Looking at Elizabeth Peyton

Elizabeth Peyton is a conceptual artist masquerading as a painter. She is most famous for painting images of Kurt Cobain and Leonardo DiCaprio and other pop icons. Peter Schejdahl, reviewing the current show at the Whitney for the New Yorker, describes Peyton as "the moral center of the Biennial."

Peyton's work is charming and very likeable. Its small scale (her paintings are usually less than 20 inches tall or wide) and recognizable subject matter make the work inviting. She has certain skills as a colorist and decorative designer in the tradition of Matisse and David Hockney, with whom she shares a room at the Whitney.

But in a more sane art world, Peyton would not be in the Biennial yet. There are no surprises in her work. There's no sense of her confronting a formal problem and finding an innovative solution. In one of Hockney's paintings at the Biennial, he renders a living room couch with huge stripes of orange and white that curve over at the top. It's simple, gutsy, and unexpectedly pleasurable to look at. And it sticks with you long after you've seen the painting. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Peyton has a bored, scratchy drawing of a photograph of Walt Whitman, done as if it were a student assignment.

In many ways, Peyton is to the current scene what David Salle was to the 80's. Both are devoted to photographs as the source for their paintings. Photos have been a source for artists for over a century now, but what makes Salle's and Peyton's use of them different is a devotion to the photograph as a physical object itself, and not just the record of a physical moment in time.

When using photographs as a source, painters must choose between rendering the image as an illusion of three-dimensional space, or treating the image as a jumping-off point for the act of building up a surface of paint on canvas. Many artists choose to go back and forth between these two ways of translating a photo within the same canvas.

Both David Salle and Elizabeth Peyton take a third way, treating the photo as a photo. Perhaps for this reason, both artists are vastly improved by photographic reproduction in books, magazines, and the web. But when you actually see Salle's painting of photograph of a woman spread-eagled, you think of the photograph, rather than the woman or the painting. And so it is with Peyton's paintings.

Peyton's style is a kind of sloppy transluscence. She prefers wide swaths of color on her small paintings, in thin layers that reveal her process of adding paint. Unlike Salle, who transcribes the photo as closely as he feebly can, Peyton slathers on paint in a general way, as if replicating a washed-out Polaroid.

Peyton's work is an image of an image, and what she finds most compelling isn't the subject matter (Kurt Cobain the human being) or the painting itself (Kurt Cobain as a subtext for painterly accomplishment) but rather the style of representation (Kurt Cobain as icon). If this seems all very meta, it is.

The Village Voice's art preview breathlessly describes her "amazing knack for capturing pop-idol images of exhaustion and celebrity with the perfect virtuosic ennui for our time." Peyton's art is very much about her time.

She doesn't take the role of heroic artist. Unlike Salle, who built huge pseudo-complicated paintings with bravura that went nowhere, Peyton creates small canvases, in a choppy half-finished style, that seek to quietly describe a sensibility. It's less about being an individual creator and seeing things specifically, and more about being a collector and seeing things in a general way.

As with Diane Keaton's collection of thrift-store clown paintings, you're not meant to linger too long on any one canvas, but rather to appreciate the entire body of work as a genre. Every piece is a sketch meant to describe the larger project, which is Elizabeth Peyton's hip and eclectic taste. Peyton skips over the difficult challenge of creating rich individual works.

Every issue of Rolling Stone and Premiere magazine comes with a trove of images for Peyton, and all she has to do is apply her signature style without looking too hard or thinking too much. She brands herself, with everything rendered in her pointy, androgynous signature style.

We're in trouble when artists consider their own work ready-made. When Duchamp presented a bicycle wheel as his own work of sculpture, it was a radically new way of looking at both the world around us and the art world in particular. When Peyton decorates the sullen look of a rockstar and it appears in a major museum, it only confirms the status quo with a cool, world-weary sigh.

The Whitney website says "her quietly familiar depictions erode the anonymity of typical media images." Peyton is a painter whose subject is the media, and her way of eroding the anonymity of corporate images is to do bad paintings of celebrities.

But let's be optimistic. I feel compelled to write about Peyton because in many ways she's teetering on the edge of dueling ideas about what art is. The pseudo-social science-influenced humanities, coupled with market pressures, have lured artists into thinking of their oeuvre first, and their actual paintings second. There is an intense pressure on artists to develop a signature style and subject, and produce a pre-defined product rather than letting artistic identity develop over time through the hard work of taking on formal challenges. It's easier to sell, and easier to create, a signature than it is a painting.

Right now Elizabeth Peyton has more signature than painting. One of her paintings at the Whitney is a copy of Leonardo's "Woman with an Ermine." Of course, copying great work is an instructive technique for artists to learn how great artists of the past worked through formal problems. I'm hoping this means Peyton's on the right track, and not just tooting her own horn.