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[The Narcissistic Sinner: Warren Criswell's
Pictures, by Donald Kuspit, page 2]
It is a wonderful fantasy—a magnificent wish fulfillment,
an ironical balancing of pleasure and reality principles—made
all the more magnificent by the dense, hand-ground paint Criswell
uses. It will last forever, or at least as long as the stone
of the Egyptian temple. But for all the clarity of the image
and its meticulous execution, Criswell implies that it is a fleeting
illusion. Its brushy, unstable edges—it does not completely
fill the canvas—suggest that it is a dream. (Virtually all
of Criswell's works show a similar picture-within-a-picture concept,
or rather, a vision-in-a-void concept.) Its tenebrism also confirms
its hallucinatory character, as does the startling detail of
the red rope and its shadow, lying low and cutting horizontally
across the very vertical picture.
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| Donald Kuspit is Professor of Art History
and Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stoney
Brook, Andrew Dixon White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University,
and a contributing editor and critic for Art Forum Magazine.
He is the author of The Dialectic of Decadence, Idiosyncratic
Identities: Artists at the End of the Avant-Garde, Signs
of Psyche in Modern and Postmodern Art, and The Existential/Activist
Painter: The Example of Leon Golub, and many other books and
articles on art and artists. |
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| Criswell will
awaken from this particular dream of himself, and record it,
but he will quickly have another with similar content and structure,
and record it with the same painstaking attention to hallucinatory
detail. He invariably shows himself doubled, sometimes tripled,
as in Highway 61, 1993. It is the self against the self,
in conflict with itself: carnal Criswell threatened by the Grand-Inquisitor-Cardinal-Superego.
Thus, in The Storm, 1993, a Cardinal Criswell—he
wears the red vestments of the Inquisition—confronts a naked
Criswell. His hands are tied behind him, while the Cardinal's
hands, behind him, hold a no doubt incriminating document. Their
nightmarish encounter—and virtually all of Criswell's pictures
are aggressive, if also erotic nightmares—occurs on the
side of a highway, that peculiar no-man's-land that is America's
contribution to civilization. The eggshells that litter that
desert reappear on the table of The Question, 1991. In
that dream picture the same naked, bound Criswell faces the same
Cardinal Criswell, who interrogates him with the aid of an electric
lamp. |
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| In The Kiss, 1992, a liberated
Criswell tries to kiss the startled Cardinal Criswell at the
same table. This may be a reference to Ivan's parable of "The
Grand Inquisitor" in Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov,
in which Christ returns to earth during the Spanish Inquisition.
Indeed, the double egg yolk in the glass is illuminated like
the infant Christ in a medieval nativity, and this life symbol
also appears in the drawing The Cardinal Reading, 1993.
In Dostoevsky's story the captured Christ stands up after his
long interrogation and kisses the Cardinal-Inquisitor, who had
planned to burn him in the morning at the auto-da-fe. |
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But if Criswell's version of this scene is to be read as
an attempt to reunify his fragmented self, it is obvious—to
judge from the expression of horror on the Cardinal's face—that
is does not succeed. Nor does the Christ reference negate his
prisoner-self's carnal nature: in The Cardinal Reading
the naked Criswell, once again bound, sleeps, while in the shadowy
background a woman is getting dressed.
In Table Dancer and Two
Manikins, both of 1992, Criswell gives his game away, as
it were: both figures are puppets in a play, more particularly,
projections of his psyche. The naked figure is sexually obsessed
but inhibited by the Cardinal, who has bound him—but at
the same time tempts him in Table Dancer (perhaps a reference
to the Devil's temptation of Christ, as told by Dostoevsky's
Grand Inquisitor). The same conflicted attitude to woman—simultaneously
guilty and lustful—is suggested by Changing
Woman, 1992. Both figures, in miniature, are laid
out on the table in front of a naked woman. She holds the glass
of egg yolks as though it was the vessel of a sacrament—a
symbol of her sacred, mysterious womb. (Changing Woman, in the
Navajo religion, is the virgin mother of twin heroes who went
on a quest to seek their origins.) The
Animation, 1992, makes it clear that they are fighting
over—performing for, being animated by—the woman. Is
she the Great Mother or the Great Whore, or both?
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The Cardinal Reading, 1992, acrylic & conté on paper,
22 x 30 inches
Table Dancer,
1992,
acrylic , conté on paper,
28 x 23 inches
Two Manikins,
1992,
mixed media on paper
25 x 35 inches
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The Diver,
1993,
oil/wax on plywood,
59 x 44 inches
Crab King Crossing, 1991,
oil/wax on linen,
48 x 54 inches
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In Table Dancer a third Criswell observes
the scene, turning it into art with the detachment and integrity
of what W. Ronald Fairbairn calls the "central ego."
Criswell the artist has a strong enough ego to survive the conflict.
Criswell the artist is also able to be detached about woman,
as The Pool,
1991, suggests. Indeed, hovering in the air above her, unsupported,
he appears at first to be "superior" to her. Criswell
the artist must in fact be detached from—the observant student,
even intellectual interpreter of—his conflict. This is indicated
by Highway 61, in which Criswell the artist, again hovering,
plays the part of the angel in a bizarre appropriation of Rembrandt's
masterpiece, The Angel Stopping Abraham from Sacrificing Isaac
to God. Criswell the artist can watch from inside a corked
bottle, as in The Diver, 1993, while the naked prisoner—here
liberated and aroused—comes to the rescue of the sinking
Cardinal (or perhaps to finish him off), and face, unblinking,
his terror of the Other in Crab King Crossing, 1991.
A closer look, however, reveals the failure of this artistic
detachment: in The Pool, for instance, sprouting antlers
identify the artist as the voyeur Actaeon, only moments before
being torn apart by the hounds of his own lust, as the floating
Diana looks on, serenely outraged; and in Highway 61 the
artist-angel is unaware that he is about to be run down along
with his other "selves." Criswell the artist is in
fact just another character in the play. With each objectification
of himself the "real" artist—"central ego"
or St. Augustine's "inner man"—recedes ever farther
into the tenebrae.
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Working with a great economy of iconographic as well
as formal means, Criswell has made a number of intense, uncanny,
highly concentrated images of his own inner life. He has objectified
not only his sexual conflict, but his "transcendent"
position as an artist. It clearly saves him from himself: his
art is the saving grace in his "sick" scenes. It permits
him to see his conflict as a kind of theater, and to regard it
with irony and finally good humor, that is, as a funny if weird
melodrama.
But make no mistake: his images are grim and sinister.
Not only does their tenebrism—their generally Caravaggesque
realism, modified by American populist descriptive realism—testify
to this, but their setting as well. It is uniformly desolate,
indeed, desolately uniform America. The empty highway in Highway
61, Two Men on Stilts, 1991, The Storm and
Crab King Crossing—Criswell here is caught in the
headlights of car and perhaps about to be hit and killed by it,
just as he was caught by a flashlight in The Trespasser and
about to be caught and punished for his crime (ultimately the
crime of his desire, his animal nature; he holds his penis in
the latter picture)—is as important a subject matter, that
is, as obsessively thematized, as the figures in those pictures.
Similarly, the table at which the naked Criswell and Cardinal
Criswell sit is barren, for all the objects on it. They are equally
futile, as All the King's Horses, 1992, makes clear.
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They cannot put the Humpty Dumpty Criswell feels
he is together again after his "fall," a term which
of course connotes sexual—"original"—sin,
and the mythic origin of mortality. This is why Criswell expects
to be punished, to crack up—to be hit by a car, captured
by a guard and imprisoned, that is condemned by the spectator—by
the Other (no doubt for showing himself literally as well as
emotionally naked, and thus violating a social taboo, especially
against the latter).
In the same way, The Diver, Two Men on Stilts,
and The Pool contain vast voids. Emptiness is vulgar rather
than solemn in America, that is, a sign of indifference rather
than interiority. Criswell's brilliant rendering of all-American
emptiness symbolizes his feeling of anxious emptiness in an indifferent
world. It is in effect the punishment the Cardinal threatens
him with: to escape the void he must endure the exhaustion of
his conflict, more particularly, of his restraint of his lust.
His empty space is always ominous and threatening, as in Two
Men on Stilts, where the sky is full of smoke and fire, and
in The Diver, where the sea is a stormy abyss. Both suggest
infernal suffering, punishment, and doom.
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| D. W. Winnicott once said that the
catastrophe one fears has already happened—one's fear of
going mad, for instance, always acknowledges a madness that already
exists. Criswell's works are a remarkably precise demonstration
of such fears. They also motivated many equally histrionic surrealists,
but Criswell is less mechanical they they tend to become, no
doubt because he does not have the same didactic purpose, which
is one of the saving graces of working for oneself, and in an
American idiom. Criswell's pictures are rooted in sexual conflict,
but reach deeper, into the mystery of the self. |
The Narcissistic Sinner: Warren Criswell's
Pictures
by Donald Kuspit (1994)
Copyright 1997 by Warren Criswell
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to Kuspit, page 1)
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Copyright © 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 by Warren
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