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At the GMOA:
SUSAN HAUPTMAN
Iry-* ^ ema ^ e body, though age-old, have
II I lay constituted a veritable P.C. minefield since
roughly the mid-1970s.
It was then that sculpture hottie Lynda Benglis took cut
her infamous full-page ad in the magazine Art Forum. The ad
— featuring Benglis, nude, with a 16-inch dildo — signaled an
all-out attack on the then-pervasive machismo of the art
world. And it was then that the Guerrilla Girls — that group of
politicized women artists-cum-statisticians in gorilla masks —
berfan to bring attention to the artworld's gender inequities.
Later in the decade, feminist artists like Carolee Schneemann
and Hannah Wilke were often rightly ac-ri^ed of re-objectifying
their naked bodies, perpetuating the very oppressive image
systems they sought to short-circuit.
It is little wonder that prominent feminist artists of the
'80s fled to the relative safety of irony and deconstruction.
Women like Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger resorted to the
production of socially subversive propaganda, relying on ironic
taglines and found images. It was art that was as clever as it
was de-personalized.
Given the weight of this history, it is no small accomplish
ment that the deeply personal, charcoal and pastel self-por
trait figures of 50-year-old Michigan native Susan Hauptman
thoroughly undermine the stereotypes they flaunt, and do so
with verve and humor. It is difficult to cite another artist cur
rently addressing women's lives in such a finely nuanced and
insightful fashion. ‘
The art world has noticed. In the past decade, Hauptman
has been granted two NEA fellowships, and had work placed in
public collections like the Met, the Detroit Institute of Art and
the Corcoran. For the next few weeks, Athens art lovers will
have a chance to notice for themselves: from now until Oct.
25, two Hauptman drawings will be on display at the Georgia
Museum of Art's annual UGA Faculty Exhibit, on loan *rom the
Arkansas Art Center.
Hauptman herself is currently on loan to Athens and the
UGA art department — 1998 is the second year of her three-
year stint here inhabiting the Lamar Dodd Professorial Chair, a
position invented to snag nationally recognized artists. (Only
one other woman artist has filled the position since its incep
tion 28 years ago.) Thus far, her experience down South has
effected her positively. "There is something crazy down here,"
Hauptman says. "It's in the water. And crazy is a wonderful
thing to be if you are an artist.... Hopefully I'm drinking in a
little of that craziness."
If one takes "crazy" to mean "unpredictable and humorous,"
it is an apt description of aspects of Hauptman's drawings. The
most striking of her works at the GMOA — a 92-inch high 1992
self portrait — elicits memories of the 1958 B movie Attack of
the 50 ft. Woman. Like many of her images, however, it also
confronts the viewer with the assurance of a woman at mid
life, centered and secure in her own subjectivity.
The drawing is only one chapter in Hauptman's ongoing,
unsparing visual chronicle of her movement through the
stages of life (a chronicle that was born of love: her first sel f -
portrait was drawn as a communique for her husband, who
was living on the opposite coast at the time). As each stage
is captured, her facial expressions grow animated; the wrin
kles grow more defined and the crow's feet deepen. Taken
together, these images are unmpeachably honest. Sometimes
naked, but more often clothed in ultra-feminine garb, her
depictions assert an aggressive humanity that thoroughly sub
verts any pin-up-patriarchal ends they could possibly serve.
Each androgynous glare, each unflappable face is painfully
present and vulnerable, free of the blase defensive affect that
so afflicts much postmodern figurative imagery.
Surprisingly, Hauptman's artistic growth included a time
spent with abstractionism in the 1960s, which she says gave
her a sense of "total freedom to explore space." However, she
soon honed in on a meticulous, hyper-naturalistic style,
inflected by her pas c ion for non-linear systems of perspective.
Today she works on one drawing at a time, each of which
takes three to four months to complete, given her normal
schedule of six 10-hour days per week.
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13 FLAGPOLE SEPTEMBER 23, 1998