Acting Like an Animal
Artist
Alan Turner
(American, 1943-2020)
Date1975
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsImage Size: 20 × 20 in. (50.8 × 50.8 cm)
Frame Size: 21 × 21 in. (53.3 × 53.3 cm)
ClassificationsPainting
Credit LineGift of James Pearson Duffy, 2008
Object numberUAC3829
Description Alan Turner (1943-2020) was a notable and rather idiosyncratic American artist who emerged out of New York in the 1970s; his work during the subsequent decades revealed interests ranging from the surreal, the grotesque, and the erotic (though he once stated that “I never meant to scare people” ) to the banality of the everyday. Born in the Bronx, Turner studied at the City College of New York where he received his bachelor's degree in 1965; he then moved out to California to enroll in a graduate program at UC Berkeley, where he studied under David Hockney. Hockney offered Turner an escape to London during the draft years, where Turner lived and worked until his return stateside in 1972. Turner has produced diverse yet internally coherent bodies of work, including his Abstract Expressionist forest paintings of the late 1970s, his plasticine figurations of the 1990s, and his 2010s Box House series. In Turner’s most famous ‘skinscape’ paintings from the 1980s, he “spread[s] flesh like peanut butter and pin[s] eyes to skin like butterflies to paper” in a callback to the Surrealists. Some paintings such as Acting Like an Animal “fit into none of those groupings,” and reveal Turner’s early engagement with the likes of René Magritte. Acting Like an Animal austerely depicts a brunette figure on all fours using her mouth to scruff a black cat with the Magrittian caption “ACTING LIKE AN ANIMAL” in black block text below. Despite her confounding actions, the woman is fashioned in a blue t-shirt, skirt, and brown strappy sandals. This tension—read: ‘uncivilized’ versus ‘civilized,’ or even ‘feral’ versus ‘domesticated’—removes the woman and her cat from the realm of the mundane into the realm of the bizarre and the fantastic. The velour of the outfit helps to further fuzz boundaries. Furthermore, both are animals, so which parts are acting, and which are not? The work then fits into a larger narrative concerning Turner’s oeuvre, namely: Interests in hybridity, metamorphosis, and carnality.
Turner’s work was once described by painter Carroll Dunham as “at the edge, if not out of bounds” of the field of figurative art; “He has maneuvered outside the discursive loops of postmodernism to a place that’s really ‘nonmodern.’” His work has been exhibited and circulated internationally, collected by prestigious institutions, and most recently celebrated at Sadie Coles HQ in London.
Written by Sarah Teppen
1. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/alan-turner-artist-dead-76-1202680367/
2. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/18/arts/gallery-view-a-perverse-witty-sadomasochistic-universe.html?searchResultPosition=6
3. New York Times references Proper Breeding (1975) in the Whitney’s collection, which echoes Acting Like an Animal conceptually and stylistically: 4.https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/arts/design/alan-turner-dead.html
5. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2000/10/01/alan-turner/
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