Drunk vs. Stoned 2: Revenge of the Stoned
Elwyn Palmerton
If last summer’s version of "Drunk vs. Stoned" was more drunk (rambling and spatially discombobulated), this year’s sequel, "Drunk Vs. Stoned 2," is surely more stoned. The show is concentrated, precise, exhibiting an almost anal-retentive sense of order and an overall sensibility that could only be called stoner logic: a paranoiac sense of a greater, larger idea emerging from all the smaller synchronicities and resemblances between the individual works. The good news for drunks is that there’s plenty of clear floor space to fall over in and not too much stuff to knock over–and a room size replica of an Old West Style Saloon.
The "Stoner" entries outnumber the "Drunk" entries–19 to 16 by my count–with four that could go either way, plus a few that start from one state and approach the other: droned, if you will. Robert Crumb’s distinctly stoner sensibility, for example, approaches "Drunk" as subject matter in I Suppose You Think I’ve Had Too Much to Drink–a drawing of an inebriated lady saying just that. Speaking of synchronicities, how much do R. Crumb’s thin, anxious, heavily LSD-influenced pen lines, resemble Henri Micheaux’s thin, anxious pen lines (on the opposite wall), which were made under the direct influence of psychedelics? Which, for that matter, quite closely resemble the lines in some works that I made, years ago, on, um… paper. Weird. And have you ever really looked at hands? I mean really looked at hands.
Visual and conceptual links like this abound. A Mary Heilman near the entrance (riffing on Al Held’s head-shop-poster-style colored checkered planes) visually rhymes with Chris Johanson’s (ahem) trippy painting (in his style of askew, faux-naif, off-kilter contradictory perspective with smallish figures against an overlarge back wall belligerently parallel to and synonymous with the picture plane). Meanwhile, Johanson’s work is mirrored on the opposite wall by one of Pedro Bell’s marker drawings of a similar spatial motif and complimented by Anne Collier’s Spill, a photo of records leaning against a wall–the only visible one entitled, You Only Say You Love Me When You’re Drunk. Pruitt and Early’s Miller High Life can ziggurat (each with a different novelty sticker) echoes the isometric perspective of Paul Noble’s mega-stoned Bosch-like vision which evokes the sensual grotesquerie of self-conscious sex… on weeeeed–a vision, quite appropriately, placed next to Monique Prieto’s abjectly psychedelic painting featuring the phrase "MY… SELF". Stoner logic abounds where everything links to something else but nothing really seems to add up. But that’s the point… (wait a second, where was I? … oh yeah, yeah, right); it’s the key to "Drunk vs. Stoned 2"s jovial demented success, actually: capturing fragments of altered realities, bringing back those worlds in a way that only art can, and altering consciousness without chemicals. It’s an old, almost primitive thing that we can call atavistic without being pejorative. Heady.
