De Roberta Smith sobre Elisabeth Murray, ainda
(The New York Times nytimes.com 13 Agosto 2007)
"Ms. Murray belonged to a sprawling generation of Post-Minimal artists who spent the 1970s reversing the reductivist tendencies of Minimalism and reinvigorating art with a sense of narrative, process and personal identity. Her art never fit easily into the available Post-Minimal subcategories like Conceptual, Process or performance art. This may have been because her loyalty to painting, which was out of fashion, was unwavering. At the same time, her blithe indifference to the distinctions between abstraction and representation or high and low could put off serious painting buffs.
Both tendencies enabled her to be one of a small group of painters — including Philip Guston, Frank Stella and Brice Marden — who during the 1970s rebuilt the medium from scratch, recomplicating and expanding its parameters and proving that it was still ripe for innovation, in part because of its rich history. Her sources ranged from Cézanne, Picasso, Gris and Miró to Stuart Davis, Al Held and Agnes Martin. As she remarked in the 1987 catalog to her first big museum show, which traveled to the Whitney in 1988: “Everything has been done a million times. Sometimes you use it and it’s yours; another time you do it and it’s still theirs.”
In Ms. Murray’s mature work, eccentrically shaped or multipanel canvases fused Cubism’s shattered forms and Surrealism’s suggestive biomorphism with the scale and some of the angst of Abstract Expressionism and more than a touch of Disneyesque humor and motion. Her semi-abstract shapes resolved into bouncing coffee cups, flying tables or Gumby-like silhouettes with attenuated arms and legs that careered across surfaces like thin, unfurling ribbons. Her preferred spatial effect often seemed to be a swirling vortex, with the illusion of motion both countered and underscored by weighty colors and thick surfaces subdued with the active workings of a palette knife. The overall impression was of some inchoate yet invigorating crisis of the heart or hearth, as intimated by titles like “More Than You Know,” “Quake Shoe” and “What Is Love?”
Roberta Smith é hoje um dos melhores críticos de arte actuais (como defende James Elkins num curioso livrinho que também apareceu na FNAC, What Happened to Art Criticism, Prickly Paradigm Press, Chicago)
e o que aqui diz a propósito de E. Murray tem uma importância capital face às posições críticas que por aí circulam.
Trata-se de pôr de parte a versão pateta da mudança de paradigma circa 68 que infecta o calendário de Serralves, por exemplo, cultivando uma estrita obediência supostamente neo-vanguardista mas agora já só académica que venera os pós-minimalismos reducionistas e ditos conceptuais (na entrada da colecção de obras fotográficas lá está a reiteração da cartilha do "paradigma detectável na arte dos anos 60 e 70"). Ou a litania sobre a inevitabilidade do fim e o gosto móbido pelos restos, ou detritos.
Trata-se de perceber que a partir dos anos 70 o que mais importa é o proliferar de caminhos que rejeitam e reinvertem as tendências reduccionistas do minimalismo e do formalismo modernista em geral. De revigorar a arte pondo em causa todos os interditos anteriores, os dos esquerdismos vários, para-dadaistas ou estalinistas, e os do formalismo em versão Greenberg e herdeiros.
De reconstruir a pintura, não exactamente por "lealdade" ou respeito conservador pelo medium, mas porque o seu horizonte de possibilidades se mantinha em aberto para outras experiências sustentadas no seu rico passado.
Fora das grandes manobras vedetistas e mercantis que os museus cumprem, a pintura de E. Murray (que foi tb uma professora muito respeitada) manteve uma enorme frescura e uma constante atitude de experimentação e risco, ensaindo sempre novas direcções.
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