Lisa Yuskavage at David Zwirner

Hippies, 2013
Oil on linen
82 x 66 1/2 inches (208.3 x 168.9 cm)

Vulgarity seems like the word most often brought up in reference to Lisa Yuskavage’s work. The story goes like this: the whole TrapperKeeper mythopoetics—the Lisa Frank and Ralph Bakshi plus fantasy art plus porn—contrasts with the exquisiteness of its execution. Italicized, Italian Renaissance techniques like sfumato, chiaroscuro, and cangiantismo are invoked. The viewer is to believe that this combination of the very low and the very high results in “tensions” and “ambiguities” that make her work “cryptic.”

But the appeal of the work is not so hard to divine. All the ingredients are there. She is committed to authenticity; she mocks the norms of good taste; she celebrates the body and polymorphous perversity while subverting trite ideas of the “feminine.” She is irreverent towards history, but not too irreverent—she broadcasts, again and again,  her awareness of that tradition. To the art worshipper, Ms. Yuskavage is an ironist: fully aware of her paradoxical position vis-a-vis the history of her art and creating her own place in it. If not a genius—an idea no one believes in anymore—she is certainly a virtuoso: both of her medium and of our cultural hang-ups and preoccupations.

For many artists and critics, the intentional tastelessness of Ms. Yuskavage’s work suggests that grandest, oldest chestnut: intense personal struggle and triumph through radical self-acceptance. After such a victory, the world must interpret the artist, rather than the other way round. But collectors, of course, see things rather differently. They have been vulgar from the very beginning, and can perceive that Ms.Yuskavage’s paintings offer the self-acceptance without any of the struggle. The work allows the collecting classes to affect a variety of bohemian airs without bohemian squalor. With Ms. Yuskavage’s work, the collector buys his place among the bright, the witty and the ironic along with the sense that his own vulgarity will always be master. Ms. Yuskavage’s latest show at David Zwirner marks the latest unnecessary stage of this retarded dialectic.

In the show’s most iconic painting, the myth of American counterculture is directly appropriated in the title: Hippies.  One of Ms. Yuskavage’s prototypical nymphs stands with an air of defiance in a moonlit field while a supporting cast of multicolored satyrs peer out from behind her, with expressions that range from mischievous to wounded and confused. These are indeed the kitsch spirits of some age past. Ms. Yuskavage’s choice of the Anglo-Saxon “The Brood“ for an upcoming museum show is telling: these are not the dryads of Arcadia, fed by dry Mediterranean breezes. They are more like the goblins and trolls of Germanic primeval imagination; the earth here is sticky and the air foul. These aren’t tree spirits: they live under toadstools, they are fungal. This is a reiteration of Grunge, the ascendent pop-cultural aesthetic during Ms. Yuskavage’s rise as an artist in the 90s.  But this tells us what we already knew: that the story of the hippies has grown musty and that culture can turn into rot.  One should give some credit to Ms. Yuskavage’s ingenuity here: she is pawning off some mildewy goods to collectors at what one presumes must be very dear prices.