Julie Heffernan
By Fred Camper
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Heffernan writes that her paintings are in part “a reaction to the dryness and strategizing of art-making in the 70s. I wanted to paint my own raving, inappropriate world, the micro-narrative side of women’s experience.” Historically, she believes, the still life was “the humblest” form of painting: “Most of it,” she told me, “just didn’t have the stamp of male puissance.” But in some 17th-century traditions of still life painting, the bountiful food depicted is meant not only to give visual and sensual pleasure but to symbolize human achievement and mastery of nature. There’s an almost phallic quality to glowing paintings of overflowing gourds, their plenitude filling the eye with color and form. Heffernan, 39, is a New Yorker with two art degrees: she’s knowledgeable about past painting as well as current feminist theory and offers an implicit critique of the still life tradition. Her only modestly bounteous arrays of fruit lead not to the contemplation of plenty but to the highly idiosyncratic content of the smaller images. Rejecting the global statements and grand generalizations of mainstream “masterpieces,” Heffernan joins other feminist artists in conveying a more individual content.
Such works call for the viewer’s active participation. The small vignette views have “enough detail that you believe the image,” as Heffernan says, but are sparse enough to force the viewer to complete them. Most important, the paintings’ heterogeneity leads the viewer in many directions at once: these works never make fixed statements. The artist abjures the role of world creator, instead filling her work with multiple possibilities, all of them interesting, none of them “true.”
Modesty, perhaps the most interesting and surely the most underreported trend in current art, takes many forms. Röhm’s works represent simply moments in time. And just as Heffernan’s paintings deny–even critique–the self-sufficient certitude of a traditional still life, so Rohm’s minimalist forms are tied to observed nature, not presented as absolute and independent truths. The artist is redefined, becoming less a conveyor of revelation, as in much of earlier art, than a mediator between nature and viewer.
