Wall_Text

Historical Context Video, 2007

A critic once observed that no artists have ever been as definitively in the wrong place at the wrong time as Ian and Jan. Certainly, 1970's Washington was hostile to Ian and Jan's advanced conceptual and performance-based practice. At the same time. it is important to note Ian and Jan's symbiotic relationship to Washington art. In many ways, the duo viewed their work as a restorative, a cure for what they perceived as a strain of valetudinarian, passionless aestheticism in Washington painting.

This connection to Washington art was, in turn, a veritable poison pill for acceptance outside the city. If Washington painting, with only a few prominent exceptions, was considered 'minor' in New York critical circles, how could a mere embellishment, a critique of minor work make any headway? In a sense, Ian and Jan were trapped by their love/hate relationship to the Washington Color School.

Ironically, the most recent, comprehensive and widely used text on 20^th century art, Art Since 1900 [Foster, Krauss, Buchloh, Bois] does not contain a single reference to either the Washington Color School or the Washington Body School. For now at least, it seems, they are united in oblivion.

Collaboration, intimacy and power video, 2007

The early 1970's saw the rise of feminism in society-at-large and an attendant sweeping, devastating critique of art practice, art theory and art history. Under the circumstances, it should be no surprise that -- from the very beginning -- gender and power issues were percolating violently beneath the surface of Ian and Jan's work. Ian's heroes were charismatic [male] cult figures, like Joseph Beuys and Yves Klein. In the final analysis, Ian sought a follower, not a collaborator. The couple's inability to explicitly address these overarching [and particularly pertinent] issues in performances constituted a major frustration for Jan and eventually contributed to end of Ian and Jan's professional and personal relationship.

Wings, 1979

Wings effectively marks the end of the cycle of major body paintings in the oeuvre of Ian and Jan. It is also one of their most complex and poignant works. The performance consisted of the duo painting a large scale canvas in front of a live audience. Instead of using traditional brushes or color field pouring techniques, they applied paint with feathers awkwardly harnessed to their shoulders. As they worked, Ian chanted the names of Morris Louis paintings and Jan muttered Helen Frankenthaler titles.

At the time of its performance in 1979, the Washington Post chief critic, quite mistakenly, interpreted Wings as a redundant and dated attack on the art world's worshipful, unthinking acceptance of the Greenbergian narrative of post-painterly abstraction. In retrospect, it is clear that the piece is not so simple. If Ian and Jan's reverential attitude toward Louis and Frankenthaler seems facetious at first blush, there is also a genuine, and tragic, sincerity here. In fact, Wings can now be seen as a self-abasing ritual of surrender: Washington to New York, body school to color field, collaboration and teamwork to individual accomplishment. Wings' reference to the story of Icarus is inescapable. Like the mythic hero, Ian and Jan made a noble effort to challenge inflexible constraints. Where Icarus wanted to fly, Ian and Jan sought, by sheer force of will, to insert themselves into art history. In the mid-1970's, they had come close to the flame of recognition, but now their downward spiral was painfully evident. With characteristic ingenuousness, Ian and Jan made their folly and humiliation the subject of art.

Though the critical response to Wings was hostile and entirely insensitive to the bittersweet coda it constitutes in Jan and Ian's career, the couple's live audience was unusually appreciative. In Ian's account of Wings, he recalls that one young woman wept at the end of the performance. "She understood," he avowed.

Corner Piece, 1972

Corner Piece exemplifies the no-holds-barred, aggressive performative practice that catapulted Ian and Jan into the spotlight of the Washington art world. In the initial performance, a sheet of Plexiglas was mounted in a corner, just as it is for this exhibition. The artists, both nude and slathered with paint, pressed themselves against the surface from opposite sides. In this recreation, a video of the 1972 performance is projected on the Plexiglas from the original work.

As with all great works of art, no single explanation suffices for the power of Corner Piece. The artists' bodies are, simultaneously, the agent of painting, the subject of painting and, crucially, the work of art itself. There are clear connections to the performative tactics of the Japanese Gutai artists, the Fluxus group, and Allan Kaprow's Happenings. (And, without question, Ian and Jan share a common ancestor with all of those movements: Han's Namuth's ubiquitous photographs of Jackson Pollock in the act of painting). Among their contemporaries, Bruce Nauman – from whom they 'appropriated' the title, is surely is the most relevant.

Ian and Jan used the impermeable Plexiglas as a distinct contrast to the Washington Color School's permeable, unprimed canvases in order to underscore the absurdity of making art that absorbs rather than reflects the energy and passion of the body. Even the duo's Dionysian frenzy cannot penetrate the barrier erected by the so-called painterly surface. For Ian and Jan, art that isolates, that separates, is an impoverished art. In this regard, critics have noted a sly reference to Marcel Duchamp' s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), where the bride and her lovers are eternally suspended in a state of unconsummated desire.

Streaking, 1974

The single drawing on view here is all that remains of Ian and Jan's 1974 Streaking. For this performance, the couple jogged for precisely one mile in an easterly direction along S St., NW on a Sunday morning. They were naked except for specially engineered backpacks containing sacks of pure powdered pigment. As they ran, streams of pigment spilled from the sacks creating an ephemeral stripe painting – a mile long in concept, but, in fact, creating only tiny intervals of wind blown particles that never connected.

Though Jan's longstanding interest in Tibetan and indigenous American sand painting was certainly operative in the basic idea for Streaking, the pair had an uncharacteristically straightforward motive for the piece. Streaking was, in fact, conceived as a direct homage to stripe painter Gene Davis, with whom Ian and Jan felt a special kinship. Davis had also been spurned by Clement Greenberg. In Ian's view, that rejection was due to the time-based, performative elements -- in a word, the theatricality -- of Davis's work. Ian's radical reading of Davis's stripes was not without support: Two years earlier, Davis himself had executed Franklin's Footpath, a huge outdoor street painting in Philadelphia. With Streaking, Ian and Jan sought to recognize and validate the prankishness latent in Davis's oeuvre – hence the reference to the then popular college escapade. Davis, who, by some accounts, was obsessed with his currency among younger artists, expressed his enthusiastic approval of Streaking in a later interview.

The Chariot, 1976

The Chariot, created for the 1976 US Bicentennial, is perhaps Jan and Ian's most ambitious, elaborate and widely known work. In a full scale Roman-style chariot, decorated with wings resembling Morris Louis's oozing stripes, the couple, dressed in togas, circumnavigated Washington's Dupont Circle to the amazement and delight of commuters and the usual assemblage of park denizens. Jan sat regally in the driver's seat, while Ian pulled the cart like a rickshaw. No 'art world' audience was on hand to witness the event. Jan insisted that no art professionals be alerted or invited.

In hindsight, Ian and Jan's celebration of a national holiday may seem naïve. But this was special time for the duo – a period of optimism, confidence and success. The Viet Nam war was over. The stains of Watergate, Chile, and the CIA scandals were fading. Jimmy Carter had been elected president and promised a new era of respect for human rights. And, importantly, Ian and Jan were in love. For the moment at least, romance and artistic collaboration seemed perfectly balanced.

If The Chariot brims with optimism and good humor, it also, typically, has a tendentious aspect. The work skillfully toys with the accepted wisdom that color field painting reflects the formality of Washington's neo-classical architecture, yet remains staunchly apolitical. For Ian and Jan, the notion of an uncritical art based on a rigorously authoritarian building style was intolerable. In this context, the appropriation of Morris Louis's 'colors' for the chariot makes sense. The undulating lines of Louis's poured magna suggest the stripes of a flag waving in the breeze – for Americans, always a signal of victory -- peace through strength. The contrast with the reality of Viet Nam, where peace was achieved only by virtue of a humiliating defeat, is unavoidable. Here, the stripes function ironically as an emblem of art's unthinking accommodation to power. In this light, Ian and Jan's 'victory' lap around Dupont circle takes on a darker, Nero-esque black humor – they are the deranged off-spring of formalist painting, madly circling Admiral Dupont in their color field chariot.

Costumes in the work of Ian and Jan

Without question, Ian and Jan's nude performances are their most well known – in part, of course, due to the controversy they prompted in conservative Washington, DC. However, their deployment of eccentric dress and costumes played a significant role in many important works, including, The Chariot and Wings. In this regard, the pair was prescient. In contemporary art today, Ian and Jan's expansive use of costumes is echoed in the practice of artists as diverse as Cindy Sherman, Matthew Barney and Vanessa Beecroft, to name only a few prominent examples.

back to Ian and Jan






		Wall text copyright 2007 Rex Weil/Central Intelligence Art: Ian and Jan: Main video, 2007 When artists Jeffry Cudlin and Meg Mitchell discovered references to Ian and Jan's Washington Body School in an obscure 1985 Corcoran Gallery of Art catalogue, they were puzzled: How could a seemingly major episode in Washington art have been expunged from history? With further research, their interest widened to more general inquiries: What is the relationship between a given historical context and specific modes of art production? How does the grand narrative of art history seek to weave art and context in some useful, rational way? Why are some artists 'in' history and why are some neglected? How is art history made, unmade, and re formulated? As Cudlin and Mitchell pursued their investigation, they unearthed an impressive documentary and physical record of Ian and Jan's career: films, photographs, drawings, costumes, and props. Interestingly, they also struck a mother lode of resurgent and enthusiastic interest in Ian and Jan among historians, collectors, critics, gallerists and curators in the Washington area. As Cudlin and Mitchell's project progressed, it became increasingly apparent that they were now actively influencing the very process they were interrogating.



		Historical Context Video, 2007 A critic once observed that no artists have ever been as definitively in the wrong place at the wrong time as Ian and Jan. Certainly, 1970's Washington was hostile to Ian and Jan's advanced conceptual and performance-based practice. At the same time. it is important to note Ian and Jan's symbiotic relationship to Washington art. In many ways, the duo viewed their work as a restorative, a cure for what they perceived as a strain of valetudinarian, passionless aestheticism in Washington painting. This connection to Washington art was, in turn, a veritable poison pill for acceptance outside the city. If Washington painting, with only a few prominent exceptions, was considered 'minor' in New York critical circles, how could a mere embellishment, a critique of minor work make any headway? In a sense, Ian and Jan were trapped by their love/hate relationship to the Washington Color School. Ironically, the most recent, comprehensive and widely used text on 20^th century art, Art Since 1900 [Foster, Krauss, Buchloh, Bois] does not contain a single reference to either the Washington Color School or the Washington Body School. For now at least, it seems, they are united in oblivion. Collaboration, intimacy and power video, 2007 The early 1970's saw the rise of feminism in society-at-large and an attendant sweeping, devastating critique of art practice, art theory and art history. Under the circumstances, it should be no surprise that -- from the very beginning -- gender and power issues were percolating violently beneath the surface of Ian and Jan's work. Ian's heroes were charismatic [male] cult figures, like Joseph Beuys and Yves Klein. In the final analysis, Ian sought a follower, not a collaborator. The couple's inability to explicitly address these overarching [and particularly pertinent] issues in performances constituted a major frustration for Jan and eventually contributed to end of Ian and Jan's professional and personal relationship. Wings, 1979 Wings effectively marks the end of the cycle of major body paintings in the oeuvre of Ian and Jan. It is also one of their most complex and poignant works. The performance consisted of the duo painting a large scale canvas in front of a live audience. Instead of using traditional brushes or color field pouring techniques, they applied paint with feathers awkwardly harnessed to their shoulders. As they worked, Ian chanted the names of Morris Louis paintings and Jan muttered Helen Frankenthaler titles. At the time of its performance in 1979, the Washington Post chief critic, quite mistakenly, interpreted Wings as a redundant and dated attack on the art world's worshipful, unthinking acceptance of the Greenbergian narrative of post-painterly abstraction. In retrospect, it is clear that the piece is not so simple. If Ian and Jan's reverential attitude toward Louis and Frankenthaler seems facetious at first blush, there is also a genuine, and tragic, sincerity here. In fact, Wings can now be seen as a self-abasing ritual of surrender: Washington to New York, body school to color field, collaboration and teamwork to individual accomplishment. Wings' reference to the story of Icarus is inescapable. Like the mythic hero, Ian and Jan made a noble effort to challenge inflexible constraints. Where Icarus wanted to fly, Ian and Jan sought, by sheer force of will, to insert themselves into art history. In the mid-1970's, they had come close to the flame of recognition, but now their downward spiral was painfully evident. With characteristic ingenuousness, Ian and Jan made their folly and humiliation the subject of art. Though the critical response to Wings was hostile and entirely insensitive to the bittersweet coda it constitutes in Jan and Ian's career, the couple's live audience was unusually appreciative. In Ian's account of Wings, he recalls that one young woman wept at the end of the performance. "She understood," he avowed. Corner Piece, 1972 Corner Piece exemplifies the no-holds-barred, aggressive performative practice that catapulted Ian and Jan into the spotlight of the Washington art world. In the initial performance, a sheet of Plexiglas was mounted in a corner, just as it is for this exhibition. The artists, both nude and slathered with paint, pressed themselves against the surface from opposite sides. In this recreation, a video of the 1972 performance is projected on the Plexiglas from the original work. As with all great works of art, no single explanation suffices for the power of Corner Piece. The artists' bodies are, simultaneously, the agent of painting, the subject of painting and, crucially, the work of art itself. There are clear connections to the performative tactics of the Japanese Gutai artists, the Fluxus group, and Allan Kaprow's Happenings. (And, without question, Ian and Jan share a common ancestor with all of those movements: Han's Namuth's ubiquitous photographs of Jackson Pollock in the act of painting). Among their contemporaries, Bruce Nauman – from whom they 'appropriated' the title, is surely is the most relevant. Ian and Jan used the impermeable Plexiglas as a distinct contrast to the Washington Color School's permeable, unprimed canvases in order to underscore the absurdity of making art that absorbs rather than reflects the energy and passion of the body. Even the duo's Dionysian frenzy cannot penetrate the barrier erected by the so-called painterly surface. For Ian and Jan, art that isolates, that separates, is an impoverished art. In this regard, critics have noted a sly reference to Marcel Duchamp' s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), where the bride and her lovers are eternally suspended in a state of unconsummated desire. Streaking, 1974 The single drawing on view here is all that remains of Ian and Jan's 1974 Streaking. For this performance, the couple jogged for precisely one mile in an easterly direction along S St., NW on a Sunday morning. They were naked except for specially engineered backpacks containing sacks of pure powdered pigment. As they ran, streams of pigment spilled from the sacks creating an ephemeral stripe painting – a mile long in concept, but, in fact, creating only tiny intervals of wind blown particles that never connected. Though Jan's longstanding interest in Tibetan and indigenous American sand painting was certainly operative in the basic idea for Streaking, the pair had an uncharacteristically straightforward motive for the piece. Streaking was, in fact, conceived as a direct homage to stripe painter Gene Davis, with whom Ian and Jan felt a special kinship. Davis had also been spurned by Clement Greenberg. In Ian's view, that rejection was due to the time-based, performative elements -- in a word, the theatricality -- of Davis's work. Ian's radical reading of Davis's stripes was not without support: Two years earlier, Davis himself had executed Franklin's Footpath, a huge outdoor street painting in Philadelphia. With Streaking, Ian and Jan sought to recognize and validate the prankishness latent in Davis's oeuvre – hence the reference to the then popular college escapade. Davis, who, by some accounts, was obsessed with his currency among younger artists, expressed his enthusiastic approval of Streaking in a later interview. The Chariot, 1976 The Chariot, created for the 1976 US Bicentennial, is perhaps Jan and Ian's most ambitious, elaborate and widely known work. In a full scale Roman-style chariot, decorated with wings resembling Morris Louis's oozing stripes, the couple, dressed in togas, circumnavigated Washington's Dupont Circle to the amazement and delight of commuters and the usual assemblage of park denizens. Jan sat regally in the driver's seat, while Ian pulled the cart like a rickshaw. No 'art world' audience was on hand to witness the event. Jan insisted that no art professionals be alerted or invited. In hindsight, Ian and Jan's celebration of a national holiday may seem naïve. But this was special time for the duo – a period of optimism, confidence and success. The Viet Nam war was over. The stains of Watergate, Chile, and the CIA scandals were fading. Jimmy Carter had been elected president and promised a new era of respect for human rights. And, importantly, Ian and Jan were in love. For the moment at least, romance and artistic collaboration seemed perfectly balanced. If The Chariot brims with optimism and good humor, it also, typically, has a tendentious aspect. The work skillfully toys with the accepted wisdom that color field painting reflects the formality of Washington's neo-classical architecture, yet remains staunchly apolitical. For Ian and Jan, the notion of an uncritical art based on a rigorously authoritarian building style was intolerable. In this context, the appropriation of Morris Louis's 'colors' for the chariot makes sense. The undulating lines of Louis's poured magna suggest the stripes of a flag waving in the breeze – for Americans, always a signal of victory -- peace through strength. The contrast with the reality of Viet Nam, where peace was achieved only by virtue of a humiliating defeat, is unavoidable. Here, the stripes function ironically as an emblem of art's unthinking accommodation to power. In this light, Ian and Jan's 'victory' lap around Dupont circle takes on a darker, Nero-esque black humor – they are the deranged off-spring of formalist painting, madly circling Admiral Dupont in their color field chariot. Costumes in the work of Ian and Jan Without question, Ian and Jan's nude performances are their most well known – in part, of course, due to the controversy they prompted in conservative Washington, DC. However, their deployment of eccentric dress and costumes played a significant role in many important works, including, The Chariot and Wings. In this regard, the pair was prescient. In contemporary art today, Ian and Jan's expansive use of costumes is echoed in the practice of artists as diverse as Cindy Sherman, Matthew Barney and Vanessa Beecroft, to name only a few prominent examples. back to Ian and Jan

Enter content here

Enter content here

Enter content here


				*jeffrycudlin.com* *wall text*



	home \| assimilation/dissolution \| Ian and Jan \| paintings \| resume \| statement \| criticism