Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Martin Wong
American; 20th-century
New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art
84%
Houston Street. 1986. Acrylic on canvas
What this painting does is trick you into treating it like an object — not quite a sculpture or a wall work but something more basic — so that it can bowl you over, in the final estimation, as a painting. Its flirtation with the history of trompe l'oeil, the way it pushes up with discomfiting realism against the edges of the canvas and the front of the picture plane, is the first thing that goads you into experiencing it more with your body than with your eyes. And then its size and its lowness to the ground and its overwhelming array of tactile effects all finish the job. But there are aspects to it that, once you fall into approaching it in the way you approach "things," just as soon disqualify it from occupying an uncomplicated place of immediacy in your physical world: its sides aren't painted, only its face; though big, it's too small to be a real gate; its far right edge isn't a deceptive surface but a tenuous sliver of pictorial depth; there's cramming and perspectival fuckery in the top left corner, but then the rest of the image ignores this and goes on being blithely illusionistic and flat. Not only do these sly visual effects come steadily to disrupt the phenomenological stuff that starts to happen as soon as you put yourself in front of this object — they actually manage to divert your bodily experience up towards your eyes. Vision is forced to make up for all the failures of physical presence to account for what it is that Wong's painting is doing. (TFS, 2026)