Zoe Crosher

Nov 23, 10:01 am

ARTFORUM REVIEW “The Swimmer” The FLAG Art Foundation by David Coleman, Oct 2024 Print

John Cheever’s famous short story “The Swimmer” (1964) is about Neddy Merrill, an aging suburban Narcissus who, on a hot and boozy afternoon at a couple’s house in Westchester County, New York, decides to swim back home, eight miles away, through the pools of various friends and neighbors. Though Merrill vigorously and obliviously begins his odyssey in summer, it takes him into the bitter chill of autumn, the journey is marked by tales of his own haplessness and failures. The body and psyche of this prototypical “red-blooded American male” weaken with each successive revelation. A surreal blend of Greek tragedy and middle-class malaise, Cheever’s parable is an epitaph for the postwar party years, reflecting the growing anxieties of the 1960s.

The denial and doom that flooded the summer of 2024 couldn’t have been better timed for “The Swimmer,” a group exhibition at the FLAG Art Foundation that closed this past August. Curated by the institution’s director, Jonathan Rider, the show pulled together seventy-two works by thirty-one artists in a variety of media that could almost be read like an advent calendar for Cheever’s story.

Some works recalled the text’s sunny, gin-soaked oblivion with a splash of chlorine. The first floor of the gallery focused more on the tale’s mise-en-scène, imbuing placid views of empty pools by artists such as Dike Blair, Amy Park, Alessandro Raho, Ed Ruscha, and Cynthia Talmadge with a humid sense of privilege and loneliness. Nearby, what appeared to be an abstract undulating turquoise sculpture by Martin Boyce, Forgotten Seas, 2010, was actually an arrangement of rusting steel public-pool benches—an assemblage that literally upended any trace of summer nostalgia.

In other pieces, what was absent took on even greater amplitude, often in ways that mirrored the story’s undercurrent of conflicted masculinity. A suite of postcard-like, Alpine-style paintings by Stephen Truax magnified the idea of longing through the revelation that sites in the landscapes depicted places for gay hookups. A series of Zoe Crosher photographs pictured spots along the coast of SoCal, where celebrities both real and fictional (Norman Maine, Dennis Wilson, Natalie Wood) disappeared. A Jack Pierson photo of sets of translucent swim trunks drying on a line seemed to equate summer and love as things that fade and leave. Conversely, a work by Elmgreen & Dragset, Powerless Structures, Fig. 19, 1998, consisting of two pairs of quickly cast off jeans and briefs in scrunched-up piles, took on a wholesome, skinny-dip vibe.

The inclusion of works featuring actual bodies changed things. For instance, a Cindy Sherman black-and-white Untitled Film Still, 1979, pictured a young woman treading water. The print introduced other pieces (by artists such as Burt Barr, Katherine Bradford, and Melanie Schiff) that seemed to tie into the second half of the story, when Merrill’s excursion turns grimmer and more metaphysical—the dark side of the sun.

The show’s great rosace, however, was the special installation of a 2015 Tony Feher piece totally covering a 110-square-foot window with a radial, radiant mosaic made of nothing more than strips of blue painter’s tape. It elegantly indexed a host of referents—a clear summer sky, a cathedral window, ripples in a tiled pool . . . or the smashed windshield that might have ended Merrill’s story if he’d chosen to drunkenly drive home. And Feher’s process for this work, literally masking off the world outside, gets to the heart of the denial that is at the center of both Cheever’s story and, to an extent, the conditions necessary to make art.

It wasn’t all denial, though. With “The Swimmer,” the author held up a mirror crack’d to his privileged audience and fans—a story both for and about the insulated readership of the New Yorker (where the text was first published in July 1964). When the movie based on the tale came out in 1968, its meta tagline read WHEN YOU TALK ABOUT “THE SWIMMER” WILL YOU TALK ABOUT YOURSELF? The FLAG show held up a similar mirror to its own visitors, even sourcing a work that had its own tagline: Jim Hodges’s sky-blue wool throw blanket, created in 1998 for the Norton Family Christmas Project, bore the stark legend IF THERE HAD BEEN A POOL IT WOULD HAVE REFLECTED US.

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