ARTISTS
DON DOE
SELECTED PRESS
Naughty but Nice, The New York Sun, 2007
"Post-feminist" can be as hard to distinguish, politically, from plain old sexist as "Bad Painting" can be, aesthetically, from mere, um, bad painting. Both come down to nuances of intention as much as qualities of affect. And both come to a head in a great deal of contemporary art that taps well-worn tropes of female sexuality. Many artists, seeking simultaneously to offend and to arouse, opt for a strategy of schlock and "ooh-ah."
Many artists of both sexes trowel sources high and low, looking for inspiration to the mannerists among Old Master painters and soft-core pornography and comic strips in mid-20th-century popular illustration. The result: images of women calculated to appeal in equal measure to our indignation, humor, and libido.
Anachronistic techniques are as key to this kind of painting as dubious taste. Picture book realism is, in turn, in equal measure shopsoiled and, because thought to be obsolete and therefore impressive when done well, novel. John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage are at the head of this movement, but increasingly they seem to be the tip of an artistic iceberg. Think you can risk their charm because your core values are sturdy? Remember the Titanic.
Don Doe is a graphic artist in more than one sense of the phrase: His show of drawings, watercolors, and the odd painting of raunchy female pirates goes for the jugular. Piracy is a perfect metaphor for an art that commandeers noble techniques with such swashbuckling bravura. His line, color and composition are fulsome and alluring, curvaceous and giddying.
The installation keeps pace with a sense of over-the-topness in the individual pieces, with dashing shapes created in dense, artful clusters. Evidently, Mr. Doe is protean in productivity and unselfcritical (or at least unself-censoring). The artist's own salon-style hang acknowledges and gently mocks oeuvre inflation.
Almost every composition shows a voluptuous young woman, scantily clad, caught in a coy expression that is saucily aware of the viewer's gaze. "Sailing Is a Process" (2005) depicts a gal turning away from a telescope to look at us; the heroine of "Map Maker" (2002) is caught in a state of rapture, her muscular torso contracting as her bust protrudes, with her maps spread out before her. The scenes are situational rather than narrative because the focus is always on the women rather than the event. They are absorbed not by their activity but by us — as are they in turn by artist and viewer. This is even true in Mr. Doe's latest series, "New Mothers" — which is displayed with greater restraint in a second room — despite the inclusion of an infant to occupy the young beauties' attention.
If you hate this work, you will need to escape for air. If you love it, you might also want to run out and find yourself a pirate. It is those of us left in ambivalence about Mr. Doe's enterprise that are rewarded by staying with this silly but alluring work, because it yields surprising formal nuances. Most of these come down to materials, though, with different qualities of line or mark achieved from varying media and papers. In terms of iconography, Mr. Doe is unremitting.
In terms of high-low stakes (masters or porn) he actually strikes a middle ground. His strongest affinity is with that borderline dubious, though formidable, modern American master: Reginald Marsh. But Mr. Doe also looks to more reputable sources. He is an admirer of the Dutch mannerist Hendrick Goltzius, whose work has been borrowed by Mireille Mosler, who, incidentally, is known primarily as an Old Master dealer. He clearly looks, also, to Pontormo, especially in his babies. But the more striking similarity is with modern and contemporary illustrators like Vargas in vintage Playboy magazines.
In Britain some years ago, an advertising campaign for a brand of cream cakes coined a phrase that seems apt for Mr. Doe's dumb aesthetic: "naughty but nice."
David Cohen