DEBORAH KASS

Salon 94 is proud to restage Deborah Kass’ The Art History Paintings, her full-frontal response to the patriarchal, exclusionary art history culminating in the late 1980s. Painted between 1989 and 1992—the advent years of New York’s reckoning with intersectionality—the works challenge the reigning narratives of art history that ignored the roles of gender, race, ethnicity, and privilege in sustaining the status quo.

A dozen paintings reunited in our second-floor galleries—including important loans from The Guggenheim and The Jewish Museum—are a collective and enduring call to arms, confronting the ongoing erasure and minimisation of voices throughout art history. Kass’ tactic was to undermine the narrow trope of the male ‘genius,’ audaciously pulling apart the foundational narratives of 20th century art history to expose its limitations. Excerpting the “greats”—Picasso, Pollock, Johns, Warhol, Cezanne et al.—Kass deconstructs the ways the reception of their work reinscribes the exclusionary channels between market, museum, and history.

Injecting elements of popular culture—Walt Disney, Charles Schulz, wrestling manuals, and pornography—Kass introduces a new lexicon for interpretation. Kass conjoins Robert Motherwell’s Elegies to the Spanish Republic with Ferdinand—a “sissy” bull who preferred to smell flowers over fighting—and, in another painting, an image pulled from an instructional manual for young male wrestlers. In other paintings, Pollock and Picasso are reread together through male pornography; Warhol’s Before and After abuts Cinderella; Dumbo, the African savannah, and Cubism link together high art and pop culture versions of the continent... These juxtapositions make explicit underlying logics that structure the ways meaning in art, maintenance of power, and construction of value continue within a guarded and reactionary establishment.

Kass did not ask, she demanded a space for her voice—a gay, Jewish woman—by hijacking these works and returning them back to anew. ‘This work asks the essential question what it means for someone—me—to be excluded from a language and then speak through it. Art follows power—that’s why I took it on and took ownership of it.’

What The Art History Paintings confront—and change—is not isolated to the moment of their making—in this way they are not prescient ’...it’s still ongoing. It’s time to wake up, recognize the stakes, and continue questioning whose history we’ve been told to revere.’ The work extends beyond art—they are unapologetically activist: if you are not angry about this—if you’re not outraged—then you’re not paying attention.

‘Painting has all this incredible baggage; it embodies all the signs of the last millennium of male hegemony. I sought recontextualise it, to reclaim it for myself and make room for others.’ On the first floor of Salon 94 will be a display of works by contemporaries and precursors of Kass’—David Salle, Julian Schnabel, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, Robert Moskowitz, and John Baldessari—some works with direct references to the paintings upstairs, and others serving a representative role. The combination of the two floors is an attestation to the multiple histoires and trajectories our current moment carries forth simultaneously.