A Saturday night in June, unusually cool for the Crescent City, unusually dry, unusually breezy. I’m standing in Still-Zinsel gallery on Julia Street assailing Dan Piersol with my thoughts on his work.
“I think you’ve hit upon some elemental metaphor for the New Orleans condition,” I say. Piersol’s dark, lively canvases line the ivory walls, as turtlenecked, fish netted, and bespangled art types drift around us, pausing before this painting or that, whispering, and floating away. “I think that the black background that you use symbolizes the sinister side of the city. Not just the poverty, and ‘poor schooling, and the attendant crime, but the unfathomable depth of lightless mystery, the who, what, why, and where of the city, the riddles that everyone utters once in a while, but no one ever satisfactorily answers. You know Dan, the city as sphinx.”
Piersol, tall, gaunt, oaken, and palpably Midwestern, tilts his head to one side and stares at me through his wiry eyebrows: “Then when you paint over the black abyss with all of these loose strokes of brilliant color—orange, green, blue–It’s just like Carnival, ‘when in spite of everything, we gather in the streets for the great, gaudy Bacchanal. In a way, it’s like we’re collectively whistling past the graveyard. Your paintings tell that story, Dan, they depict great gaiety trying to block out underlying mournfulness. ”
Piersol crosses his arms.
“Just look at your subject matter. You compose all of these wonderful still-lifes, with the vase of flowers, and the bottles ‘of perfume, and the paper fan, Indicating some sort of peaceful, comfortable domesticity, but then there’s that scowling Japanese mask hanging in the background, or lying on the table top, brooding over the world outside. Again, you allude to a facade covering up the deeper reality, acceptance obscured by denial. This is us! These are our false faces in the darkness, lit by the light of the flambeaux. Your paintings are the mirror!”
Dan continues to stare at me as I take a sip of exquisitely cheap Chardonnay from a plastic cup.
“Your stuff is so conservative. I mean, isn’t there supposed to be a secondary ironic meaning beyond the work itself? A subtext? Something that refers to the role of the artist in the postmodern milieu? Isn’t there supposed to be a sense of overriding self-consciousness? Isn’t there supposed to be some sort of New York/L.A. influence? Dan, your stuff Is so French! It. reminds me of Cezanne or Derain, for Christ’s sake. Your work Is as faithful to outdated values and broken down with inertia as the Big Easy itself. You know Dan, 50 years .from now, when people realize what a truckload of bullshit most contemporary an really Is, they may look back on your paintings as the true expression of the New Orleans gestalt. You might be the enduring poet of our time. You might have been the artist who cooked up the right psychovisual gumbo. Do you ever think about that?”
Finally, mercifully, Piersol brings my monologue to a halt.”No,” he says smiling, “the truth Is, Doug, I’m just a dumb painter.”
Leaving Piersol to another of his admirers, I’m making my way back toward the wine bar at the rear of the Gallery for a refill when I spot through the crowd Elayne “ Angel” Binnie, whom I have repeatedly heard of, but never actually met. Binnie, dark eyes flashing, smile glittering, wearing a low-cut leotard top, floor-length voile skirt, and suede boots, her shaven head topped with a straw boater, would be a show-stopper, even If she were not the most elaborately tattooed woman in the city, and even if she were not pierced about the lips, nose, eyebrows, and ears with a score of gold rings and beads.
When I say that she is elaborately tattooed, I know that this probably produces ‘in your mind the image of an eclectic tangle of skulls, tigers, witches, warlocks, guns, knives, parrots, and comic book excesses typical of the tattoo genre. But no, the tattoos Angel wears over more than fifty percent of her body have nothing whatsoever to do with the usual capricious gathering of images pieced together over time. Actually, Angel has only three tattoos, and these were designed not to decorate her, but to transform her.
From hip to ankle, Binnie shimmers with rainbow-hued fish scales, ending with fins that cover the tops of her feet, by tattooist Juli Moon of New Hampshire. From shoulder to wrist, each of her arms is laced with a delicate English arts and crafts pattern of ivy leaves and violet blossoms by her soon-to-be-ex-husband Alex Binnie of London. And as her moniker suggests, from her shoulders to below her buttocks stretch a pair of carefully rendered angel wings by Bob Roberts of Los Angeles.
Angel is the personification of the ‘broad spirituality of the New Age. She is the illustration of the union and balance of earth, wind, and water. Her tattoos do not recall the long tradition of sailor/biker bravado, and her piercing does not recall the self-mutilation of the punk aesthetic. Binnie’s “look” speaks of self-ownership, self-discipline (imagine 60 hours under the needle for her legs alone), and self-invention.
Angel, the proprietor of Rings of Desire, a piercing salon down on Decatur near the French Market, admits that she Is an exhibitionist of sorts, but she is scrupulously unpretentious about the meaning of her appearance. When asked. if she were an artist herself, Binnie first cast attention on the tattooists who had done the inking before admitting that the simple, whole designs were her own concept, and In that way she had created a work of an. I am less reticent about the issue. For my money Angel Is one of the most Interesting “objects” you’re liable to find in a gallery any time soon, and Elayne Binnie is the artist behind the art.
Returning to dumb painters for a moment, and returning to Still-Zinsel for that matter, get yourself back to the gallery on August 5th for the opening of-an exhibit of new works by John Hamilton-one of the coolest, but least known artists in town. And wear your best white linen (does anybody really have white linen?) to the opening, as it will be the big summer bash on Julia Street: “White linen Night.”Also check out the promising conceptual exhibit at Arthur Roger gallery in which artists reveal the intimacies of their studio environments, opening the same night.
