For artist Donald Moffett, the political is personal, as are investigations into art and art history. "The Extravagant Vein," now on view at the Tang Museum, surveys this artist's range of work — from expanding the definition of painting to political work that is quietly persistent, never overbearing.
The exhibit traces the evolution of Moffett's career from the 1980s, when he pasted up his own political posters all over Manhattan, to the present. As a founding member of Gran Fury, the design collective that grew out of the AIDS activist organization ACT UP, he helped spread the message that officials were ignoring the crisis.
One of his original posters from 1987, a portrait of Ronald Reagan with the words "He Kills Me" with an orange and black spiral, is repeated over an entire wall of the gallery. The poster was made the same year the president finally publicly uttered the word "AIDS" six long years after the epidemic was first reported.
Hung on top of this boldly graphic wall is a series entitled "Blue (NY)" from the late 1990s. Elegantly simple photos of the sky at various shades of blue provide an elegiac contrast to the anger of the earlier work. Formally, the minimalism of the later series also suggests the direction in which Moffett would take his work from the '90s on.
In "Gutted" (2007-2008), a series that both employs and confronts abstract minimalism, the paintings are splayed open. Sutures made of zippers at each corner form an opening to reveal a different color inside the canvas, turning it and the conventions of minimalist painting inside out. Not simply formalist exercises about space and the picture plane, though that is part of it, they evoke much more — recalling at once autopsied bodies and flowers blooming. I wondered if the title suggests in one simple word what it felt like to survive the AIDS crisis, even as so many of his peers did not.
"The Extravagant Vein," (2003) the series for which the show is named, plays on conventions of landscape painting. With videos projected onto gold-painted canvas, the result is beautiful. The surface shimmers with the hint of movement in the rustle of leaves or figures talking. The video was shot in "The Ramble," an area of New York's Central Park known for the last century as a place for both gay cruising and, sadly, because of that reputation, violent attacks.
