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Anyone who feels at home with the phrase "creative disorganization"
may feel some empathy with the work of Judy Pfaff. Wasco
is actually one of her more orderly pieces—she has created
works which demanded an entire building to hold all of their chaotic
elements. Critic Linda Nochlin talked about chaos when she described
Pfaff's work for a 1988 catalogue:
"Clearly, there is a tendency in the critical discourse to
equate the feminine and the 'chaotic,' whether the latter is seen
as a negative or a positive characteristic...An artist like Judy
Pfaff, however, might well think that such 'chaotic' contents were
precisely the stuff of interesting creation."
It is hard to disentangle the individual elements of Wasco—this could be an indication that the work is not as "chaotic" as it seems. Certainly, there are old supermarket signs, brightly colored metal cylinders, and found objects, but Wasco's bold exuberance seems to transcend this simple summing of parts. Pfaff uses the lively gestures and bold colors of the Abstract Expressionists in the service of carefully worked-out themes. There is a method to her "chaos."
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CRITICAL EXCERPTS
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Roberta Smith, Pfaff's Progress: Off the Wall and Back,
from Autonomous Objects show, Charlotte, N.C., 9/86
"First, there is the fluidity of her work. The elaborate installations which form the basis of Pfaff's reputation combine elements of painting, sculpture, and drawing on an environmental scale vis an encyclopedic range of colors, materials, and references to high culture...Pfaff has helped stem abstraction's largely reductivist course, opting instead for an art of "complexity and contradiction"...Second, a lyric formal exuberance seems to keep Pfaff "forever young" and forever in process...Pfaff felt an immediate affinity for artists like Barry Le Va, Alan Saret, Lynda Benglis, and Richard Tuttle, known for casual, often temporary works of art which resulted from performance-like interactions with unusual materials...Pfaff replaced the "official" Post-Minimalist of accumulation through repetition with the strategy of accumulation through diversity and through the deployment of multiple modes and codes...In essence, Pfaff was and remains a painter more at home in three dimensions than on a flat surface...achieving a total surround of painting and sculpture [rock,paper,scissors]...In effect, she seems to "lose perspective" on a flat surface, as well as any sense of scale...a group of elaborate wall-pieces which constitute her most completely successful autonomous non-installation efforts so far...The buoyant, baseless suspension of this new work establishes Pfaff even more convincingly as a maker of materialized paintings...her success depends quite a bit on her growing mastery of sculptural technique, especially welding...If there is any comparison, Pfaff's new pieces are like nervy, blue-collar Stellas. They give the impression that they were put together at the local supermarket or the local five-and-dime, painted, and then, miraculously, enlarged."
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Linda Nochlin, Judy Pfaff, or the Persistence of Chaos,
from 11/88 shows at Solomon and National Museum of Women
"This bold and frenetic jousting with chaos, at once undermining
determinate structure yet recalling by this very betrayal Modernism's
fidelity to the grid, has characterized Pfaff's production since
the installations of the early 80s, and persists in the drawings
and wall-pieces of more recent vintage. It is chaos of a specific
sort, nationally and historically locatable, urban in its intensity
and dynamism, late-capitalist in its profusion, its ungrounded overproduction
of disjunctive associations...There has always been a tendency to
associate artistic "formlessness," in the sense of a rejection
of rigid structure, with femininity...Clearly, there is a tendency
in the critical discourse to equate the feminine and the "chaotic,"
whether the latter is seen as a negative or a positive characteristic...Picasso:
"A painting isn't a market basket or a woman's handbag, full
of combs, lipstick, old love letters and the keys to the garage."(From
Life With Picasso, 1964)...An artist like Judy Pfaff, however, might
well think that such "chaotic" contents were precisely
the stuff of interesting creation...Adjectives like "expansive,"
"open," "generous," are used by Pfaff herself
to describe her work; she thinks of her pieces as "accessible
rather than hard to get at."...Most recently, Pfaff's works
have shown a tendency to keep chaos under control with a tongue-in-cheek
reference to the once-rejected grid...Yet the central impulse towards
a creative disorganization and disorientation—a rage for chaos—remains
even in these relatively calmer pieces."
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