Playing bodies

Author

Perelman, Bob

Date

• 2004

Publisher

New York, New York: Granary Books

Summary

• COLOPHON: "Francie Shaw
• These paintings are all still lifes of three small figures, two bendable people and a plastic dinosaur. They are intimate relationships which can be viewed as between two figures or different parts of oneself. At the same time they are clearly toys. As a whole the 52 paintings do not form any narrative progression; instead each poses variations of some basic question: is this play or struggle or both at once? What is the difference between terror and excitement, pleasure and pain? Who is carrying whom, who is in control?
• Bob Perelman
• One of my greatest pleasures is hearing Francie talk about paintings. In response to my first attempts to write a companion poem, she talked about the one that is now #3, telling me that I was just taking the point of view of one of the figures, but that for her both figures formed a single event. That put into words what I then recognized I had already been seeing in the paintings: passionate, hard-won instability, liability.
• Dino, Guy-Puppet, Girl-Puppet-ersatz, nature and historically real enough gender-the three figures are posed into an alphabet of primal postures. Spelling what? Eroticism pushing outward and intensifying or just little toy pictures? Subjectivity frames reason in these paintings. At the same time they stage flexible tragicomedies of the unnamable mixes of drive and reaction that course through our moments.
• To try to met this in words has been as exhilarating as those dreams where you can fly and as sobering as waking up."
• Unsigned. Unnumbered.