The World Upside Down: Donald Perlis’ America by Donald Kuspit

 Donald Perlis, Big Stripper, courtesy of Ilon Art Gallery

            And then strange motions will abound.

Yet let’s be content, and the times lament, you

            see the world turned upside down.

            The World Turned Upside Down, 1646

 “A brief description of the ridiculous Fashions of these distracted times.”

By DONALD KUSPIT April 24, 2025

    Donald Perlis is the Pieter Bruegel of our times.  Bruegel’s works were “sharp or sarcastic” and “provocative”—socially critical—and ruthlessly realistic.  Like Bruegel, Perlis often crowds his canvases with figures, sometimes large, even grandiose, like the Upside Down Dancer in a New York subway—a sort of hell, not only because it is underground, but because the passengers seem damned by their indifference to each other.  Also, like Bruegel, Perlis paints genre scenes, often depicting “low” subjects—scenes of recreation, often of a so-called “merry company,” as in Mighty Clouds of Joy.  Irony, even cynicism, verging on nihilism—a sense of the meaninglessness of it all, masked by a sense of its superficiality--pervades Perlis’ paintings, compensated by a Poussinesque sense of the beauty of nature, evident in Birders, Charley, and Sunday.  Nature’s flourishing green—the color of life, as Goethe noted—is painted with a subtle, devoted attention, in contrast to the figures—photographing each other rather than nature.  Poussin’s Et in Ego Arcadia comes to the mind’s eye, with the photograph the kiss of death in the paradise of painting—and nature.  When it was first invented the photograph was said to announce the death of painting, but Perlis’s Charley shows that painting can hold its own against photography, indeed, outwit it in expressive subtlety and pictorial eloquence.  Perlis’ works set up a paragone between painting and photography, and more subtly between perverse love, symbolized by the seductive Stripper—“perversion is the erotic form of hatred,” and voyeurism—a “mode of obtaining sexual gratification by watching nude women or two individuals engaged in sexual acts”--then the audience watching the tempting stripper perform in Sphinx are voyeurs.  The tease is that she may be “phallic woman”—a fantasy that a woman has a “phallus,” and as such powerful, even all-powerful as the Stripper is, as her dominance of the audience suggests.  All of Perlis’s women are dominatrices.

Upside Down Dancer, courtesy of  Ilon Art Gallery
 

Donald Perlis, Sphinx, courtesy of  Ilon Art Gallery
 

   Entertainment, a staple of American life, not to say fantasy compensation for and distraction from its failings, is clearly perverse and voyeuristic for Perlis, for Love has become Mickey Mouse.  Marx said religion is the opium of the masses, and entertainment is the religion of the masses, as the worship of and rewards given to entertainers make clear.  Perlis’s Mickey Mouse becomes the red hot phallic totem pole worshipped by a bevy of female nudes in a film shoot.  The monstrous sphinx is watching from a giant television screen, ready to destroy one if one doesn’t know the answer to her riddle.  A ruthless irony informs Perlis’s paintings, and unresolvable paradox, suggesting they are little theatres of the absurdly entertaining.      

Mickey, courtesy of  Ilon Art Gallery

Perlis’ America is a perverse voyeuristic society, hypnotized by seductive strippers and lascivious whores—one and the same in the Sphinx, implicitly the seductive Whore of Babylon.  Reduced to dumb, passive, submissive animals by lascivious, naked whores in the ironical Mighty Clouds of Joy, men become demasculinized playthings of women.  The sphinx was a winged monster with a woman’s head and lion’s body who destroyed one if one didn’t know the answer to her riddle—“man”—but Perlis’ men are destroyed by women before they can answer her riddle.  The ancient Babylonians practiced ritual prostitution, and so do the modern Babylonians of America.  In Rivals women, Implicitly prostitutes, wait their turn to be fucked—to fuck and be fucked, to show their naked bodies and seduce and fuck men, is the raison d’etre of Perlis’s women, as Swimmer makes clear.  There are no Friends in Perlis’s America, as there are in nature, as Perlis’s two birds show, only sexually aggressive castrating women and pathetically passive, if now and then sexually aroused, men.  Women are implicitly vicious, man-eating monsters, as Giantess, a work that seems to hark back to Caravaggio’s Medusa, 1595-1598, makes clear.  A number of Perlis’ paintings have a tenebristic aspect, noteworthily Cupid and Psyche—Psyche, a beautiful, seductive nude, with a classically perfect body—she’s not a slutty stripper--seems to be approaching Cupid with a knife, to his terrified surprise.  Again and again Perlis depicts the battle of the sexes, with women usually winning, dominating men by way of her attractive body, hypnotically seductive, reducing men to passive stupidity. WM