Apparent signatures: Vivienne Koorland Remaps Postmodernism

A P P A R E N T Vi vi e n n e Ko o r l a n d Rem ap s Po s t m o d e r n i s m Matthew n a t Vivienne Koorland restores to painting is, very nearly, painting itself, DeBord along with a kind of painterly intelligence that has been tough to find, at V least in New York, for better than a decade. That she does so from the stance of a consummate—and true—postmodernist, fashioning her work out of a literature of loss, anonymity, and elliptical suffering, led me to consider her talent and feel, well, a little scared. She's that good. Like the visionary directors of the Journal of Contemporary African Art • Spring/Summer 1995 American cinema in the 1970s, Koorland has confronted the universal riddle of violence: If it's so bad, why are we drawn again and again to dwell on it's meanings, while still delighting in the illicit charge? Why are we enticed by the reduced form of it, and what happens when the complex truth of its making is revealed? Further, how can we act ethically in a world both so suffused with the legacy of violence and punctuated with its reinvention, on film, in art, on the streets, internationally—everywhere? Finally, in what ways does violence plague identity, driving it to its extremes and leaving it either crippled and anachronistic or untenable as a political stance? T A That's required, it seems, is a new type of aesthetic and ethical cartography, which Koorland has taken as one of the organizing metaphors of her recent work, exploring the idea of mapmaking in a broad, Fredric Jameson kind of way. Koorland is a Jewish South African who has lived in Europe and, most recently, the United States. She speaks three languages and wishes the politics surrounding apartheid hadn't prevented her from picking up a few more. An inveterate postmodernist, she understands , perhaps more fully than any other contemporary artist, the central lesson of the midcentury: its fragments cannot be glued back together to reform a pristinely civilized vessel—while they retain, in their visual record of faded aspirations, irreplaceable chips of hope, they also come to us with sharp edges. Left:Vivienne Koorland, South Africa Over Hungary, 19 9 3 - 9 4 ( Oi l a n d s t i t c h e d b u r l ap o n l i n en ). Co u r t e s y o f Ke n t Ga l l e r y , N Y C . Below:Vivienne Koorland, South Africa Over Hungary ( De t a i l ) . Co u r t e s y o f Ke n t Ga l l e r y , N Y C . Journal of Contemporary African Art • Spring/Summer 1995 It's useful to remember that what was for centuries coherent in Western representation has been, via modernism's offenses as well as its triumphs, busted all to pieces. It is against this staticky background of optimistic edginess— the defining feature of millennial aesthetic mood (like a TV documentary abruptly interrupted, but with friendly messages about minor "technical difficulties")—that Koorland has made her contribution to what poststructuralism has reduced to "discourse," but what I'd rather think of as a "tradition." In Koorland's case, we're looking at the tradition of painting. But not the tradition classically stated, through the usual organs of reactionary fussing. Koorland engages painting in the same way that Mark Morris or Bill T. Jones engages choreography, or Paul Beatty and John Ashbery poetry—as the inescapable reminder of how memory operates, how the memory of memory operates, and how memory collides or coexists with current sympathies. Through the haze of these epistemological fluctuations, Koorland posits her definitions of postmodernism, using painting as her compass, her guide to a recapitulation of memory. Often incorrectly located somewhere in the iffy elbowroom between postmodern market geeks like David Salle and the mythopoetic gravitas of postwar Germans like Anselm Kiefer, Koorland is most certainly not trying to append herself to bored American Pop or red-eyed postwar...