“In The Land of Retinal Delights, the Juztapoz Factor”

“In The Land of Retinal Delights, the Juztapoz Factor”
Laguna Art Museum

Before I roll up the sleeves and get the shovel, let me say that I thoroughly enjoyed the Juxtapoz show and I recommend it to everyone, artists and philistines alike. The work is a fun, accessible, not to mention gigantic formation of artists whose work and names will be familiar to anyone who has ever picked up a copy of Juxtapoz and indeed many that have not. It’s almost too much imagery to take in all at once and I suspect that there may be a lot I missed, what did manage to permeate the thickness of my skull was challenging and rewarding on many levels.

I think first we need to discuss the context of the work in Laguna. According to it’s own mythology, the lowbrow, underground, pop-surrealist, graffiti, punk art movement was born from the custom culture, counter culture, underground comic scene of 1960’s California, and has struggled ever since to get into the ivory towers of the established art world. You know the art world I’m speaking of right? Uptight, minimally or non-representational, overly conceptual, boring, stuffy, opaque, challenging, educated. It looks like they’ve finally managed to crash the party. With Juxtapoz (the magazine) as the nucleus, several of the older artists in the show and their friends have meticulously constructed an alternate art world all their own. This show feels a bit like a cross between a smorgasbord and a retrospective. But it’s far too soon for a retrospective, two thirds of the artists need to die off, and the surviving ones need to labor in obscurity for years while some ignorant, unskilled young upstarts overshadow their careers before we can even begin to figure out which of them were visionaries and which of them were imposters.

The other main problem I have with this show is the notion that all the art is part of some intentional movement. Yes, it is a snapshot of what is happening at the moment, yes it all fits into Baseman’s notion of “Pervasive Art” however in their rush to glorify the visual, there seems to be a lack of the conceptual, each artist laboring away with their own ideas (hopefully) with rarely an intersection between any two of them except the occasional referencing of the same pop culture sources. The pervasive part ends up feeling populist, swapping the clever for the cool, and critique for mass appeal. Someone wiser than me, when discussing the antics and repercussions of Duchamp and Warhol once said: “They did as much harm for art as they did good.”

I think that statement fits snuggly around the neck of Robert Williams and friends, while they have brought the promise or representational art back from the dead; it’s still missing something like a reanimated Frankenstein’s monster. A tiny quote on Jim Houser’s painting says it best: “This defines us, this flatness in the eyes.”

In this show, the heavy hitters, while easily recognizable, are not where the party is. Sure, Robert Williams and his old pals have some deservedly prominent space but their skills reveal their bluntness when hanging next to some of the fresher work. Sylvia Ji who is the artistic equivalent of a fetus knocks them dead while in contrast, a giant work by the Clayton Brothers, looks like everything you’ve ever seen them knockoff and makes you wonder why we ever cared. Mark Dean Veca’s “There is no spoon” (acrylic and ink on canvas) looks like acrid wall paper with pop culture images woven into the floral motif. Is it décor as art, or art as decor? It makes me wonder about the way that representational imagery is tied into everything, and how we mitigate and decide the value of each. In his piece, Veca poses questions that the rest of the artwork in the show seems up against: Are we offering new ideas and challenges, or merely creating trendy decoration? As we parody or pay tribute to pop culture, to old comic characters and sci-fi, do we bring any new meaning to the table or do we merely float along on nostalgia? If we reference crap-culture, do we risk becoming more of the same?

I’m just going to say this once and for all, I can’t stand the “work” of Shag, totally hate it! It’s boring, formulaic, and suffers from flatness visually, emotionally, and conceptually. His ingenuity and energy is obviously taxed in the marketing, and merchandizing aspect of his career, for there seems to be nothing left for the art. I hold him in the same regard as I do Thomas Kinkade: With wonder and amusement that he has managed to last this long, that there is someone out there culturally bankrupt enough to find the so called art interesting and worthy of adorning a set of beer coasters, matchbooks, mouse-pads, martini shakers or even the walls of a house, gallery or a museum.

One of the most interesting pieces for me was “Sleeping by day” by Ray Cesar. Born of what seems to be an entirely digital process, the giclee print of a girl with narrow Appalachian eyes is initially uninspiring but offers up a lot of questions. The piece blends in among the paintings, looking from a distance, a bit like the efforts of some uptight egg-tempera painter, but unlike painters which at some point have to reconcile their own abilities, Cesar has instead used a 3-D modeling program offering infinite focus, complete control of lighting, texture and opacity. He has managed to create a hyper-real fantasy world as convincing and eerie as anything I’ve seen in a movie theater. With such control at one’s disposal, it’s a wonder why more artists have not jumped on the digital bandwagon. More to his credit, I think it’s one of the only prints in the show that is a piece of art that no human hands need ever touch. While that fact might negate the importance of the piece hanging in Laguna for some viewers, considering the shameless promotion, capitalization and salesmanship of some of the other artists in the show, Ray Cesar comes off looking like the smartest guy in the room.

Up stairs from the Juxtapoz show is something that for me capped off the whole experience, it’s a relatively small piece with a relatively long name: “The miniature reproduction of the old Laguna Beach art gallery recreated by Margaret and Stanley Sheppard, with sculpted figures by Gail Hindman”. This was in an exhibition of miniature signed canvases by Laguna artists. How do I explain this thing? It’s basically a diorama of what was apparently the old Laguna Beach Art Gallery but looks more like a miniature Unabomber shanty complete with six-inch versions of some dead artists.(presumably) This is a lowbrow work of art of the highest order. Unapologetic and classically kitsch, it glorifies the early cultural pioneers of Orange County who unknowingly created the cradle/grave in which art in The O.C. has attempted to scratch its way out of, for so many years. The piece is a unique representation of the very Orange County art prejudice that the curators, purveyors, and patrons of the Juxtapoz show are trying to break, perched quietly above like a well-mannered monkey on a proverbial back. The tiny plein air painters of waves and hillsides, trapped behind glass in a miniscule purgatory might have a thing or two to tell the artists of the Juxtapoz show about the way the cutting edge inevitably ends up dull.
--Snowflake