ART ISSUES, November-December 1994 ~Tom Folland

LINDA BURNHAM
Christopher Grimes Gallery

Linda Burnham’s new paintings—mostly large, cream-colored canvases populated with black stencillike figures, swabs of lime-green and pink, crisscrossed patterns, decorative swirls from a baker’s icing bag, large slabs of thick latex, and small circles of resin—continue to inventory the vernacular of image-making. Reproduction techniques, popular imagery, and hybrid manipulations of surface and form are all here, yet Burnham manages to expand her ongoing investigation into the ways and means of painting by folding everything back into the language of paint. What may appear as large stencils of clownish figures in Giggle, Babble, Burble and Gush (all works, 1994) for example, are simply stuccoed onto the canvas in black alkyd with the precision of a house painter.

Burnham doesn’t really paint, but “meta-paints”. Whereas in her earlier work, the invocation of multigenerational imagery and sundry techniques may have led the viewer outside the frame to consider the array of representation in society, it is not the case here. Clownish figures and hands with pointed index fingers, culled from 1930’s printers’ symbols, iconographically dominate nearly every canvas and suggest that Burnham is attempting to give a reading of popular and hammy imagery. However, the sheer busyness of her paintings’ swirling patterns and circles, and the thick strokes of latex moving up and off the surfaces which surround, displace, and interrupt these figures, corrupt any such simplistic analysis. Burnham’s canvases instead host a clash of different languages, formal devices, histories, and ways of pursuing the practice of painting as reconstituted through the very structure of mark-making. In addition to the stucco technique of house painting and the simulated applications of cake icing, the entire repertoire of contemporary and modernist painting is here—a repertoire now seemingly exhausted by the inevitable limits of understanding (we are, after all, no longer in the halcyon days of signs and symbols). If twentieth-century sculpture has been able to move off its pedestal into the space of the real world, painting has been left behind, stranded upon the shores of its own objecthood as colored canvas stretched over a wood support.

Burnham presides as a woman, over a mostly paternal history of the critical practice of painting—from Jasper Johns’ frozen encaustic brushstrokes to Sigmar Polke’s and Gerhard Richter’s investigations of image and form; as if in response, Burnham rearranges the indexical traces of image-making through frenzied compositions. All of this is highlighted by the silliness of Burnham’s titles and the poignancy of her appropriations; the canvases and the scrubbed, barely discernible images which she has worked over and filled in belonged to her late husband, Robert Overby (1935-1993). The titles that breathlessly assign an irreverent banter to objects which themselves are a true index of loss—Giggle, Babble, Sputter, Stutter, Burble and Gush—are drawn from the lexicon of meaningless dialogue, suggesting forms of phatic speech whose primary purpose is to keep the channels of communication open, regardless of what is said. It may very well be that Burnham’s paintings are ghostly palimpsests, ciphers of the various states of contemporary and modernist painting, which will always be returned to the static and ahistorical space of the decorative. Burnham paradoxically pronounces the death and life of painting as a meaningful art form, again and again, by painting painting itself.