Mira Schor
War Frieze (1991-94)

Art Basel, Switzerland
Booth T5
September 21 - 26, 2021

Lyles & King is pleased to present Mira Schor’s monumental painting War Frieze in the Feature sector of Art Basel 2021. Never before shown in its entirety, War Frieze is a 195-linear-foot painting addressing war, patriarchy, and language. The work will be shown in rows wrapping around the entire booth space and the eye will scroll from left to right around the booth’s area, reading the paintings.

In the early 90s, Schor focused her attention on the critique of painting and the place of misogyny within that paradigm. In War Frieze, the transmission of power in society is represented by the flow of language as body fluid from sexual body fragment to body fragment—language embedded into the body of oil paint. Schor engaged with the metaphorically expressive possibilities of the materiality of paint, imparting its bodily traits to the discursive script.

War Frieze is constructed like a cinematic unspooling of accumulated sections. No image can convey the physicality of the surface, which is important to what the work was and is “about”—that is, not just its narrative political content but also its place in the discourse of painting and in response to the critique of painting prominent in the 1990s when this work was done. At the same time, in envisioning a potentially endless painting that, read from left to right, is meant to mobilize the body of the viewer into a spatialized act of discursive and material reading, Schor matched the ambition for monumental scale of major sculptural and site installations of that era by artists such as Walter De Maria, Robert Smithson, Richard Serra, as well as in relation to major language-based installation works by Jenny Holzer and Lawrence Weiner. Yet Schor insisted on doing so in a cumulative painting that could be easily dismantled and reinstalled, a contingency that was part of its feminism.

The language represented in War Frieze is no longer the language of the secret diary or the obsessional love letter that characterized the place of language in her work in the 1970s: it is public, the phrases often appropriated from the news. One segment, Pub(l)ic hair, speaks to the Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill hearings and Duchamp’s Fountain. Another reads “It’s Modernism, Stupid,” inspired by the Bill Clinton campaign motto, “It’s the economy, stupid.” “Area of Denial” was a type of weaponry used during the Gulf War and “Undue Burden” was part of the wording of a Supreme Court abortion decision. An incarnated punctuation mark is presented for its visual seductivity becoming sexualized markers of printed language and text, which had been a dominant visual thread in feminist theory and art in the 80s.

Mira Schor has a 50-year oeuvre as an artist and activist. She created the Red Moon Room for the epochal exhibition Womanhouse (1972) while a participant in the CalArts Feminist Art Program founded by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. In addition, she is the author of A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life and Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture. She is the co-editor of the journal M/E/A/N/I/N/G with artist Susan Bee. Her work was recently exhibited in Where Art Might Happen: The Early Years of CalArts at Kunsthaus Graz, Austria. Schor is one of the great under-appreciated voices of feminism and painting.

In the late eighties, I returned to representations of language of a more political nature. In War Frieze (1991-94), an approximately three-hundred-running-feet by one-foot-wide painting done in discrete eight- to twenty-foot sections, the transmission of power in society is represented by the flow of language as body fluid from sexual body part to body part—language embedded into the body of oil paint. The language was no longer that of the secret diary or the obsessional love letter. It was public, often appropriated from the news, such as the phrase "Area of Denial," which was a type of weapon used during the Gulf War, or "Undue Burden," part of the wording of a Supreme Court abortion decision.

—Mira Schor, Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture, 1997

“Area of Denial”

In the early 1990s I was making paintings in which language, mostly appropriated from the news, flowed from sexualized body part to sexualized body part. I was always on the watch for language that I could use as image/subject/figure in painting, preferably language fragments that could be interpreted as having more than one meaning. Area of Denial came from a Nightline episode before the first Gulf War and referred to a category of weapon that denies territory by in some way making life unlivable, as I recall the story was that such area of denial weapons exploded above ground denying oxygen to living beings in that territory.

Area of Denial here may apply to the body of woman and the body of painting which in the 80s and 90s was not a favored space for women artists to deal with representation of gender and sexuality, unlike photography and performance.

—Mira Schor, 2018

“Undue Burden”

Undue Burden refers to the wording of the 1992 Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, in which “the Court held that states cannot enact laws that put an ‘undue burden’ on women seeking an abortion.” The burden is also that of the history of painting on the contemporary painter at the end of the 20th century. Undue Burden is part of a group of paintings that engage two strains of seemingly opposed thoughts and passions: the ideal of flatness and the equality and tension between figure and ground as the essence of modernist painting—as defined by Clement Greenberg and advanced by painters such as Barnett Newman in his writings and statements—and the quality of religious attention to details of subject and surface in Flemish painting, while pursuing the underlying overarching goal of my work which I have often described as wanting to bring my experience of living inside a female body—with a mind—into high art in as intact a form as possible. So Newman’s Onement I and Hugo Van der Goes’ The Portinari Altarpiece are equal influences or progenitors in pursuit of that agenda.

—Mira Schor, 2018