"In the Land of Retinal Delights: The Juxtapoz Factor" at the Laguna Art Museum

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

Ground Us -- Huntington Beach Art Center

The pamphlet for this show says "Three large scale site-specific installations will amuse, engage and imagine a new and improved world." I will begin my critique here buy suggesting that these works were not "large" and they were by no means site-specific. Okay, they were pretty bigish, but, but by no stretch large--Serra is large!

I say not site-specific because all three of these works could be re-installed
elsewhere pretty much exactly like they were presented in these spaces so
that removes all aspects of site-specificity. And what is the direct object of amuse, engage, and imagine? Is the author of this statement saying that these three works will amuse, engage, and imagine a new and improved new world? Sorry, I don't get it.

That is where my negative critique of this exhibit ends. The performance of
P. Williams' "The Finishing Touch" is thought provoking and contemporary to
the minute. Yes, the work itself performs; in fact, it self-destructs. When the airplanes first start flying over this city made of garbage and cardboard one feels a sense of foreboding (a 9-11 type of nostalgia).

But then when the large building itself starts to move and subsequently begins to demolish the city, one is suddenly aware that the fear is not from above (from the other), but rather from within (from the self). Point taken, we have nothing to fear but ourselves. Great job P.

Lucrecia Troncoso's "Tree of Life..." is visually intriguing, technically sound, and large enough within this gallery space to captivate its viewers. I am afraid that it has been too long since I saw this show to speak overly intelligent about this work. And I don't want to simply try to respond to her statement in the brochure. However, I do remember enjoying the metaphor and environmental sensibility that this piece was trying to communicate. It engaged me so it must have been a successful piece.

Kiel Johnson's insanely intricate drawing "Survival Mode" is captivating in
a Schiele way. Again big enough for the space and the work definitely draws one in to his comical depictions of urbanity. Not really my style but still, amazing work.

So overall, other than the pamphlet author's poor introductory paragraph, this exhibit is worth a visit--especially now that P.'s piece is "finally finished" as the artist proclaimed at the conclusion of his work's performance.

--ART

Peter Saul, OCMA

Peter Saul, OCMA

Peter Saul currently has some large paintings very nicely arranged on some well-lit walls in Orange County. Who is this guy, and how did he manage to get a museum retrospective? These are questions that didn’t exactly plague me, but that I could by no means answer as I walked through the space. Large and beautifully colored, the paintings run the gamut of depiction from old popish cartoons to grotesque twisted forms vivisecting, chopping, conquering and converting each other. It’s difficult not to like a guy who paints heads being chopped off and liberally uses fluorescent paint, but his subject and color choices are far more sophisticated than merely testing the limits of the visible light spectrum. In the newer paintings he has traded the surface intrigue of his earlier works in oil for rhythmically daubed acrylic, building stylized, freakish humanoid forms in rich colors that seem to provide better than the usual color yield acrylic has to offer. He has weighed in on a variety of subjects, his illustrative approach creating a feel for the paintings that rests somewhere between editorial and satirical, whether it be cops fighting punks on a subway, or conquistadors doing their genocide thing.

Most telling for me perhaps is a quote on one of the placards from Saul himself: “It’s the intellectual dignity of modern art that upsets me, excites me to paint like I do.” There must be some sort of dignity someplace in a man to motivate him to invest so many years into so many large-scale works. With his fantastic proclamation, Saul seemingly attempts to separate himself from the rest of the art world at large, and indeed it’s easy to imagine that for a great many years his stylized, representational works were likely at odds with what everyone else was doing. But here he is, hanging in a museum, with the likes of Baldesarri and Burden across the hall, so he must not have been all that removed. In fact, he is at his best lampooning the established, accepted art stars, his “Francis Bacon Descending a Staircase” and not one of the larger works in the show, is possibly the best and most poignant piece that Saul has brought out of storage. At once a reference and an acknowledgement of Duchamp’s destruction of objective painting, which Saul is still sore about, and Francis Bacon who Saul apparently looked at a time or two. Pretty much says it all.

I also revisited the “Art since the 1960’s” show across the hall, While the first time I walked through the show a couple months ago, the show served mostly as a back drop to the Disorderly Conduct show, something to fill the space, and definitely not a destination in and of itself. It sat quietly and confidently in the corner, smug as it knew something that Disorderly Conduct didn’t. Seeing it again, reminded me how truly progressive art can be, and makes one long for the humor, insight, and challenge of other times. Sure, some of the work is almost 50 years old but it still feels as engaging as anything new. Ok, so it’s also pretty much just stuff from OCMA’s permanent collection and most of the works are second string, oddly arranged, and dusty at best, yet put together it adds up to create a representation of a community of individuals, however loosely linked, attempting to understand, document and affect their time. Which lets face it, is pretty cool.
--Snowflake

Disorderly Conduct, OCMA

Disorderly Conduct, OCMA

I could say a lot about this show but here’s the short of it. It was an ok show over all, some of the work was great, most of it was acceptable, and a couple pieces were bad. This however, is usually the way that multi artist shows seem to work at museums. Over all, the work didn’t seem terribly cohesive but some was interesting. Then I started reading the placards and the statements about the artists and the curatorial direction of the show.

For a Show titled: Disorderly Conduct, the work seemed pretty predictable and in no way disorderly. Perhaps pieces lampooning Dr. Condoleezza Rice and the war in general (Karen Finley) felt provocative for the board of directors of a small museum in Orange County, but fails to bring up any points the rest of us haven’t already considered. The statement for the show claims the work is about conflict, war, violence, racial tension, urban strife and environmental disaster, which one might think would make for a grotesque, visceral, and perhaps even offensive viewing experience. The work however, while it does address these omnipresent issues, does it in the most orderly means imaginable, creating a feeling of the predictable and almost polite.

The show comes off less like the sum of its parts and instead like a bunch of parts lacking a summation. So I chose to view the show as a lot of individual works that just happen to be temporarily housed in the same location. Here’s my break down of the artists:

Robin Rhode’s digital animation is a quick read, which is unfortunate because it moves slow enough that one quickly loses interest but not before wondering why there was so much use of the Ken Burns effect from iMovie and longing for the aptly filmed pixilation of Jan Svankmajer instead.

Karen Finley got a chuckle out of me, just one.

Pilar Albarracin is the Spanish Cindy Sherman.

Pearl C. Hsiung, I enjoyed standing very close to her paintings, I wish they were abstract. I also liked the irony of her “Site Specific” installation which was small enough to be specific to almost any location.

Glenn Kaino deftly combined intrigue and disappointment with a very cool one-liner of a chess board piece and his apparently related “One Hour” paintings which I think was intended to illustrate the point that it doesn’t take long to figure out you are not proficient at something, or perhaps that we all spend a lot of time on things we should either give up or never show to people. His spinning rock and house piece is a great metaphor for missing the mark or just going around and around and never getting to the point. Which I think is what this show is all about.

Mike Kelley was interesting as usual and managed to get his own room (don’t miss it, it’s removed from everything else)

Martin Kersels knows something you don’t; you should try to figure out what that is.

Daniel Joseph Martinez takes up a lot of space with very little.

Rodney McMillian didn’t inspire me to write any notes.

--Snowflake

The Birth of T.E.A. Party

We met. We drank. We lifted our pinkies.

We bashed artists, galleries, politician, and mostly, the press.

Prepare for the rebellion. 

Once a month.