| For most, the term Art Deco calls to mind all manner of decorative, architectural and craft-based artifacts—streamlined interior design concepts, pre-World War II jewelry, the Chrysler building, Miami’s South Beach skyline, or, at the very least, an appealing computer font type. |  |
Cultural Decoupage – Whitney May
For most, the term Art Deco calls to mind all manner of decorative, architectural and craft-based artifacts—streamlined interior design concepts, pre-World War II jewelry, the Chrysler building, Miami’s South Beach skyline, or, at the very least, an appealing computer font type. For those familiar with the work of Manhattan artist Clifford Faust, however, the term takes on contemporary association by way of some present-day subject matter and a cut paper collage approach to the famous art movement of the 1920s and 30s. By infusing images such as that of a group of mohawked, spike-belted youths with the aesthetic of this bygone era’s design style then, Faust manages to impart an additional layer of meaning to his prints. In them, he renders both redolent and significant the diversity of our everyday American cultural landscape—a topic with which he is well-acquainted.
After a childhood in Oregon and an education at the Los Angeles Art Center School, the artist began his professional career by venturing first to San Francisco and then east to settle down, live and work in 1960s New York. Three decades later, Faust continues to commit himself to doing justice to the deeper impressions he was left with from along the way. According to images like his Kansas, Apple Pickers and Campfire, it wasn’t so much the variety of locales Faust at one time called home, but the in-between—the experience of travel itself—that stirred the artist and goaded artistic production. Clearly, Faust’s post-grad bi-coastal experience was riddled with feelings of displacement, and he appears to have cultivated this encountered stance as onlooker and outsider. Even now, it is a quality everywhere apparent in his art. By merging this distinct sense of remoteness from his subjects with the nostalgic, pared-down elegance of the Art Deco style in such a way, Faust ultimately provides his prints with a decidedly symbolic sensitivity.
Additionally, in working within the vein of Art Deco’s most recognized painter of the late 20s and early 30s, Tamara Lempicka, Faust’s prints are of a comparable colorful and decorative yet less voluminous graphic quality. Flat against the picture-plane lies the subject matter within such notable works as his Lovers—a piece that gestures not only toward the aesthetic of Art Deco, but also toward that of Japanese prints of the 19th century through its asymmetrical, off-center composition and clear quotation of a traditional Japanese interior. Although there is an obvious sense of three-dimensional architectural space represented here, Faust’s cut paper collage technique provides the viewer with figurative signage made up only of solid blocks of contrasting colors and a bare minimum of pencil-thin lines reserved for the delineation of the couple’s (modern-day) jean pockets. Here, as in all of Faust’s prints, the image is more a decorative assemblage of representative parts than a naturalistic or illusionistic expression of space and volume. What is extraordinary in this case, however, is the clear articulation of human intimacy—the barely touching hands that tell more than any meticulous, realist illustration of the same scene could.
In other examples of his work, this approach makes for some arresting visual encounters full of contrasting shape and color, but with little specific human interaction. The result, in such works as his Club Kids, is a more emblematic account of a contemporary cultural cross-section. Here, the artist depicts the cordoned-off world of American urban youth from the perspective of the rest of us. Silhouette-like human figures composed of colored shapes without gradation or a single readable facial expression serve as representatives of a larger social group. Individualism is ceded, but to an end. What is emphasized here instead, as in the majority of Faust’s works, is the greater cultural phenomenon at hand, and it is the streamlined, retro chic nature of the Art Deco aesthetic that perfectly fits this iconographic-inspired bill.
In Faust’s art, the viewer is consistently visually cut off from or positioned outside of the space inhabited by the subjects, yet he remains familiar with such iconic images of American culture—both old and new. The product is at once a reassessment of modernity from the objective eye of an outsider and a pronouncement of these American cultural impressions as nothing short of vital.
