Artists Meditate on the Rose as a Symbol

In the millennia-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). 

A rose is … a bomb? Gabriella Hirst tells us in a wall text for her mixed-media work “How to Make A Bomb” (2015–ongoing) that a German horticulturist created the Rosa floribunda “Atombombe” during the postwar nuclear fervor. But the flower as vehicle for or witness to political violence comes through more forcefully in works like Taryn Simon’s “Framework agreement for economic cooperation. Quito, Ecuador, January 12, 2012, 2015, Paperwork and the Will of Capital” (2015), in which a spare panel beside a massive photograph of a bouquet informs us that these flowers were present for an agreement between Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that allowed Iran — under sanctions due to its nuclear program — to access US currency via an Ecuadorian bank. Further expanding upon flowers’ relationship to political shifts, Anna Jermolaewa’s installation “The Penultimate” (2017/25) configures bouquets representing global revolutions of the last few decades (for instance, Tunisia’s “Jasmine Revolution,” Myanmar’s “Saffron Revolution”) atop a chair, with an empty vase waiting to be filled. 

And it’s something uncategorizable: Two bright roses gleam in Farah Al Qasimi’s photograph “Gurdwara Nanak Darbar Sahib (Kansas)” (2017), while the shadow of an unseen man with a long beard in a turban haunts the center of the composition. It’s elegiac and moving even without context, but it might deepen the experience to know that it was taken in a Sikh temple in the aftermath of Adam Purinton’s murder of Srinivas Kuchibhotla and wounding of two other men in Kansas in 2017 because he believed them to be Arab. 

I’ll admit I’m a sucker for this kind of premise: disparate works grouped convincingly under a concrete theme or symbol. I guess the injunction is to wander the field and pluck what suits you — you’ll likely find something with an artist list that includes Cy Twombly, Louise Bourgeois, Joe Brainard, Jay DeFeo, Awol Erizku, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol, to name just a few of those I didn’t get around to. A rose is a rose is a rose — and there’s so much in a rose. 

A Rose Is continues at the FLAG Art Foundation (545 West 25th St #9, Chelsea, Manhattan) through June 21. The exhibition was curated by Jonathan Rider.