrait—Legs and Hands, Thumbs Together, Coplans's shyly withdrawn penis is visible above the vagina shape formed by his compressed thumbs, the pose recasting his body as a hermaphroditic totem.

For her part, Ross, was embarking on a transformation of medium and idiom. Coplans coaxed her to relinquish the rectangular canvas, the implicit window onto nature, for a more object-like shaped support that would cancel any residual representational tendencies. She worked on canvases shaped like ovals, chevrons, and masks, in the process developing a more astringent geometric vocabulary. In 1992, Ross came to recognize the sculptural self-sufficiency of the armature itself: one of the shaped stretchers, unadorned by canvas and paint, became her first wooden relief, Large Oval. More reliefs followed, and then a series of freestanding sculptures in aluminum laminate. From this point on, the process of working with fabricators would require an uncompromised clarity of intention while eliciting more ambitiously conceived forms.

The lifesize sculptures Angular Leaning Figure and Stout Leaning Figure are late entries in a series of abstract pieces with overt figural references that Ross initiated in 2001. The human figure had never before appeared in her art. These two mature works combine an almost industrial vocabulary of polished stainless steel and razor-sharp edges with the basic anthropomorphic suggestiveness of verticality and human scale. Contours swell upward from a tapered base, surfaces angle back from projecting facets, and one sleek curve marks the blade-like upper profile of a cleft whose other side folds back from the central form like a leaf unfurled from a stalk.

The progress of Ross's sculpture from a relatively modest scale to the essentially monumental was paralleled by a comparable aggrandizement of the dimensions of Coplans's pictures. Coplans made black-and-white "self-portraits" until his death in 2003—indeed, most viewers and students born after 1980 know him only as a photographer. There is a tart irony to this consistency of subject, for the roguish Coplans enjoyed disclosing that the fantasy of working with the female nude is what stoked his youthful desire to become an artist in the first place. His later photographs, at once grotesque and clinical, focus ever more dispassionately on his body as material, a thing, which submits to being sectioned into diptychs and polyptychs, cropped and splayed in mirror-like configurations and enlarged to a confrontational mural size. But early on, in the mid 1980s, each print was a self-sufficient composition, scaled for intimate viewing, and self-consciously staged by the artist-model to test the boundary between two propositions, the body as a self-directed agent and the body as an obedient instrument of the artist's will.

Ross acquired the seven photographs on view, all from between 1984 and 1986, at a time when she and Coplans were closely aligned in the exploration of fresh creative territory. Her sculptures, conceived two years after his death, are distinguished by the very coherence and decisiveness his instruction was meant to nurture. But the exhibition is open to considerations that lie beyond the biographical. Ross's drastically reductive figures, shorn of all incident and detail, mark the distant outpost of a sculptural exploration that starts with Rodin's Monument to Balzac and continues in Brancusi's svelte birds and the metamorphic cubistic figures of Lipchitz, Pevsner, and others. Coplan's self-portraits are haunted by an earlier nude incarnation of Balzac, Rodin's proudly paunchy and splay-legged study for the monument. Indeed, Rodin and Coplans both acknowledged the weary athletes and past-their-prime warriors of Hellenistic sculpture when they rejected the ideal of youth in their art. Even the cropping of Coplans's head from each composition—today a routine artist's ploy to cancel individuality and frustrate sympathy—reflects a determination, shared by Rodin and traceable to the connoisseurship of the sculptural fragment, to convey meaning with the body alone.

There is an acknowledgment of Brancusi as well in Coplans's enterprise. We are tipped off by the photograph Self-Portrait—Back and Thighs, in which the symmetrically positioned upper legs and erect trunk reiterate the brazenly phallic composition of Brancusi's Torso of a Young Man. But the connection is ultimately more substantive than this sly quotation. During his stint at the Akron Art Museum, right around the time of his own first photographic efforts, Coplans curated an exhibition of Brancusi's photographs. It is in the spirit of Brancusi, who tirelessly arranged and re-grouped his sculptures in the studio for the camera's eye, that Coplans stretched, lunged, leaned, bent, and reclined. He was not simply serving as his own model-Coplans had become his own sculpture.

Viewed together, the works of Coplans and Ross make a strong and rather discomfitting addition to the story of the figure in art. Confined in a bare and shallow field, cut by the frame and subjected to cold scrutiny, Coplans takes refuge in dark humor but can assert himself only perversely, through the serial proliferation of yet more punishing images. Ross's refined personnages, suavely soaring and confident in their formal resolution, are nonetheless fatally thwarted, masked and sheathed in a perfectly impenetrable skin. This exhibition, which might seem at first to be a somewhat circumstantial, even sentimental, pairing of paper and steel, becomes an occasion to consider (rather fittingly at the Musée Maillol) the very rich legacy—and unfinished business—of Modernism's reinvention of the figure in art, its sacrifice of narrative, nature, and beauty in the pursuit of an original, abstract, and sometimes brutal alternative.

French Version/Version Française