Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava

Art in NYC, 2021, Part 2-

David Hammons, Day’s End, 2021, a permanent installation, which opened in May, 2021 on the Hudson River on the former site of Pier 52, which the great de-constructivist Artist Gordon Matta-Clark once “modified” into a work also called Days End in 1975. Appropriately seen here at day’s end, December 23, 2021.

In spite of everything that happened in 2021, particularly the “return to normal” that wasn’t, there were some extremely good shows up here last year. I’ve written about a number of them- Alice Neel: People Come First, Goya’s Graphic Imagination, Cezanne Drawing, and shows of Tyler Mitchell, John Chamberlain, and some others. Having just featured the monumental NYC half of Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror in Part 1 of this look at Art in NYC, 2021, there was another NoteWorthy show of 2021 going on at the Whitney at the same time.

Of all the shows I saw last year, Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing, was the biggest revelation.

Jennifer Packer gets top billing. That might be reflective of the fact her show is on 8 while Jasper Johns is on the 5th floor?, or her name is longer? 7 years later, I still haven’t warmed up to the architecture of the new Whitney, the east end of it seen here from the High Line. But the shows have dramatically improved, in my opinion. That’s the High Line Admin building to the lower foreground, also designed by Renzo Piano, who designed the Whitney.

The Johns and Jennifer Packer shows are a fitting cap to 2021 for the Whitney Museum, which has had a steady string of excellent shows beginning with Vida Americana in 2020 (which I wrote about here) that continued throughout 2021. The stellar Julie Mehretru and overdue Dawoud Bey shows up from spring through the summer, 2021, continued Vida’s momentum, with Jasper Johns and Jennifer Packer now setting the stage for the next Whitney Biennial in the spring. The Whitney also collaborated with Hudson River Park (which lies across the West Side Highway to its west) on legendary Artist David Hammon’s Day’s End, which opened in May, 2021 directly opposite the Museum. A permanent installation right next to the site of a large public park (to the right in the picture up top) currently under construction (where the Department of Sanitation complex was when I looked at the “new” Whitney Museum Building, here, in 2016). It’s something of a major coup in my view, that with the new park when it opens and the Little Island a few blocks away should bring more people to the area and the Whitney. As hard as I was on them during their early years on Gansevoort Street, in spite of everything, the Whitney had a great year in 2021, and they deserve a lot of credit for it.

Flashback- May 25, 2019. Two of the four works by Jennifer Packer in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, each in a different size that ranged from letter size (right), to small mural size.

On October 29th, after my 4th visit to Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror at the Whitney, I headed up to the 8th floor to see the member’s preview of Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing. I had seen 4 of Ms. Packer’s Paintings in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, where they gave me pause. Painting has increasingly become a minor medium in each succeeding Biennial, much to my dismay, and this was true, again, in 2019, so I opted not to write about it, after having written about the 2017 edition. Whereas 2017’s installment was memorable for the marvelous “dialogue” between Henry Taylor, who was already quite established, and Deana Lawson, who was just making her name, it was hard to get a full sense of what Jennifer Packer was about from this selection. I filed her name and the impression. Before that, she had been Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum from 2012-13, with a show there, her work was then shown at Sikkema Jenkins in Breathing Room in 2015 and Quality of Life, 2018, the Renaissance Society in Chicago in 2017 in a show titled Tenderheaded. But, it was the debut of Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing at its first stop at the Serpentine Gallery, London, in May through August, 2021, that began the buzz that’s now taking on a life of its own at the Whitney. Simultaneously, there is Jennifer Packer: Every Shut Eye Ain’t Sleep at MOCA, L.A., her first West Coast show. 

The opening gallery during the early days of the show’s run. Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!), 2020, Oil on canvas, 118 by 172 inches, her largest Painting to date.

Still, it turns out I had no idea what I was in for when I stepped off that elevator in late October. An hour and a half later, I left awestruck.

Mourning is a central theme of this stunning, meditative, work, and others in the show. Here, in a work that also includes 3 fans, the 2020 violent death of Breonna Taylor is echoed in this reminder that the mourning continues as does the search for justice. I don’t know if Ms. Packer knew Ms. Taylor or not, but the sense of loss here fits right in with the intimacy of her Portraits of her friends and those she does know.

I can’t remember the last time I was in a show of work by an Artist largely unknown to me that left me with the undeniable feeling that I was in the presence of true greatness.

Fire Next Time, 2012, Oil on canvas, 72 x 156 inches. The presence of fans (2), a recurring motif, doesn’t keep this  remarkable large work from literally burning off the canvas. The stairs offering the only way out for the figure slumped to the left.

I did not writing that last sentence lightly. I’ve spent two months thinking about it and letting the dust begin to settle before writing this piece. I started going to Art shows in 1980. The very first show I saw was the 1980 Picasso Retrospective at MoMA. I was on the road with a band and flew back to NYC, twice, just to see it. I could have stopped looking at Art right then. I’ve never seen anything like it- still. In the intervening 41 years I’ve seen thousands of shows, hundreds each year, and I count 1,700+ visits to The Metropolitan Museum among them. I’ve been thinking back trying to recall having had this feeling before… When I first saw a Sarah Sze show in the 1990s that had a similar effect, though, given the large size of the work, there were only a few pieces in the show. Most of the great shows I’ve seen have been of work by Artists very well known to me. It takes years, decades, for an Artist to create a body of truly great work. Jennifer Packer has managed to put together an extremely impressive, even revolutionary, body of work at at the ripe old age of about 37. It’s even more remarkable to consider that some of the major pieces in this show are 10 years old (Fire Next Time, 2012 or Lost In Translation, 2013), or close to it!

Lost In Translation, 2013, Oil on canvas. One of the most remarkable Paintings I’ve seen in years. One of Ms. Packer’s “trademarks” is the there/not-thereness of her Portrait subjects. Here, in this double Portrait, things get taken to an entirely different level. I under exposed this shot to try to show the gorgeous, subtle, range of tones that are easily lost under bright light.

Revolutionary? How?

In the space of 35 works, Ms. Packer manages to “reinvent,” in a sense, both the Portrait and the Still Life. Portraits have been around for thousands of years, going at least as far back as the Ancient Egyptians. Yet, I can’t recall ever seeing anything like Lost In Translation before. The figures melt into each other in a way that Abstraction overplays and Representational Painting doesn’t attempt. Here, we have something “in between,” leaving it up to the viewers to try and decipher. Well, yes, Picasso managed to reinvent the Portrait any number of times (no comparison of the two Artists is intended). He was about 26 when he Painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907, perhaps the beginning of his continual reinvention of the Portrait (though in a group ). Jennifer Packer was about 27 when she Painted Lost In Translation.

The renowned Painter Jordan Casteel sits in her studio at Yale where Jennifer Painted her in 2014. Jordan, 2014, Oil on canvas, 36 by 48 inches.

More Art in NYC, in 2021. The same Jordan Casteel was commissioned to Paint this Mural, The Baayfalls,  on the High Line. It should be up until March.

She favors friends, loved ones and those in her circle as subjects, so this there/not-thereness of her subjects in her Paintings is partially a way of “protecting” them she has said. This is achieved through a very wide range of mark-making that magically coalesce into images that are remarkable for both their “thereness” and their nebulosity.

Her use of color is another bombshell. When was the last time you saw a Portrait done in red as she does here (in the face not the hoodie)? The Body Has Memory, 2018, Oil on canvas, 60 x 48 inches, a Portrait of the Artist’s friend Eric N. Mack, a fellow-2019 Whitney Biennal Artist.

The power in her work, for me, lies in her uncanny way of combining opposites- intimacy and nebulosity, presence and absence, color and emptiness, created and enhanced with that extremely wide range of mark making techniques I mentioned that all flow together magically. I haven’t seen anything like her intimacy and nebulosity since Francis Bacon, while other elements, like her settings, echo Kerry James Marshall for me. Jennifer Packer seems to prefer to place her subjects in their surroundings, reminiscent of Mr. Marshall’s marvelous, and intimate, home settings. Her poses have an amazing “comfortable in their own skin”-ness that are a hallmark of Alice Neel’s Portraits. In the end, all of this leaves much for the viewer to ponder for his or herself, and, at least in my case, brings me back again and again to look further.

A wall of her Still Lifes in the third gallery.

How has she revolutionized the Still Life?

Say Her Name, 2017, Oil on canvas. Ms. Packer memorialized Sandra Bland, two years after her death in police custody at age 28.

Those on view at the Whitney are freed from their usual setting in a vase or a bowl on a table. In Jennifer Packer’s, the plants seem to float in thin air. Have you ever seen any like them¹? Doing this allows her to control the context. All of a sudden, these pieces are not “about” place. They are about something else. They are about what the Artist has on her mind while she’s Painting them, and that’s what the viewer is left to ponder.

Oh, and to those obsessed with putting Artists in boxes, for reasons that continue to escape me (besides laziness), Good Luck boxing Jennifer Packer in anything besides the Jennifer Packer “box!”

In case you’re wondering, she Draws as uniquely as she Paints.

The Mind Is Its Own Place, 2020, Charcoal and pastel on paper.

The Mind Is Its Own Place strikes me as something of a counterpart to Lost In Translation from seven years before, retaining much of the power of the earlier Painting. Her lines carry much of the weight of the color in her Paintings. The Drawings on view here are every bit as mysterious and nebulous as her Paintings, though in different ways, particularly without the colors. And every bit as stunning, which is no mean feat.

The word is out. The crowds are beginning to show up, the catalog is sold out. December 28, 2021. By the time this show ends in April, I expect there to be a line to see it. And not only because of the virus.

After six visits, two and a half months in as I write this, it astounds me to write that I’m left with the inexorable feeling that we are watching the arrival of an important, major Artist. That’s “major” as in the major Artists who line the galleries of our greatest museums.

Important how?

First, reinventing the Portrait and the Still Life puts her in that discussion. That’s more than a lot of all Painters living or dead have done. Second, as she’s said, “My inclination to paint, especially from life, is a completely political one. We belong here. We deserve to be seen and acknowledged in real time. We deserve to be heard and to be imaged with shameless generosity and accuracy.” Looking at her work, though, one thing that strikes me hard is that in her efforts to imagine “with shameless generosity and accuracy,” many, if not most, of her Portraits have an other world quality that is fresh and haunting. She brings “negative space” into the physical body! Parts of her subject’s bodies are left blank in a different way they are in Egon Schiele’s work, or anyone else’s. It’s almost like she doesn’t want to reveal, or share, too much of the sitter, who are often those close to her. For me, at least, that feels endearing and heightens their intimacy. Those are the qualities I respond to. She accomplishes this using an extremely wide range of mark making. Not since so-called Abstract Expressionism have I seen a Painter who is so free in her technique, but it always just works. It always looks “right.” When I look at her Portraits, they  look to me exactly like what it really is- A sitter who might have been there (i.e. sitting in front of Ms. Packer) once. A temporary state. “It’s not figures, not bodies, but humans I am painting,” she said.

Equally astounding for me is to say that, all of one show in, Jennifer Packer’s name is at the top of my list of important Painters to arrive in the 21st century. Yes, I know. I’m the guy who doesn’t believe “best” exists in the Arts. It doesn’t. Let’s just say that if the conversation turned to “Who are the important Painters to arrive in the 21st century?” She’d be the first one I’d name. It’s a symptom of how much her work is on my mind.

Besides, someone has to be first. ; )

BookMarks-

Going…going…gone….

The catalog accompanying the London & Whitney installations of Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied with Seeing: Serpentine Gallery, London is exceptionally well-done. One of the most beautiful Painting books I’ve seen, it carries over Ms. Packer’s unique color sense to varying colored paper for the text sections. It was easily one of my NoteWorthy Art Books of 2021 among most highly recommended Art Books I saw last year. If you buy it from the link in the book title in this paragraph (only), NHNYC will receive a small commission, with my thanks. 

*Soundtrack for this Post is “Hidden Place” by Björk, the first track on her album Verpertine, 2001, performed here (at 23:04) in 2001 in her extraordinary concert at Riverside Church.

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