| It is a curious thing we ugly Americans do: we are infatuated with a meta-world of fictional animals to replicate our social order, manifest our ids and superegos, our social rites and character flaws, and enact our moral lessons. The peculiar and unprecedented intimacy of the human psyche with anthropomorphized animals saw its flowering in the 20th century, with the rampant proliferation of cartoons by Walt Disney and the animated film industry. This odd and unnotedly bizarre phenomenon is the entry point of Joyce Pensato’s tour-de-force solo show at Parker’s Box in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. |  |
American Psycho: Bugs Bunny on Heroin – Andrea Liu
It is a curious thing we ugly Americans do: we are infatuated with a meta-world of fictional animals to replicate our social order, manifest our ids and superegos, our social rites and character flaws, and enact our moral lessons. The peculiar and unprecedented intimacy of the human psyche with anthropomorphized animals saw its flowering in the 20th century, with the rampant proliferation of cartoons by Walt Disney and the animated film industry. This odd and unnotedly bizarre phenomenon is the entry point of Joyce Pensato’s tour-de-force solo show at Parker’s Box in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
With over a dozen works, the largest of which is a sprawling 10 by 11 feet of a giant Homer Simpson head, and most ranging in the five feet by five feet zone, in charcoal and pastel on paper or enamel paint on linen, with a strictly black and white palette. Figures on the edge of recognizability such as Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Zozo and Mr. Moto Mickey, undergo a breathtaking transformation as they are rendered with rough, frenzied paint strokes thrown on canvas, dripping profusely. These works have the effect of being apparitions, nightmares, strangely in limbo, haunting and psychologically invasive, searing an imprint on a viewer—like warped after-effects of a lie a culture plastered too often over its wounds, ready to backlash, akin to mutants of a radioactive nuclear disaster, unnervingly unwilling to give up the vestige of their once utopian Disney sanitized glow. They are oblivious to the dissonance of that prefab glow with their now menacing, cancerously overgrown state. Not enough can be said of the effect of the sheer size of these paintings. Unlike so much photography and painting today, which exploits large size gratuitously, self-servingly and careeristically, for no other reason but to grab attention and fill cavernous gallery spaces, Pensato sensitively meshes the large size with other elements of the work. She uses size to up the ante to just the right level, injecting an almost hall-of-mirrors, off-kilter lunacy to their formidableness.
Homer is a ten- by eleven-foot charcoal and pastel rendering of Homer Simpson, whose cartoon iconicity is captured and perfectly replicated, but resolutely besmirched, with an ashen, muddied, deteriorating metamorphosis. We feel the wiry strands of his disheveled, middle-aged receding hairline, his bulging eyes, vacuous and desperate, exuding a pathetic-ness and utter lack of hope. The eyes skate at the verge of being imploring, but mostly just seem vastly inert and dazed, arrested in their own existential conundrum and impotent stasis. There is a dirty, charcoal-smudged quality to his face and the background, inexplicably conjuring associations with heroin withdrawal, street life, homelessness and seedy disorder.
Mr. MotoMickey is a ten- by seven-foot, almost all white painting of a creature with a Yoda-like head that is too large for its wiry boxer-shorts clad body and a frozen, duck-like grin on his face and dazed eyes. There is something gross about him, with a menacing, too-friendly circus midget freakishness. There is an erased drawing quality to this piece, as the contours and shading of this figure are effected by scurried brushstrokes of white paint that wash out a black background. The "Wanted" series consists of eight one-foot by one-foot paintings of white enamel on a black background of dogs’ heads (seemingly German Shepherds) with a ghostly, scratchy, Cujo-like, X-Ray quality. These translucent white-on-sheer-black background works with distorted expressions come the closest to seeming horror-ish.
Her charcoal and pastel gestural drawing, This Must Be the Place, shows a porcupine-like jovial animal walking. It gestures towards cuteness but falls squarely on the side of grossness, with its nose-less, muzzle-like face with a huge grin expanding over half the area of its face, and two beady eyes. It is without arms, but has two creature-like legs. Maybe the most expressive element of this creature is its unruly mane of all-over body hair, which is rodent-like, thick and vaguely discomfiting. With its grin and its proud human posture walking, one feels apprehensive that this animal does not know its place as a non-human.
These figures have been yanked out of their cartoon context—in their highly codified, brand named, iconographically uniform, impeccably reproducible form—and metamorphosized as denizens of a netherworld of menace, a societally discarded marginality, and with an inchoate sense of muted horror. Not a poltergeist-y supernatural horror, but a horror rooted in a complex mélange of real life societal and emotional disasters. Many of the works have the effect of mug shots, photo negatives and criminal “wanted” ads. She inhabits a fiercely individualistic, expressive and craft-based painterly tradition to reinterpret and deconstruct the inconography of a mass culture animated film industry and its attendant corporate commercialism.
Pensato’s figures do not seem to represent people, qualities in people nor the cartoon characters themselves, whether literally or metaphorically. They resolutely retain an eerie “creature-ness,” and are not overtly anthropomorphic, yet are potently tied to a commentary on culture. These figures "float": temporally, spatially, culturally and narratively, not place-able in one specific time, place, character, etc. Their genius is that they are simultaneously ontologically indeterminate while affecting a pointedly emotionally specific impact. The most tangible thing one could hypothesize they represent is a state of societal, psychic and cultural deterioration and dysfunction.
Though mining from pop culture for its images, Pensato’s work is about as removed from the mindset of Pop Art’s cool sardonicism as one can get; most saliently because the original images behind Pensato’s cartoons are not intact. Nor are they used, manipulated or re-appropriated in their original form to mock, ironically re-enact or infiltrate the politics of cultural production in an image-based society, as was the case in Pop Art. Her relation to, transformation of and intention towards popular culture’s imagery is operating on a wholly different wavelength than that of Pop Art; and yet, the hinging of her work on such blatant popular culture icons makes it such that one cannot resist the comparison as the closest cousin. It is almost as if Pensato uses the cartoon figures as a receptacle (or even mantra) to channel a host of complex, grating emotional drives. There is a “bite” to her work, coming from the re-contextualizing of such culturally revered icons of saccharine sweet childhood bliss in such a dystopian context. Does the work perhaps allude to the hijacking of childhood and a premature cultural soiling of innocence in America?
If not engulfing the figures in an unyielding blackness that seems alternately baleful or acutely lonely, as is the case of the moribund, shrouded A Different Homer, "Wanted" and, most unrestrainedly, the fiendish Hello Stranger, then she mires them in a disjointed, nonsensical, all white absurdity, as in Can’t We Be Friends. Here, there are four anxious, cross-eyed, enormous-billed, disembodied Daffy Duck-like heads. In Bunny, the soft fuzzball nose, floppy ears, innocent round eyes and muffle paws would otherwise imbue this with an endearing stuffed animal portrait-ness—were it not for the harrowing blackness in which most of the painting is rendered. The long, vertical drips of white paint on the black enamel background suggest splattered blood.
There is something gross and macabre to these renditions, a hysterical banality and “haunted carnival” friendliness that mask an underlying malevolence. These animals are not timid, and they will not be ignored. Pensato has turned commodified, consumerist "cute-ification" inside out, unfolding the American Psycho-based, dystopian underside, and a smearing of all its cheery Disney heroes.
Unlike the scores of Generation X and Y solo shows one must trip over today, which are incoherent in a glib attempt at postmodern fragmentation and eschewal of authorship, the works of Pensato (who came of age in the 60s) cohere and almost engender a force field. One feels the imprint of a single vision, though not in a constraining “Master Narrative,” nor schematic way, but in a liberating way. We feel invigorated at the mordant wit of Pensato to show such irreverence and cavalier destruction towards such candy-corn and soda pop, screwed-up and quintessentially American ambassadors of faux innocence.
