“What is an ‘old-age style’? Is it the same as a ‘late style’?” asks Linda Nochlin at the start of her 2008 essay, “Old-Age Style: Late Louise Bourgeois.” As our understanding of an artwork evolves with the artist’s age, the essay examines Bourgeois’s enduring aesthetics and interests throughout her seven-decade career, focusing particularly on the soft and hard qualities of her work. Nochlin, the esteemed feminist art historian, meditates on the relationship between a work made early in an artist’s career and one made at the end of their life, asking how the latter changes our understanding or interpretation of the former. Borrowing from the late Palestinian-American literary theorist Edward Said, Nochlin concludes that “late styles abandon all the comforting segues and aesthetic connections that hold the art object together, dealing instead with disconnects, abysses, unyielding dislocation and unresolved contradiction.” Late styles, in other words, force us to contend with shifts and disruptions in artistic focus, whether tied to an artist’s biography or not, that don’t fit neatly into historical assessments of earlier work.
Nochlin’s definition of “late style” is helpful in understanding The Prime of Your Life, on view at Marc Straus Gallery in New York. Gathering 18 women artists over the age of 75, the exhibition is a cacophony of materials, concerns, and, yes, styles. Painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation, in wildly different scales, forms, and techniques, all congregate as a series of calls and responses rather than unified harmony. With only their age assembling them, the works in this exhibition offer less of a generational statement and more a critical question of 21st-century feminist art history: What does “prime” mean for a woman artist, when their work is most likely to be valorized by the market and museums only in their older age?
Marina Abramović’s photograph “Standing with Skeleton” (2008/2016) introduces this question. Installed near the gallery’s entrance, the large-scale image depicts Abramović in black against an equally inky background with an ivory skeleton atop her back. Over 50 years, she has almost always used her body in her performance-driven work, eschewing subtlety for straight-on confrontation. She did this poetically with her 2010 epic performance and exhibition The Artist is Present, regarded as a career zenith, in which she stared opposite another individual during museum hours. Compared with the rigor and passion of Abramović's live performances, this photograph feels, at best, inanimate, and at worst, almost like a parody of her practice; the skeleton seems more like lighthearted Halloween decor than an elegiac meditation on old age. Does knowing the strength of Abramović's other work make this look like a comic pastiche? Is it fair to compare? Does a lesser, later work diminish the strength of the stronger, more provocative and innovative earlier one? How will we know if "Standing with Skeleton" is a late work? Perhaps now, at 79, Abramović is just hitting her prime, an epoch of work on the horizon.
