Melissa Gordon: Female Readymade by Amie Corry

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp wrote to tell his sister: ‘One of my female friends who had adopted the masculine pseudonym Richard Mutt sent in [to the American Society of Independent Artists] a porcelain urinal as a sculpture.’[1] Duchamp was almost certainly referring to the German Dadaist artist and poet Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927). Duchamp himself did not claim authorship of the urinal until 1950, long after the Baroness had died. And yet despite strong evidence that von Freytag-Loringhoven was the original author of the urinal, Fountain remains attributed to Duchamp the world over.

Skip a few decades and we find the critic Clement Greenberg observing, in his feted essay collection Art and Culture (1961), that Jackson Pollock had, in 1944, ‘furtively’ admired the paintings of a ‘primitive’ painter named Janet Sobel (1893–1968). Sobel, Greenberg noted, ‘was, and still is, a housewife living in Brooklyn’. Her all-over paintings, which Pollock admitted made an impression on him in the years before he started consistently using similar techniques, presented ‘a dense tracery of thin black lines lying over and under a mottled field of predominantly warm and translucent color’.[2] The American-Ukrainian artist is rarely mentioned beyond a footnote to Pollock.

Ideas of authorship are inseparable from the Western canon; they’re sticky and hard to rework. In ‘Liquid Gestures’, Melissa Gordon draws on the examples of von Freytag-Loringhoven and Sobel to test assumptions surrounding originality, genius and voice. Underpinning it all is a forensic examination of gesture, which delights at first glance and rewards closer looking.

There is a stage-set feel to ‘Liquid Gestures’, Gordon’s first institutional exhibition in the UK since Spike Island’s ‘Material Evidence’ in 2013. Towner’s galleries are carved up by a series of metal stud-frames that create open-ended passageways and doors. The layouts of the frames are taken from plans of Sobel and von Freytag-Loringhove’s studios, and Gordon describes them as ‘offcuts’. The two studios should be consecrated art-history ground, sites of the genesis of two of the twentieth century’s most significant artistic innovations: the ready-made and drip painting. Gordon, however, isn’t just arguing for a reclamation of the space that has historically been denied Sobel and von Freytag-Loringhove – the frames intersect one another to complicate the idea of a single room; they are supports and passages rather than walls, a welcome disruption to the notion that the artist is an isolated, individual genius.

Towner Art Gallery Melissa Gordon Installation View photo credit Rob Harris

Gordon’s work advocates for a serious interrogation of what happens when gesture is applied to surface and released into the world to be viewed, reproduced and/or stolen. This new series is made up of layers of print and paint process, with each medium and method granted equal footing. Domestic objects and personal effects – underwear, tights, vessels, a belt, a chair, a cap – are silkscreened onto large, uniformly sized canvases. There, they look like slight, floating negatives; tender hints at the forms and shapes we use to orientate ourselves in the world. Cut-out sections of canvas hang in cartoony, intestine-shaped, flaps off one of the canvases, exposing the frames behind. Photographs and texts are printed or painted into the compositions. There’s a pleasing, early Internet feel to the palette – hazy sky blues merging into lilacs, pale oranges and metallics. Some feature digital prints alongside tacky impasto.

Towner Art Gallery Melissa Gordon Installation View photo credit Rob

Most of the action hangs off a grid of some description, sometimes ordered and empirical - graph or Ben-Day dots – elsewhere, unruly, as where mesh fencing has been silkscreened directly onto the canvas. The grids offer background support to the other forms, techniques and references, but then, everything is supporting something else here: the metal stud-frames play an active architectural role in the display of the paintings and the large canvases host small paintings: abstract gestural things that vary completely in style and appear alongside her children’s drawings. It’s unclear which, if any, is a rehearsal for the other.

Melissa Gordon, Female Readymade (Hat, microphone, belt, chair, Attie’spainting, stockings, rope, scarf) 2020. Photo:KristienDae

‘Painting’ or ‘gestures’ sits independently among the found elements in the titles/mediums, which themselves read like studies in mythmaking: Pollock’s Shed, photos of Janet Sobel, Letter from Mark Rothko, keys, wire cutters, Blow Up detail of Pollock painting and of Sobel painting, chain, smoking gun, p.218 of ‘American Type Painting’, gestures.Gordon further riffs off the performance of action painting in a piece that spans the length of one of the walls. A long swathe of raw canvas presents bulging waves of colour. Mops, sponges and brooms were used to spread thick blue paint onto the floor of the Towner’s corridors, then photographed and printed onto raw canvas. Gordon mimics the motion of domestic labour while presenting the opposite outcome – an assertion of space rather than a tidying away. Another wall shows a Dadaist frottage of the exterior of the artist’s own studio – door, windows, bricks and mortar – rather than its innards. And so, through subtle allusions to our given art history, Gordon returns to Sobel and Freytag-Loringhove.

In Anne Carson’s essay, The Gender of Sound, a page of which is painted onto one of Gordon’s canvases, the poet writes: ‘Woman is that creature who puts the inside on the outside. By projections and leakages of all kinds—somatic, vocal, emotional, sexual—females expose or expend what should be kept in.’[3] There is much in this show that strives to propel outwards, to push against what we’ve been told to keep inside.

Melissa Gordon, ‘Liquid Gestures’, Towner Eastbourne (16 October 2021–30 January 2022)

[1] Quote translated by Siri Hustvedt from Irene Gammel’s biography, Baroness Elsa (2002, MIT Press). Accessed at:https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/29/marcel-duchamp-fountain-women-art-history

[2] Zalman, Sandra, ‘Janet Sobel: Primitive Modern and the Origins of Abstract Expressionism,’ Woman’s Art Journal, vol. 36, no. 2, [Old City Publishing, Inc., Woman’s Art Inc.], 2015, pp. 20–29

[3] Anne Carson, ‘The Gender of Sound’, Glass, Irony and God (New Directions Books, 1995) p. 119