Maud Gatewood: Re-Visions - Robert Hobbs

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maud gatewood: re-visionsby robert hobbsDuring the past four decades well-meaning critics havecategorized Maud Gatewood's art as "southern," withthe unfortunate result of masking her highly criticalapproach and ignoring the dialogue that she has maintainedwith both modernist and postmodernist art.Many writers have assumed some regional quintessencethat can be verbally articulated and representedin art. For example, Blue Greenberg of the DurhamMorning Herald writes, "The southern sense of naturepermeates [Gatewood's] work. Its essence is the sun,heavy shade, stillness and small-town feeling.''' ln ArtPapers Susan Knowles views Gatewood's work as "thedistilled essence of the South."2 And in an essay forthe New York Times, Ronald Blythe terms her paintingsof Caswell County "part of the landscape of every NorthCarolinian mind."3 Even when cogently reasoned, thisassumption of an essential southern quality errs in itsbroad generalizations because there is not one Southbut many. No longer voting a Dixiecrat ticket, peoplein the southeastern section of the United States areboth conservative and liberal, rural and urban, WASPand multicultural. Since World War II, the AmericanSouth has changed dramatically. From a relativelypoor and provincial section of the country, plagued bybigotry and racial violence, it has become home towidely varied, even international business and industry.It is part of what is euphemistically known as theSun Belt, a designation that provides a progressiveimage and at the same time disengages the South fromits former Bible Belt identification.An informed observer of this changing region overthe past four decades, Maud Gatewood has taken fulladvantage of her marginalized status-as southerner,woman, and deeply sophisticated individual living inone of the poorest counties in North Carolina-to developan art intended to revise prevailing opinions anddisrupt the polarities of an urban-vanguard versus aregional-parochial culture. Part of the difficulty in categorizingthe direction of her art is indicated by theunwieldy label suggested by Elizabeth Baker, editor ofArt in America, who called her "a stylizing sophisticated-primitiverealist. "4Gatewood's "re-visions" are wry critiques of thesepolarities. Rather than regarding the South as anessence, Gatewood finds ways of transforming regionalsubjects by subjecting them to some of the same distancingdevices of both modernist and postmodernistart. But she does not fall into the trap of regarding anynew art as an orthodoxy; instead, she subjects it to aregionalist critique, thus taking an independentapproach to both mainstream and regional attitudes.Gatewood has noted the changing identity of theSoutheast, occasioned by urbanization, industrialization,and the great migration into the Sun Belt.Because change is a crucial component of the newSouth's identity, Gatewood paintings often play withambiguities that allow both the artist and her publicthe options of interpreting their outcome. "I think youlearn that life isn't always straightforward," the artisthas stated. "I think it's in the nature of the species tobe a little evasive and covered. Ambiguity might bethe heart of life as well as art. "S One of her goals is tocreate works of art poised on the threshold of distinctlydifferent realities, including urban and rural sensibilitiesand abstraction and realism : "Creating a goodpainting is like walking a tightrope. You've got tomake the thing work, but almost not work, to get thatteetering sensation ."6Although couched primarily in formalist terms, this"teetering sensation" relates also to her subject matter.Gatewood prefers to keep her subject matter as openas possible by concentrating on formal problems andrelying on the unconscious mind together with deeplyheld values to give these shapes meaning:II
What I'm trying to paint is relationships, formalrelationships: light and color and forms. Theremight be messages, but I think a Jot of timespainters know less about what their painting saysthan anybody else.?Rather than depending on the rhetoric and power ofpublic manifestos as many avant-garde groups did inthe first part of the twentieth century, Gatewood trustsher work to communicate its contents and finds thatsuggestion is ultimately more persuasive than bombast."I believe whispers carry farther than shouts," theartist has stated. "With a shout, it's boom, splash andit's gone. A whisper just drifts on and on."Because the regional interpretation is firmlyingrained in discussions of Gatewood's art, it is importantto understand its limits at the outset of this studyby examining the two essays that have contributedmost to the idea that her southern character is basedon an immersion in nature. Written by the eminentNew York critic Donald Kuspit, these essays containpassages that often have been repeated in reviews ofGatewood's paintings. In the first, written in 1977 andentitled "Mythical Regionalism and Critical Realism,"Kuspit provides an incisive analysis of regionalism as aconstruct that people frequently have preferred toregard as reality. He considers this myth to be idealisticand also troubling because it simplifies the natureof reality by providing a "'True Romance' or soapopera" gloss over the complications of modern technologyand abstraction. According to Kuspit, evenwhen artists subscribing to this mythical regionalismhave embraced modern art, they have tended to freezeit into a timeless realm and have refrained from enteringthe dynamic sphere giving rise to modem art, thustransforming it into a static w orld that can be manipulatedto accord with the regionalist quest for simplicityand reliability.SIn his 1983 essay for the exhibition cataloguePaintJng in the South: 1564- I 980, Kuspit conjecturesthat "the Southern sense of nature ... [is] an unconsciouspresence ... that conditioned the sensibility of theserious Southern modernists as much as modernistpractice."9 He goes on to say that "what one refers towhen one refers to oneself as Southern is a highlyemotional awareness of nature as a dominant force inlife ...."IO When he comes to the subject of MaudGatewood's art, he connects her depiction of tunnels inthe early 1970s with a "sense of interiority [that] is psychicas well; it correlates with the sense of nature asindwelling as well as dwelling in nature." Coming perilouslyclose to reducing Gatewood's choice of subjectmatter to the traditional gender-specific psychologicalaccount of woman = interiority, he concludes that thisinteriority "articulates the Southern condition of beingsaturated with nature from the beginning. Nature inthis sense is not simply a paradise of plenty but therhythm determining the inner life's unfolding-a moralforce, not simply a platitudinous presence." II If onewere to take Kuspit's reasoning to its natural conclusion,one would regard all paintings of tunnels as manifestinga sense of interiority and conclude that subjectmatter always takes precedence over style, renderingthe latter an unessential mode of communication. Amajor problem with Kuspit's interpretation is that itleaves room neither for irony nor for the disparitybetween subject matter and style that is essential tomany works of art and specifically to MaudGatewood's paintings.In the earlier essay Kuspit likewise turns to highlydebatable speculation when he proposes that artistsshould wish to avoid the t~.Alin pitfalls of "the prejudicedglance implied by the media look" and "an underpinningof formalist abstraction designed to structure itaccording to a predetermined look of 'good art"' by12
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Maud Gatewood: Re-Visions - Robert Hobbs

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