Mary Ellen Croteau

© 2002 by Nancy Nield Buchwald

MARY ELLEN CROTEAU
Chicago, Illinois

This article was written by Nancy Nield Buchwald, a PhD Candidate at University of Chicago. Her research interests include Abstract Expressionism and contemporary feminist art.

The art of Mary Ellen Croteau, one of the most famous-if not infamous-- Chicago artists of the last two decades, proves difficult to describe and neatly categorize. Although she characterizes herself as a feminist artist, her art production reveals the myriad contradictions and complexities of that elastic label.

A student at both the University of Illinois at Chicago and later at Rutgers University, Croteau trained as a sculptor and confesses that she finds painting "difficult." However, her art production of the last fifteen years, which consists in great part of large scale paintings, reveals unequivocally that Croteau has overcome the technical challenges presented by the medium and imposed her own hand and vision on the perhaps originally recalcitrant canvas.

Although Croteau's embrace of the medium of oil on canvas might lead the viewer to consider the artist an advocate of traditional subject matter and artistic techniques, even a cursory examination of the artist's oeuvre reveals her indebtedness to the "appropriation art" of the 1980's, made famous by such artists as Cindy Sherman, Barbara Krueger, and Sherri Levine. Like these feminist predecessors, Croteau appropriates-or borrows-imagery and themes from both artistic and mass cultural sources to interrogate the manner in which a patriarchal society and set of institutions-including the history of art-naturalizes the oppression and marginalization of women. Her paintings also closely parallel the concerns and style of the Russian artists, Kolamar and Melamid, whose Stalin and the Muses (1981-2) manipulates a realist style to bring together components of radically differing political and social traditions and histories. However, while Kolamar and Melamid's appropriation of components of Baroque and Renaissance art comments on the incongruities and instability of an art driven by fascism, Croteau's faux-Renaissance paintings foreground the feminine body as a signifier of feminist struggle against a heavily edited patriarchal art history.

For instance, in her powerful 1997 painting Annunciation, Croteau wryly and elegantly subverts traditional High Renaissance presentations of the story of Gabriel's announcement to Mary of her pregnancy with the Christ child. Appropriating the diagrammatic compositional format, the saturated jewel-toned colors, and the stage-like settings of Italian Baroque painting, Croteau interrupts one's art historical reveries with the disconcerting, even violent gestures of the two protagonists in the image. Rather than fallen to her knees in the posture of submission and reverence common to images of the Virgin in paintings of the Annunciation, the pointing hand of Croteau's Mary communicates a magisterial gesture of impatience and dismissal in the face of an angel suddenly angry and reduced to open-mouthed bafflement.

Annunciation forms part of a larger installation, which Croteau has titled Musée de la Nouvelle Renaissance or Museum of the New Renaissance, an ongoing concept over which the artist has labored since 1995. The meaning of the word renaissance is multivalent for Croteau: it gestures to the artist's determination to re-present a history of Renaissance painting now stripped of the leaden weight of misogyny, a history in which such figures as the Virgin and Eve have agency. In addition, Croteau's installation participates in the re-birth of feminist painting and art production at a point in art history deemed by some critics "post-feminist." The MNR functions as a museum space designed for women, an area which repudiates what Croteau calls the "misogynist rooms" of such museums as the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In the MNR, female beholders do not uncomfortably inhabit the male gaze, beholding images of victimized or sexualized femininity. Rather, Croteau creates for the viewer a place where women emerge as subjects of, not objects of the gaze.

(Self-Portrait) as Saint Lorena of 1996 testifies to Croteau's predilection for incorporating references to the misogynist practices of the Catholic Church as well as her efforts to address and alter art history's tendency to depict women as victims, vixens, and temptresses. In Saint Lorena, Croteau portrays herself as a canonized Lorena Babbit, beatifically looking upward at floating putti while grasping the knife, which ostensibly cut off her husband's violent and violating penis. Commenting on the proclivity of wealthy male Renaissance patrons to commission artists to include their visage in religious paintings, here Croteau pictures herself as both patron and subject. In Saint Lorena, Croteau ironizes the notion of sainthood, not evacuating it of meaning, but unmooring it from cultural and religious associations with sacrifice, submissiveness, and masochistic martyrdom. The beheaded and castrated statue of a reclining male nude in the background of the painting attests to the literal disintegration of an outmoded patriarchal order. Here, Croteau constructs, on the pictorial foundations of religious painting, a new notion of feminine sainthood linked to courage, even audacity in the face of abuse.

Croteau often uses laughter as a subversive force in her determination to destabilize patriarchal institutions and the systematic oppression of women. In Men I Have Known, a mason jar stuffed with what appears to be pickled penises, Croteau foreshadows the themes of Saint Lorena. Offering to the viewer an unsettling mixture of humor and rage, Croteau renders the homely Ball jar suddenly uncanny, a site/sight of ravenous hungers and strange trophies. In this way, she undermines the kitchen's -and femininity's-- association with passiveness, safety, hearth, and haven. Similarly, in the installation Creation of Man, Croteau again represents traditionally feminine tasks, in this case ironing, as both productive and deadly. In this work, an iron further flattens and immobilizes the flaccid skin of a man, his gender marked by his shriveled genitals. Here, as in Men I Have Known, Croteau invests feminine chores/tasks and objects with the power to struggle against, to render ridiculous, a patriarchal ideology which relegates women to the private sphere and dismisses her labor as women's work.

Although the female body is only implicitly present in Men and Creation, Croteau revels in the color and texture of female flesh. In the painting The Unrepentant Magdalene, Croteau presents herself as the infamous biblical temptress, luxuriating in the display of the broad expanse of her body. Rather than turning away from the viewer in shame, Croteau/Magdalene gazes directly at the viewer with a complicitous smile, her open mouth about to receive a glowing cherry. The symbols of vanitas on the table before her, candies and jewelry, as well as the skull, a traditional memento mori, bear little rhetorical power as they retreat behind the joyous exposure of female skin. In Unrepentant as well as Getting in Shape, Croteau offers an alternative, celebratory discourse about embodied femininity whose contours far exceed the shape of the ideal American female body. In this way, Croteau's art refuses complicity with film, television, and advertising images, which endeavor to impose upon women a normalizing and oppressive aesthetic ideal which strips them of their flesh as well as their agency and visibility.

Croteau's most recent work also addresses issues relating to the body, but from a more metaphorical perspective. In a 2000 painting entitled DeSoto, IL, the artist explores the ruins in and ruining of the American Midwestern landscape. Photo-realist style images, including De Soto and TV Nation, suggest to the viewer that the way in which industry, commerce, and government abuse landscape is akin to the way in which patriarchal institutions oppress women. While ostensibly a departure from her earlier art historically based work, these newer landscapes continue the artist's exposure, her laying bare, in her words, of the way in which both economic and discursive production and consumption limit and deform different kinds of bodies, those of femininity and of the landscape. In this way, Croteau has expanded the terrain which she has mapped so closely for the past two decades, now representing the laceration of the industrialized landscape as a both an actuality and another set of metaphors for a female body brutally assimilated to a what Croteau terms a "sexist" culture. Croteau is especially concerned in most recent work with the cancerous growth of hills of waste in an otherwise flat landscape, the results of the intrusion of the unnatural, the man-made into a once-prairie. Stripped of figures and even signifiers of specific location, her landscapes have a potent and melancholy lyricism sometimes missing in her earlier paintings. Works such as DeSoto, TV Nation, and Welcome to Calumet City evoke emptiness and abandon, a sense of ruin peculiar to an American landscape both literally and figuratively scarred by commodification and the encroachment of waste. According to Croteau, even landscape, it seems, is disposable, or alternately, a cancerous and diseased body hidden from view.

(above left) 'Annunciation', oil on canvas by Mary Ellen Croteau.
(center right) 'Men I Have Known', mason jar, latex, mixed media by Mary Ellen Croteau.
(left) 'De Soto, IL', oil on canvas by Mary Ellen Croteau.

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