A Kid Did Paint That: The Presence of the Past in Jean Hess’ Mixed Media Paintings

“My kid could paint that”: The winner of the best documentary award at Sundance this year takes its title from a much maligned statement that succinctly conveys a sense of derision, impatience and defensiveness. But over the last two decades, it seems like it has been voiced less often at modern art exhibitions.

While it might be nice to think this means there has been a growing appreciation for avant-garde art, the more likely explanation is that traditional (or “realistic”) forms of art have lost many of their ardent defenders.Those defenders of tradition did not hesitate to declare “my kid could paint that” because they assumed the authoritative standards of taste which tell us what is considered art and what is not were still very much in force.

Today those standards are for the most part treated as objects of historical study, a turn of events evoked by the quotation from the Jungian Robert Johnson that serves as the opening epigram to the “artist’s statement” which accompanies the current exhbition of Jean Hess’s most recent works at the Downtown Gallery: “many people use the energy of their nostalgia…trying to get back to a previous state of grace, back to childhood. This is not possible…”

While the ellipses found at the end of that quotation are perhaps meant to suggest Hess’ work will find a more fruitful way to put nostalgic energies to use, they seem also to announce she has come up with a singular way to actually document, or to reveal, why it is impossible to “get back to” such an imaginary condition.

Hess’ works are particularly well-suited to do so because the form (or material) and content of her “mixed media” paintings mutually reinforce one another in a manner that exposes the passage of time on three different levels: the compositional history of the work itself; the relation between the work and the tradition of Western art; the historical distance that separates the current exhibition from the time and place where the “readymade” materials used in the paintings originated.

These relationships become clearer if we see how in a work like “Tangent”, traces of the succeeding layers of clear resin and thin washes of acrylic that were used in the various stages of the composition can be found in the painting’s “final” form (Hess regards that final form as “a document of sorts that includes documentary information collected as part of the creative process.”) What gives the “history” of this painting its distinctive character is the faded handwriting that appears to be embedded in its deepest layer. The “dated” character of what are in fact the original pages of children’s school notebooks glued onto a treated wood surface is heightened by the fact that they appear to lie beneath several planes of pale colors; while these merging color patterns are marred by clusters of dark turquoise “erosions” (splotches created by using small amounts of dry metallic pigment), the most jarring aspect of the work is created by the addition of hand-painted flowers that are cut from paper and then pasted onto the surface.

The end result is that the work shows not only its actual “age” but also its inventive indebtedness to a modern art tradition which includes the “soak staining” method Helen Frankenthaler mastered in her abstract expressionist paintings, the Dadaist use of “ready-made” or found materials, and the Surrealist juxtaposition of incongruous images.

And what might juxtaposing the faded writing of a hundred-year old school notebook with a cut-out drawing of a flower tell us about our relation to the past? Here’s one possibility: it suggests the revolutionary ideas brandished by the leaders of several major modern art movements (Abstract Expressionism, Dadaism, Surrealism) have long since lost their ability to help bring about the type of spiritual renewal and material prosperity that had been promised to those school children at the beginning of the 20th century.

Hess describes the flowers that make up the “last additions” to her recent paintings as, among other things, “gifts to the children—or a sort of commemoration.”

It seems like a strange gift to give to the children who “really did” provide the foundation for the painting. For that matter it may seem strange to think of giving them a gift at all. But this could be precisely what Hess wants to convey: the glaring inadequacy of a present day gift that can no longer be accepted or rejected. For what does such a gift amount to? It looks a lot like an image of the past we give to ourselves in our failed attempts to either make amends for, or replace, what has been irretrievably lost.