CATALOGUE ESSAYS

Jane Irish, Painting the Historical Present

Jane Irish, Locks Art Publications, Philadelphia, 2021

By Raphael Rubinstein

For decades, Jane Irish has made the embrace of disparate moments a central, explicit theme in her paintings, but her ambition as an artist is not simply to offer philosophical meditations on time. Rather, she delves into the past, into various pasts, in order to address incredibly specific themes: geopolitical conflict, the legacy of colonialism, the atrocities of war. If this sounds like a grim set of subjects (and it is) the works themselves are anything but dour. Instead they exude a wonderful painterly verve: her depictions of ornate interiors and the delicate landscapes visible through their windows celebrate the decorative and the pastoral with seemingly effortless exuberance. Irish’s work also incorporates a self-reflexive discourse about cultural transmission and about art itself; along with their other concerns, these are paintings about painting. Ultimately, it is the intersection of all these elements that is the defining quality of Irish’s work. 

Art, like everything else, like you, like me, like these words I write in an eventful and uncertain autumn in the history of our country, in the history of the world, exists in time or, rather, to be more accurate, it exists in multiple times. An artefact, an image, a phrase contains something of the moment it was created, while also existing as a fact at the moment we encounter it. This interweaving of then and now is further complicated by the layered temporalities in the minds of viewers for whom memory and immediate perception are inextricably intermingled. In other words, as one of Faulkner’s characters famously says, “The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.” 

So, what are these various temporalities, these pasts and presents, we encounter in Irish’s paintings? Typically, her work initially transports us back into ancien régime European interiors where all seems to be, in Baudelaire’s words, “luxe, calme et volupté.” Underneath high ceilings adorned with pastel-hued frescoes we notice grand fireplaces and floor-to-ceiling windows flooded with pellucid light; ornate, plushly upholstered furniture and richly embroidered carpets, baroquely curving walls that are decorated with spirited motifs that seem to have leaped out of an old master’s sketchbook. But as we scan these opulent rooms, which initially appear to belong to the harmless genre of portrait d’intérieur or interior portrait, we begin to register unsettling presences, images and scenes that don’t seem to belong in these elegantly appointed settings. 

This is most dramatically the case in Irish’s many paintings that tackle the history of the American war in Vietnam. Looking down at us from the pastel ceilings are not the expected nymphs and putti but images of soldiers, civilians, protestors and armaments. These revenants from the 1960s and 1970s have not been summoned to remind us of our own mortality—their message is not  memento mori—but to play the role of recriminating ghosts, historic witnesses.  In some paintings Irish also introduces carefully inscribed poetic texts in English by American Vietnam veterans and in Vietnamese by the 18^th century Vietnamese poem Ho Xuân Hu’o’ng. If we don’t immediately notice these incongruous elements—which can also feature fragments of Vietnam’s landscape and architecture—thronging the ceilings, it’s because the artist depicts them with the same casual virtuosity she uses for the rest of the paintings. Using quick-drying mediums such as egg tempera, distemper and gouache, Irish favors an alla prima approach, which gives her paintings, even when they are large scale, the vitality of a sketch. As well as drying quickly, these paint mediums tend to have a less vibrant finish in terms of color, which Irish prefers in order to tamp down her Rococo palette. 

Almost always for Irish there is a high level of personal involvement with the content and references in her paintings. As she was working on her Vietnam paintings the artist got to know U.S. veterans who shared with her their memories and their poetry about the war. (Poems by one of the vets, W.D. Ehrhart, frequently turn up in her paintings.) Irish also made three month-long trips to Vietnam between 2008 and 2012, where she met with Vietnamese artists and created some 60 on-site paintings. Among the most powerful of her Vietnam paintings are those where her beautifully appointed interiors open up onto the Vietnamese countryside. By juxtaposing views of Vietnam with luxurious, emphatically French interiors, Irish creates a startling mise en scène that conveys in a single composition the logic of colonialism.  Here, again, direct experience played a role: during a residency in the Brittany region of France, Irish found herself painting interiors of houses whose owners had grown up in Vietnam—they were the children and grandchildren of the colonizers whose terrible legacy she had been pursuing in her Vietnam paintings.  

The artist’s personal engagement with the Vietnam War continues in her recent Tapestry Paintings, in which she imitates vintage Belgian and French tapestries of forest scenes where gnarled, leafy trees and gentle rivers and streams, largely depicted in shades unrealistic blue, evoke some bucolic idyll or, perhaps, an 18^th century boudoir.  The anomalies—and chez Irish there are always anomalies—take the form of figures and groups of figures that float amid the tapestry landscapes. It’s clear both by the positioning and style of these figures that they don’t belong to the underlying scene. This technique of dropping disconnected images from diverse sources—often from the history of art—into a painting is a characteristic postmodernist painting move. While generationally Irish belongs to the same age cohort as David Salle, the artist perhaps most identified with this technique, she rejects the neutrality and emptying out of meaning that are prominent features of Salle’s brand of postmodern painting. Nothing could be further from her than Salle’s pursuit of stylistic banality and endlessly deferred signification. Whatever her subject or source, Irish always paints with evident passion and particularity, and her ambition to establish meaning, to use her paintings to make statements about the world, is equally unmistakable.  

An especially rich instance of Irish’s dialogue with art history can be found in the Tapestry Painting Interrogator (2020), a large distemper painting made on sewn together pieces of linen and muslin.  Distributed carefully around the painting are a half dozen images, each drawn from a different historic source and each bearing the imprint of pain and violence. The foreground figures are (at left) a starving pauper from a 1444 fresco by Domenico Di Bartolo and (at right) the Dead Christ from a circa 1448 Lamentation by Vecchietta. The head with a hand pressing down on it in the middle right is from Caravaggio’s The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (1608). Just to the left is a knot of stick-wielding figures from Titian’s Christ Crowned with Thorns (1576). Above that, splayed out against a light patch in the landscape, is the image of a skinned animal from Soutine’s Flayed Rabbit (circa 1921), a painting familiar to Irish from the Barnes Collection, and to its right a small strange detail from Bronzino’s fresco The Crossing of the Red Sea (1542).

Crucial to the Tapestry Paintings was Irish’s dialogue with Scott Moore, a veteran who was one of the organizers of the Winter Soldier Investigation, a 1971 event organized by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) that featured soldiers and former soldiers testifying over several days in Detroit about the war crimes that they had seen in Vietnam. The aim of the protest was to show how U.S. policies in Vietnam, rather than the renegade actions of individual soldiers, led to atrocities and war crimes. While it gained some attention at the time—the testimony was read into the Congressional Record and President Richard Nixon instructed his “plumbers” to discredit the organizers—and was the subject of a fascinating, and harrowing, documentary film titled Winter Soldier(1972), this act of collective witnessing has been often overlooked by history. Recently, Moore gave Irish all his papers related to the Winter Soldier Investigation. This included hundreds of pages of testimony that Moore’s mother had typed out in the 1970s on an IBM Selectric typewriter. Feeling that she had to do more than merely read these texts, Irish decided to retype them herself, page by page, word by word, atrocity by atrocity.

As always with Irish, there are multiple, interwoven subjects in play. Foremost in her mind as she was painting Interrogator was the testimony of a 24-year-old former G.I. named Natan Hale who arrived in Vietnam to serve as an interrogator-linguist in December 1967.  In one of the passages retyped by Irish, Hale describes the kind of interrogations he participated in:

When I arrived there my S2 captain, told me that my job was to illicit information. This meant that I could illicit information in any means possible. He told me that I could use any technique I could think of and the idea is “Don’t get caught” and what he meant was I could beat these people, I could cut ’em, I could probably shoot ‘em . I never shot anyone— but I could use any means possible to get information.. just don’t beat them in the presence of a non-unit member or person. That’s someone like a visiting officer or perhaps the Red Cross and I personally used clubs, rifle butts, pistols, knives, and this was always done at Hill 29.

In another Tapestry Painting, Stoning (2020), Irish draws on 23-year-old former Marine Bill Hatton’s description of the stoning death of a young Vietnamese child. Angered that this little kid would scream at them as they drove by in their truck and once threw a rock, the members of Hatton’s unit decide to have some “fun.” In one of the passages retyped by Irish, Hatton offers a chilling account (pp XX)of what happened next: 

we picked up the biggest rocks we could get our hands on and piled them in the back of the truck. So when he left the Combat Base we just turned at the corner and we saw the little kid, we were waiting for the kid .. he ran out of the hootch .. and was going to scream “Marine Number 10,” and we didn’t even let him get it out of his mouth. We just picked up all the rocks and smeared him. We just wiped him out. In fact, the force of the rocks was enough to knock over his little tin hootch as well. I can’t say that the kid died but if I would have been me, I would have died, easily. The rocks, some of them were easily as big as his head. It was looked upon as funny. We all laughed about it. And then we forgot about it. It took me about a year to even to be able to recall the situation. I think it said something about the entire attitude of us over there.

To convey the brutality of this incident Irish recruits a group of figures from Raphael’s Vatican tapestry The Stoning of Saint Stephen. For Irish, the images of torture and death she extracts from European art history, many of them based on Biblical narratives, are not just vivid representations of violence and, thus, apt correlatives for the horrors of the Vietnam War, they also speak to what she sees as a much longer history of violence and oppression. She wants to remind us that cruelty and injustice were rampant during the Renaissance and that we can’t separate masterpieces by Titian or Caravaggio from that history. (This is a version of “the ugly Renaissance,” as scholar Simon Lee deemed it in his 2003 book of the same name.) At the same time, she sees those centuries-old images echoed in today’s climate of racial injustice and police violence. She couldn’t miss, for instance, how closely the scene in Caravaggio’s Beheading painting matched the death of George Floyd. Thus, within a single painting the brutality of the 1500s and the war atrocities of the 1960s are folded into the crimes of 2020.

Further complicating Irish’s paintings is her practice of recontextualizing her own work. She does this in her ceramic sculptures and in paintings that feature copies of previous paintings she had made. A particularly dizzying instance of such copying is found in Tapestry Room (2020), where she fills a space with depictions of two of the Tapestry Paintings, Bound (2020) and Interrogator. These are not simply copies of her previous paintings, but depictions of them as paintings; she is painting paintings of paintings. Pushing representational games to the limit, she inserts a mirror into the scene so that we see a section of the “copy” of Interrogator as a reflection. At the far right the picture of a doorway opens onto a sunny day of gardens, blue sky and a pagoda. 

There is something profoundly disorienting about Irish’s paintings. Not only do they invite us to venture into multiple timeframes and multiple spaces, they also tamper with our aesthetic expectations. What looks like an indulgence in the good life of the haute bourgeoisie turns out to be a chamber of horrors. Lured in by beauty and a keen eye for old masters, we stumble over the corpses of our nation’s history. (In this, Irish takes an opposite tack from another artist known for confronting the subject of Vietnam, Leon Golub, whose paintings first assault us with scenes of cruelty and only subsequently reveal the artfulness of their lovingly painted and abraded surfaces.) In Irish’s work, along with the structure of time, our notions of style, of what is appropriate for a particular subject, are turned upside down. She also disrupts our viewing habits when she populates the ceilings of her interiors with figures placed at every possible angle. By setting out to imitate the foreshortening and in-the-round effects of ceiling frescoes in a flat painting, Irish compels herself to find innovative ways of approaching representation, flipping and distorting figures so that the viewer can’t rely on familiar ways of seeing, or, indeed, familiar ways of thinking. Her work is a vivid reminder that the medium of painting has the ability to provide us with inspiring new models for understanding our changing world, and that, in contrast to theoretical texts or ideological programs, it does so through immediate experience, in all its thrilling complexity.