After seeing the show twice at the Laguna Art Museum, but as a non-reader of Juxtapoz, I must say: I get it. The question remains: do I care?
See, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to think about a show that has over 150 artists in it, and yet still refuses to say anything terribly new, for fear of seeming to engage in the mainstream art conversation; that, it seems, would be selling out to the idea of being lowbrow. As a whole, it says a lot about what we as consumers covet: easily recognizable figures, marketable object images, surreal landscapes in which we can loosen ourselves from the adult body and return to the non-existent utopia of our collective childhood. Scat and scars and Godzilla and pop-eyed girls reign.
The statement for the show asserts that “there has been a huge, but unacknowledged art movement taking place in this country for the last 40 years” and the artists represented in the show are supposedly a collection of the shirked set. I’m baffled by the “unacknowledged” part, because even though I don’t read Juxtapoz, I am very familiar with most of the names on the show’s lineup.
I’m going to pose a factor: the reason I know a lot of these names might be because I have seen the artists show in a number of prominent galleries, but it more likely the fact that so many of them have a commercial element to their work. Take Gary Baseman for example. He collaborates with Harvey’s Seatbelt Bags to create an Artist Series of purses that ratchets the price tag up twofold for a sack with his images sewn or, recently, printed onto it.
But, when standing in front of his painting in the show, I couldn’t help but feel cheated. Canting my eyes slightly to the left, I compared his thinly painted canvas of bobble-headed figures with the superealistic painting of an ass-view of a cow with human in the distance. It wasn’t the photorealistic nature of the other painting that made it so much more interesting to me, but the skill with which it was executed.
But when I looked in the giftshop at LAM, I found not one reproduction of the ass-end-cow on a t-shirt or coffee cup. I DID find, however, a huge number of tchotchkes and doodads with other characters stripped from the paintings in the show. There’s a theme here: if you need a coaster with a low-brow image, you’ve got it. If you need a change purse with a funky figure floating on its surface, you’ve got it. If you need an action figure of your fave huge-eyed borg, you’ve got it. What you don’t have, however, is art.
And as I fingered through the mounds of commercial offerings, I chuckled at the dichotomy: do you want art, or do you want stuff? It seems that there is no room for the big questions that Mark Ryden, Seonna Hong, Date Farmers, The Clayton Brothers, Jim Houser and others were exploring. Their works seemed the least “lowbrow”, whatever that means.
But, it seems, there is plenty of room for the ubiquitous female borg with the balloon head and outsized eyes. This image is repeated to the point of absurdity across a number of artists’ canvases. Who is she; what does she represent? Is she the modern us, looking hugely full of information and commercial plastic junk, and yet still somehow perpetually surprised that she’s supremely unhappy? Is she that missing innocent childhood we’re supposedly nostalgic for? If so, tell her this for me: it never existed.
This is a show of dazzle and wow, of eye-popping images (often with popping eyes of their own), of impressive works representing a genre that is struggling to be dangerous and different. The viewer senses that struggle. And while they grapple with the images swirling before them, they might also consider saving up for that Baseman Seatbelt Bag which will set them back three hundred bones. Because if you can’t own a real piece of art, I guess you might as well settle for a piece of the lowbrow pie.
--The 925
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