In the millenia-old fairytale “Beauty and the Beast,” the rose is a symbol of love, time, magic, and transformation. Fitting, then, that A Rose Is at the FLAG Art Foundation opens with Tony Feher’s enchanted flower growing out of an Anthora coffee cup (“Untitled,” 1992) alongside a narcotic poem by Kay Rosen stenciled in curlicued letters on the wall, lulling the visitor into a spell: “a rose is a rose Sis arose says ah roses sorrows … ”.
The rose might be the most densely described flower in history: It’s pure and chaste, like the Virgin Mary; stained by the blood of Aphrodite and the bloodshed of the Wars of the Roses; it’s the blushing cheek in the ghazal and a stand-in for suffering and loss in blank verse and lyric poetry; it’s a Socialist symbol, and apparently the national flower of the United States, thanks to Ronald Reagan.
In A Rose Is, it’s a symbol of femininity and endurance in a number of works. Ethyl Eichelberger and Joe E. Jeffreys’s video “Women Who Survive” (undated), montages performances of an anthem the former wrote that includes the titular line. Peter Hujar’s “Candy Darling on Her Deathbed” (1973), meanwhile, depicts the Warhol superstar looking glamorous as ever on her deathbed, a bouquet of roses behind her and a single rose before her. It’s also an object of desire: Sara Cwynar’s “Rose Gold” (2017) explores the Apple iPhone in that hue, and attendant ideas of consumerism and power. And it’s grotesque: fingers emerge from Genesis Belanger’s bouquet of ceramic flowers, “Double Standard” (2018)...
Lisa Yin Zhang
