CONCEALED, REVEALED by Lucy R. Lippard (2019)

Carrie Perreault’s work is rooted in a courageous exploration of her own vulnerability. She has found simplicity to be the best tactic to convey complex emotional subject matter, like childhood trauma and mental health. She notes that she expends “great effort to achieve minimal results.” I assume that’s minimal in the sense of the classic 1960s art movement rather than the work’s affect. Although (mostly male) minimalists rejected psychological content for a “what you see is what you get” aesthetic, women working in similar modes introduced from the beginning a different kind of content, conveyed by repetitive, labor-intensive mark-making and the use of materials evoking personal and psychological connotations, such as hair or body imagery. This is where Perreault’s performances and sculptures come in.    

Embracing “gestural acts without narrative closure” (ambiguity being at the heart of so much contemporary art), Perreault tackles issues of “emotional correctness,” recalling early feminist works from the late 1960s and early ‘70s, when audiences accustomed to mostly male art were shocked by intimate details of women’s lives and lived experience. Works like Judy Chicago’s Red Flag(a bloody tampax being withdrawn from a woman’s body) and Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Documentabout motherhood or Ana Mendieta’s rape performance were new to fine art. Perreault’s visceral videos are heirs to such work.

In For once in your life, just let it go, we are exposed for what seems like a long time to a closeup of the artist’s wet open mouth with even white teeth (and lipstick). An extended bout of self-inflicted tooth-cleaning with a dental floss holder lasts until the gums bleed, and then some. Is this about torture? Or hygiene? Or everyday masochism? The lipstick and bright red nail polish on the hand that does the work show off the subject’s gender. The video’s small scale, bringing the viewer too close for comfort, balances on the brink of voyeurism and even eroticism but never fulfills such expectations. Perreault has called it “a method of self-harm that could be construed as self-care.” 

A second video, Untitled (eggs),would be mesmerizing but somewhat incomprehensible without knowing that when the artist was in kindergarten, the school’s janitor made a habit of breaking eggs over her head – an incomprehensible act. In the video, Perreault sits straight in a chair, stoically staring ahead as an accomplice (dressed the same way, a twin?) slowly and deliberately picks up one of a line of eggs on a nearby windowsill and cracks it over her head. Deadpan, she never moves, despite gooey lines of egg dripping down her head and body. This ritual of closure ends when the eggs are used up and the accomplice departs.   

Over My Dead Bodyis an Andre-like minimal sculpture of flat plates altered through an extremely detailed process involving melamine forms for concrete, bathed in muriatic acid baths, layered in more concrete, and eventually sanded, leaving traces of painting, drawing, and other actions that lie beneath. The result looks industrially strong but is in fact quite fragile.  This continues a feminist tradition of altering the precise minimal grids that were prevalent when feminist art took off around 1970, such as Howardena Pindell’s soft grid sculpture or Harmony Hammond’s later bandaged grids.

Perreault employs art as a vessel for working out issues in her life, a kind of personal art-and-life equation. “Things that were meant to be concealed reveal themselves,” she says. “This is a thread that runs throughout my work.”  

 

Lucy R. Lippard is a writer, activist, sometime curator, author of 24 books on contemporary art and cultural criticism, including From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art, Eva Hesse,The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, and most recently Undermining: A Wild Ride through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West. She has co-founded various artists’ organizations and publications. She lives off the grid in rural Galisteo, New Mexico, where for 23 years she has edited the monthly community newsletter: El Puente de Galisteo.