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JACK BANKOWSKY ON Pat Hearn

Art Forum ?, Oct, 1999

When I wandered into the Pat Hearn Gallery at the corner of Sixth Street and Avenue B for the first time in the fall of 1984, two things called me back from the late-in-a-long-afternoon-of-gallery-rounds torpor I was just slipping into. The first was the decor, heretical by So Ho ?-white-cube standards - or for that matter, by East Village-storefront-shabby ones. In place of sealed hardwood, a grouted mosaic of tiny tiles glistened underfoot like a model-home bathroom; add a kidney-curved built-in planter and the scene seemed to promise a house-proud hostess proffering an artfully arranged platter of dip 'n' dunks. The second were the paintings, which included - could it really be? - three Bridget Rileys and a pair of terrific little Myron Stouts.

Well, the hostess did appear - on cue, and in the person of Pat Hearn, the gallery's proprietress and lead singer in the band Wild & Wonderful, shod in five-inch heels, a perfect simulacrum (to borrow the period argot) of a coiffed suburban newlywed, same vintage as the planter. The paintings, on the other hand, were not Stouts or Rileys - no, in fact, the rood pinwheels not only blushed with pastel tones (actual, not optical, unless my eves were playing tricks on me), but on closer inspection, the pictures' surfaces revealed themselves to have been collaged with printed paper, lending them a wrought delicacy that undercut the mechanical designs. The paintings, Hearn confirmed, were in fact not the work of the doyen of British Op, but belonged, instead, to Philip Taaffe, a twenty-nine-year-old artist from Manhattan (he studied at Cooper Union) by way of Elizabeth, New Jersey.

New to New York, I saw everything to be seen in the galleries, and while I would have had to admit to a measure of aloofness (unearned, of course) when it came to much of what I found in the East Village, in the presence of these images, a quickening of anxiety that for me inevitably signals the presence of work that demands to be dealt with seemed to be kicking in. What exactly was on offer here? For starters, the model that had only just managed to lodge itself under my skin a few short years earlier in front of Sherrie Levine's photographs after Walker Evans at Metro Pictures (a So Ho ? gallery more closely tailored to my own fresh curiosity for the new photographic work championed by that establishment at the time) was currupting on contact with these gently pulsating images. Before Levine - for argument's sake - artistic influence was something with which the ephebe did battle until the would-be-artist was either vanquished by a mightier precursor or emerged victorious, creatively reconfiguring the precursor work in what Harold Bloom would call a "strong misreading" and the rest of us would recognize as an original style. With Levine, art (or "appropriation," as her gesture was called back then) could be made, for a minute there anyway, simply by forestalling this heroic battle and proffering in place of a compelling new vision a deadpan replica of the antecedent work. In this "art after ideas," it was the non-difference that signaled that an idea was on offer and that the idea in question was the art. What Taaffe did in this show was to "revise" this still-new model by producing near replicas - images too recognizably associated with another artist to belong to him in any conventional sense, and thus digestible as neither an old-style attempt to forge an individual aesthetic nor a pure and tidy double. The gesture initially felt misguided, a sloppy misunderstanding of Levine's precedent, and as such, it annoyed and mystified, but then, in doing so, it at least momentarily made for art.

Taaffe's effort also partook of a larger logic, a logic that just then seemed to inform everything from the tongue-in-cheek period mimicry of Hearn's gallery decor and dress, to the rapper's reprise, to the art band's knowing covers (neighborhood groups were recycling not just standards but idiosyncratic minors - the Ordinaires did "Kashmir"; 3 Teens Kill 4 revived "Tell Me Something Good"). Indeed, it was the impure mix of irony and reverence, of ambivalence and homage - as endemic to this broader cultural sampling as to his Taaffe's rifling on minor (as much as major) modernists from Stout to second-tier Color Fielder Paul Feeley - that made his art seem as curiously equal to our (by now sustained) ironic present as anything else on offer in the galleries back then.

In the years since that early autumn afternoon, Taaffe has traded in the awkward but fertile confusion of those impure doubles for a decorative high style and a starchy gallery. Meanwhile, that curious relationship - both "too close" and "too far" from the work of the artists whose images he lifted - has for better or worse been subsumed under the official artist's rap to the normative sort of influence his early works so pointedly tampered with, just as Taaffe's once-pronounced stutter has given way to an unidentifiable, cosmopolitan inflection common in our city's social and cultural circles - his New Jersey origins replaced, when queried, with the generalizing euphemism "these parts."

Hearn too has reinvented herself more than once in post-Sixth Street days. Morphing first, with her 1985 move to fancier digs (ironically enough in the even-deeper East Village), into a Mary Boone-like demiurge of high-style power, a few years down the road Hearn opened a lower-key So Ho ? establishment with a program more than just geographically close to that of another East Village denizen whose gallery, American Fine Arts Co., occupied quarters across the street. Today, in her most compelling role since East Village days, that of Chelsea pioneer, Hearn has staked a claim at the visible forefront of the newest wave of painting from her base at Twenty-second Street.

Jack Bankowsky is editor of Artforum.