Gary Baseman, The Lowdown on Lowbrow
Emilie Trice
Since September, Gary Baseman has had four openings: one in New York at the Jonathan Levine Gallery entitled "The Garden of Unearthly Delights," two in LA and one in Barcelona, besides his lectures and book signings in Taiwan, Delaware, Beverly Hills and Charlottesville. He recently dismantled his museum installation, A Moment Ago Everything was Beautiful, at the Pasadena Museum of California Art and is currently speaking to companies about animated shorts, children’s books and collaborative sculpture projects. When I finally managed to get in touch with him after five weeks of phone tag, the hour and a half long interview that followed offered a few insights into his curiously overconfident yet self-deprecating mind. The following article is more or less a loose paraphrase of our conversation, an on-the-record discussion of the lowbrow phenomenon almost two months in the making since our drunken introduction at Marcel Dzama’s opening at David Zwirner.
Baseman and Dzama are visual culture comrades and typically categorized together as lowbrow artists, a nondiscriminatory term embracing graphic illustration, graffiti and skateboard art, design, anime, manga and toy culture, hot rod and tattoo aficionados, comic book artists and pop surrealist oil painters. However, these artists’ continuing penetration of the highbrow scene (i.e. the David Zwirner gallery) testifies to the triumphant arrival of lowbrow on the highbrow radar. A recent LA Weekly article heralded in this lowbrow golden age, citing Mark Ryden’s "Wondertoonel" retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the "Beautiful Losers" exhibition at the Orange County Museum, Juxtapoz magazine’s art editorial dominance and the migration of "fringe-dwelling galleries" to prime real estate strips. Although many would argue that it’s about time these artists are validated both institutionally and commercially, there is an underlying sentiment that the vitality of lowbrow art is being dissipated for the sake of market saturation. Robert Williams’s quote in LA Weekly resonates with this bitter taste, "When we started Juxtapoz, we wanted a place for the outlaw art that wasn’t being seen anywhere, but after three or four years we ran out. There isn’t anymore outlaw art. All this tiki and big-eye crap is just a bunch of illustrators looking for a new place for their stuff because they lost their jobs to computers." Ouch.
Baseman is a pivotal figure in this argument because of his commercial success across multiple mediums. He quit his office job to become a commercial illustrator, contributing to Forbes, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone and The New Yorker, among others. His career highlights include an animated series and movie entitled Teacher’s Pet, an Emmy award, multiple toy lines and vinyl collectables, his book Dumb Luck, board games for Cranium and inclusion in the permanent collections of The National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. and the Museum of Modern Art in Rome. A few years ago he coined the term "pervasive art" and has been tirelessly promoting the movement on an international scale ever since.
The ever-present criticism of Baseman is that he subjugates his recognizable cast of characters from one medium to another; be it editorial illustration, toys, television or fine art. Ironically, this is the entire basis of the pervasive art movement, which he defines as "working in traditional and untraditional mediums, but staying true to your aesthetic." When asked if he would consider Picasso a pervasive artist, Baseman agrees, asserting that Picasso was not afraid to explore multiple mediums and areas that many traditional fine artists avoided during his time. When I ask Baseman if he feels that pervasive and lowbrow art are inherently commercial in nature, he is quick to point out that the word "commercial" carries negative connotations, but artists "shouldn’t be afraid to create things for sale." A recent "Cereal Art" exhibit at Perry Rubenstein in Chelsea supported this sentiment by blatantly transforming the gallery into a pseudo retail outlet with lowbrow products like Dzama salt and pepper shakers, a Murakami soccer ball and Nara night lights.
Increasing exposure of these artists and such products on the East Coast furthers the integration of lowbrow and highbrow, with Southern California acting as the main origin and hub of lowbrow culture. Baseman notes that New York City, the reigning nucleus of elitist art, is actually about five years behind the lowbrow times. He accredits this to technology and the fact that artists no longer have to physically migrate to one designated cultural capital in order to share work, ideas and gain gallery representation. He insists that New York has not been as accepting of lowbrow imagery and branding as Los Angeles, although certain international lowbrow and pervasive superstars such as Nara and Murakami have been embraced by big institutions in the Big Apple for some time. New York also hosts several galleries that staunchly support the lowbrow scene– i.e. Fuze Gallery at Lit, Jonathan Levine Gallery and Deitch Projects. Despite this support and the creeping infiltration of New York’s highbrow arenas by lowbrow purveyors, LA remains the undisputed cultural center of lowbrow creativity and commerce.
There is an underlying connection between the kind of unabashed commercialism that fuels the lowbrow fire and the southern Cali culture that originally spawned that quintessential capitalist incarnation, fast food. Priced to own and mass produced, the collectables that Baseman and other lowbrow or pervasive artists create (vinyl figures, lunchboxes, thermoses, toys, etc.) reflect a certain mentality that is consumer oriented and nonexclusive. The generalized lowbrow aesthetic also reflects elements of So Cal culture, especially Baseman’s, who grew up in Hollywood and currently lives in LA. Being an East Coast girl, I have to ask him if he sees some relationship between the stereotypical, superficial beauty invoked by images of surgically-enhanced Hollywood starlets and botoxed Beverly Hills housewives and his paintings, which of late combine a pretty palette of blues and pinks with cutesy cartoonish characters that temporarily distract from their dark emotional symbolism. Although Baseman doesn’t completely accept this interpretation, he doesn’t deny it either. A perfect example of his contradictory imagery is the character Creamy, cute enough that Baseman’s 4 year-old cousin wants to be Creamy for Halloween, but symbolically translating to "man as a simpleton who’s literally creaming himself…longing for unattainable beauty." Thus the innocent is perverted, a sacred icon of youth exposed as obscene.
This is a typical aesthetic principle that resonates in most lowbrow art, the unification of beauty and depravity, grotesque comedy and appropriated pop symbols. Baseman wants to "discover some small human truth, something about the human condition. What hits me the deepest is the personal, themes of desire and longing and control and aspects of value and worth and who we are and going after your identity and your mortality and hope. Desire and longing and beauty make men stupid. I always see man as this simpleton, and I almost see myself as King Idiot." Sure enough, one of Baseman’s quintessential quotes is that his art exists "where the line between genius and stupidity has been smudged beyond recognition."
My final question to Baseman is whether he feels that the persistent announcement that lowbrow is up-and-coming renounces the fact that it has actually already arrived. He responds that he doesn’t care and as long as the work is being seen and people have access to it, that’s all that matters. In spite of the criticism that lowbrow is turning artistic objects into mindless commodities and permeating too many commercial arenas, Baseman’s attitude proves his devotion to his creative vision, and not to the all mighty dollar. This attitude epitomizes the original philosophy of lowbrow/outlaw/pervasive art and will hopefully persist even as the lowbrow movement expands and the money keeps pouring in. For King Idiot Baseman and his beautiful loser subjects, it just may be possible to have your cake and eat it too.
