Peggy Katz
Portraits and Landscapes Welded on Steel
Peggy Katz's welded portraits and landscapes on steel are the new emblems of our new primary consciousness. She works with metal and paint, welding and cutting out figures on flat metal surfaces and then painting in rich solid colors. (That's like saying Great Expectations is about a kid who comes into some money.) Her figures are stripped down to their barest essentials, but in her minimal use of line and detail she does so much more than merely establish the form. It is as if she captured the essence of a thing's existence and putting it on her metal slab released it in all its joyous life. The rendering of the figures might seem simple but the spirit is so evident and that's something so lacking these days and exactly what lesser art fails to achieve. She's retained and developed the child's instinct and talent for getting right to an object's peculiarities and, like a hieroglyph, she reduces what she delineates to its magic.
Technically, here's what she does: when the negative ground cable of her welding torch comes in contact with the positive charge of her electrode, the metal she's working on is a conductor so that an electrical arc is formed which enables the flux of the metal rod in the torch to melt thus forming the raised line. Different amperages and speeds give different thicknesses of line.
This sort of welding, as far as I know, has never been done before in making art. It is the key to her work. As marble is Noguchi's medium, metal is Katz's. What might look silly as a drawing, when rendered with the depth of welding in all its roughness, achieves an unequaled surface effect.
Cows, goldfish, Mt. Fuji, saints and the solar system in various combinations are the images she uses. These pieces aren't realistic depictions, they're about treating the scene and subject, scraping away any extraneous detail. So when a gold fish is superimposed over a saint who is portrayed on one end of a dumbbell held aloft by a naked female body builder with a cat perched on top of all, well, this isn't so strange. By simply putting them all together, the composition celebrates the harmony of them all.
In another piece, three goldfish swim around in a dark blue oval on the side of a glowing green mountain with a brown tree perched on which a red bird takes in the scene, gold crescent moon hanging in the royal blue sky. In another, Saturn and a few other heavenly bodies loom in the night sky above a blue Mt. Fuji. In a triptych, naked man and woman devils (with halos) stand on each side of an exploding volcanic Fuji.
What is delightful about these works is the way they merge the formalism and piety of medieval icons and the stark and joyous, brilliant contrasts of "floating world" Japanese woodblock prints. The resulting images are tremendously amusing in this disparity but at the same time this cave-drawing rawness and stripped down stateliness is powerful and affecting and remains.
(Arts, September 1985)