Commentary : Needling a Stereotype : Recent Works Challenge the American View of Art as Feminine

Beyond being a lavishly endowed recipient of the solemn and empty rhetoric known as lip service, the arts do not occupy a place of more than marginal prominence in the United States. They never have.

Whether it’s the art-free curricula found in almost every public school, or the nearly complete absence of writers, artists, composers and the rest from the nation’s civic life, the arts languish on the sidelines of American culture. It’s easy to see why. The most noteworthy reason Americans don’t much care about the arts is that, generally, they regard them as a feminine activity, not a masculine one.

Think of the stock cartoon-depiction of a culturally minded matron dragging her reluctant husband to the opera--or the museum, theater or concert hall. It’s a staple of American humor because it speaks an American truth.

This usually unspoken identification of the arts with feminine activity has lots of ramifications. A crucial one is that the arts get invested with the same peculiar status traditionally afforded women: They’re put up on a pedestal, where they won’t be in the way for the serious, rough-and-tumble business of daily life.

The feminization of culture in the American mind is an issue whose time may be at hand. It’s a subtext to “Guys Who Sew,” a small exhibition on view through Dec. 11 at the University Art Museum at UC Santa Barbara. More important, it’s moving front and center in the work of a few intriguing artists.

“Guys Who Sew” looks at a recent proliferation of male artists who employ needlework--a medium historically associated with women. Some early feminists even heralded needlework as the quintessential women’s art for the modern era.

Quilts, samplers, embroidery--the idea is that women, traditionally confined to the home, found an outlet for creative expression through the only means available to them. Usually, that meant the domestic art of sewing.

Curators Elizabeth A. Brown and Fran Seegull have assembled work by 13 artists, including Willie Cole, Robert Gober, Georg Herold, Jim Isermann and Mike Kelley. For some, such as Isermann’s 1993-94 pieced-fabric wall hanging, sewing is central to the enterprise. For others, such as Gober’s 1989 dismembered wax leg that wears pants, it’s incidental. A Lucas Samaras “crazy-quilt painting” from 1979, composed from long, colorful strips of sewn fabric, assumes the role of father figure.

A firm cultural equation between needlework and women’s work is essential for a show like “Guys Who Sew” to have any frisson. “Gals Who Sew” wouldn’t generate any sense of trespass. But the stew is even more provocatively seasoned by art’s repressed aura as itself a feminine activity.

The feminization of culture in the American psyche has meant that art, in order to have any true value, must typically conceal its feminine spirit, often behind an exaggerated masculinity. It has needed to be clear that a man--specifically a heterosexual man--has taken charge.

“Guys Who Sew,” through its funny, swaggering title, lampoons that commonplace concealment. Yeah, this is sewing-cum-art, but don’t worry: Regular guys are doing it ( burp ).

The inclusion of several artists who are openly gay, and of a number of works whose forms pointedly derive from doll clothes, dresses, quilts and other culturally feminine things, plainly seeks to short-circuit established standards. They play against expectations.

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In the work of two other artists (not in the Santa Barbara show), an even more pointed disruption than this is now being encountered. Rather than play against type, as the motif advanced in “Guys Who Sew” generally does, this art means to speak with the very language of our otherwise unspoken cultural prejudice. It makes explicit our subliminal identification of art with femininity.

Thomas Trosch and Sally Elesby make purposefully effeminate painting and sculpture. They are avatars of a voluptuousness that brings the feminization of culture to the surface. Their work takes the sow’s ear attributes typically ascribed to women--weakness, timidity, delicacy, emotionalism--and sensibly remakes them into haute-couture silk purses.

Trosch, a New York-based artist who had his first solo show in Los Angeles at the Ruth Bloom Gallery last year, makes wonderfully fey paintings of cheerful, wide-eyed society women in elegant, uptown drawing rooms stuffed with avant-garde art. Via cartoony word-balloons, the ladies--dedicated arbiters of taste--speak with passionate urgency about Ludwig Wittgenstein’s aesthetic philosophy and Dorothy Rodgers’ Park Avenue decorating dictums.

These fluttery pictures, made by a man, operate with a drag-queen sensibility. For the feminine artifice and deception of drag doesn’t make fun of women, as is often supposed; drag mocks instead the authoritative tastes of straight men.

Trosch’s are, as a friend put it, perhaps the faggiest paintings ever made--and yes, that’s meant as a compliment. They luxuriously indulge themselves in the feminine role Americans have silently assigned to artistic culture.

So, in a very different way, do the ecstatic sculptures of Los Angeles-based Sally Elesby, seen this fall in a breakout show at Food House. Rather than painted drag queens, however, Elesby makes luscious showgirls.

Her exuberant, non-figurative wall sculptures strut their stuff in clouds of tulle, feathers, sequins, satin flowers, rhinestones and ribbon. Elesby arrays these seductive materials in serial patterns on wire armatures, melding austere, minimalist structure with floozy forms.

These glamour-puss constructions recall nothing so much as Donald Judd’s influential, serial wall sculptures of galvanized iron and painted steel from the 1960s and after. But his industrially pretty, butch decorativeness has been deliriously replaced by her girlish, domestically produced froufrou. Out of Judd’s garage workshop and into Elesby’s sewing room, a rigorous investigation of sculptural space has been dramatically recast in a whole new set of terms.

Informed by feminist precedent, Trosch’s paintings and Elesby’s sculptures take a radical, necessary step. Think of theirs as “effeminist” art, for a culture that would rather not know.

* “Guys Who Sew,” University Art Museum, UC Santa Barbara, (805) 893-2951, through Dec. 11. Closed Mondays.