Life, Memory, Me & Us: Amy Sillman

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THE GREAT THING ABOUT being married is that you have to appeal to only one person — and it isn't even you. The same goes for all kinds of romantic bonding, and it creates a dynamic that is utterly irreproducible.

Coupling is culture, the creation of an ever-evolving two-person civilization. Each pairing creates its own language, music, play — all of which evaporate on parting. Or on simply being exposed to another person.

And yet coupling is precisely what Amy Sillman is interested in. The painter asked friends to pose, then made taut, rubbery representational ink sketches, some of which hang at the entrance to her Hirshhorn "Directions" show, subtitled "Third Person Singular." In the gallery behind are the larger abstract oils they sometimes led to, sometimes followed.

It wasn't an easy path. Or a pretty one. Between thought and expression lay a lot of revision — hundreds of second guesses, memory games and scrape-aways. Permutations that marry the polished banality of late Diebenkorn to the aggressive ugliness of late Picasso somehow capture the voyeuristic fascination we have for the love lives of others as well as the bemused wonder we often feel for our own.

Sillman's is the kind of contemporary art a lot of people hate, because you have to know what you're looking at to know what you're looking at. Turn to the catalog. There's an absolutely revelatory interview that offers a sense of who Sillman is as an investigator of elusive states of being.

» Hirshhorn, 7th Street and Independence Avenue SW; through July 6, free; 202-633-1000, hirshhorn.org. (L'Enfant Plaza)

Written by Express contributor Glenn Dixon
Photo courtesy Hirshhorn