Painting: Talkie Pop

The canvas is a bright Mediterranean blue with a narrow upper band of black. On the line dividing the two colors reclines a pasted-on paper-cutout reproduction of Goya’s nude Maja. From the nude’s hand dangles a string with ring attached. The viewer pulls the string, and the nude says teasingly, “Will you play with me?” Another pull and “I’m sleepy.” A third: “Please change my dress.” It’s really baby talk. Built in behind the painting is the voice box of a Chatty Cathy doll.

Right now, the most diverting art shop in Manhattan is the Amel Gallery, an outpost of the avantgarde. Among works by six artists are paintings that talk, roar, screech, and make sounds like demented woodpeckers trying to fell a redwood forest.

Cleverest noisemakers are the three audio-visual paintings by Marina Stern, including Hay Day, the talking nude. In Judgment Day, she depicts a standing angel trumpeting the word “Repent.” Fastened to the canvas is a curved sports-car horn, and by squeezing the large rubber bulb that honks it, a gallerygoer can bellow an unrepentent riposte full of good Bronx cheer. Independence Day puts a tiny Statue of Liberty atop a large black pyramid. When the switch is turned on, Miss Liberty’s torch blinks redly, and an ingeniously spliced tape combines the distorted voice of Mae West with electronic sounds that convey a mounting hysteria of urban cacophony.

“Think of the noises we hear every day—vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, telephones, buses, fire engines—why shouldn’t they be in pictures?” asks Venetian-born Marina Stern. Though this follows the logic of pop art, she denies that she is a pop artist: “Pop art accepts everything. I’m more of a satirist. I like to get a little dig in. What pop art has done is to release all of us to be playful. Abstract expressionism is so serious. Two years ago I wouldn’t have dared to make paintings like these, and no gallery would have dared to show them.”

Paintings, in sum, no longer have to be wallflowers, or even good little children who should be seen and not heard. But one voice at the gallery opening could be heard making a plaintive request: “Can someone please turn that painting down a bit?”