Peter Saul’s Life Is Tuff (2023) is unnerving. The painting, depicting a man’s head being crushed by an imposing black boot as he reaches for gold coins, was Saul’s response to the financial squeeze that most New Yorkers have...
Peter Saul’s Life Is Tuff (2023) is unnerving. The painting, depicting a man’s head being crushed by an imposing black boot as he reaches for gold coins, was Saul’s response to the financial squeeze that most New Yorkers have experienced. Crushed by a symbol of the capitalist system, Saul’s figure is bludgeoned by the faceless powers that be, his nose broken and eyes gouged. The work is hard to look at, but then again, unsettling times often create unsettling art, forcing us to confront the harsh realities of the world rather than hiding behind the aesthetic comfort zone of beauty.
On view at Venus Over Manhattan’s two SoHo gallery spaces, “Retinal Hysteria” is a monumental group show featuring over 80 troubling works from more than 40 artists, including Life Is Tuff. Curated by Yale art professor (and its former dean) Robert Storr, the exhibition, on view through January 13, 2024, provides a window into how artists cultivate this sense of “hysteria”—a term framed not as a gendered misconception or psychological misinterpretation, but as an embodiment of emotional excess. Here, each work explores pain and anxiety through visual strain—employing intense colors, frenetic sketches, or grisly images.
The exhibition takes as its starting point “Eye Infection,” an exhibition held at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum in 2001, for which Storr penned the critical text. That exhibition, notable for its abrasive approach to contemporary art, presented work from five artists—Saul, Mike Kelley, Robert Crumb, Jim Nutt, and H.C. Westermann—each with a raw and unfiltered perspective on the world. Westermann once described the current era, beginning in the 1960s, as “a world gone nuts.”
“‘Hysterical’ art is the effect that the art has on the viewer and the way it hits your nerves, or at least identifies where they are,” Storr said. The exhibition emerges from Storr’s contemplation of the near-universal experience of “cabin fever” during the pandemic, a sensation that was amplified by the international political and social turmoil that followed. The collective sense of being “besieged” and “hysterical,” as Storr describes it, informed the selection process for the exhibition. The show, therefore, focuses on works that provoke, disturb, and challenge us, leaving a lasting impression on its viewers.
“This show that [Storr] has put together really challenges our notions of beauty and aesthetics and what’s right and what’s wrong, and there’s an interesting sort of counterpoint to where the art market has been, and also coming at a very challenging time in the world,” Adam Lindemann, Venus Over Manhattan founder, said at a press event.
Here, pieces such as Keiichi Tanaami’s epic painting of a sci-fi scene, Fragment of Time (2022), or Steve DiBenedetto’s grotesque abstract portrait, Mental Reupholstery (2022–23), portray these excesses through unchartable motion or deluges of color. Both works evoke an unabating sense of anxiety through their visual overstimulation. Interested in overdosing on the visual experience, Storr hopes viewers engage with uncontrollable sensations provoked by the artwork, he said.
These artworks also frequently draw on decades of scathing political criticism, directly referencing the anxiety that inspired them. The exhibition includes notable pieces like David Wojnarowicz’s painting Good Morning America, Export News (1984), portraying a tableau of burning money, a dead body, and a badly beaten face, all framed by a bulls-eye, a sharp comment on the violent instability within the U.S. Elsewhere, Wojnarowicz’s 1984 painting Untitled (alien mind), features a bright red head with a miniature factory in his skull. This politically charged work criticized the industrial complex and its influence on the human psyche, representing the dehumanizing force of industrialization.
Other works in the show challenge conventional visual aesthetics, such as Ana Benaroya’s Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad (2023), a massive painting that depicts a muscular female angel whose body is comprised of shocking red flames. Though arguably one of the more appealing paintings in the show, Storr finds a throughline across artists and chronology, drawing together different modes of provocation and anxiety as universal experiences to those who can see. “Stylistic affiliation has been of no concern to me whatsoever,” Storr wrote in his curator statement. “Funk, Imagism, Underground Comix, you name it, are all just temporary labels for the expressive imperatives characteristic of ‘Retinal Hysteria.’”
The massive group exhibition is composed of hyper-contrasting paintings, sculptures, and works on paper. The exhibition veers away from creating harmony between the pieces and instead draws out dissonance between them. Works such as Robert Colescott’s colorful abstract painting 6 Witnesses (1968) form a blazing blend of bright colors, whereas Julia Jacquette’s Brains and Bile (2018), an oil painting depicting vomit among disembodied faces, repels the viewer.
As a curator, Storr explores how our perception affects our judgment of certain artworks. Many of the works are lurid, garish, and otherwise difficult to look at for long, such as Gladys Nilsson’s Errent Field (2022), a bright landscape portrait where a giant figure hovers over running figures. Even black-and-white works, such as Jim Shaw’s painting of several distorted Donald Trump faces, Large Trump Chaos II (2017), use tactics that opt for provocation rather than beauty. And yet these works, Storr argues, still communicate something important: how each artist experiences the distressing sides of life.
“There’s work in this that does not appeal to me personally; that I wouldn’t plan on hanging in my living room, but I would recommend everybody looking at it because there is something tenacious and irritating or whatever, and it’s substantial,” Storr said. “‘Liking’ is a relatively weak emotion in relation to art. ‘Noticing’ is much more important, and ‘being puzzled by’ something is the most important.”