Pop-cultural Immersion at Apex
Cristina Colasanto
Bringing the works of Roberto Cuoghi, John Dogg, Nate Lowman and Kaz Oshiro together in Apexart’s 2003 Summer Program is the result of a fortunate collaboration between art historian Katy Seigel and gallerists, Michele Maccarone and Mitchell Algus. Exhibiting four young artists bound by a common interest in popular culture and media imagery, each of their works appropriates and reinterprets modern cultural artifacts.
Cohesive thematic threads are secondary to the instinctive emotional power evoked by iconic figures and objects, real and fictitious. Apexart’s latest group show gives new significance to pop-cultural immersion.
Roberto Cuoghi’s “Goodgriefies”, 2000-1 animated, video still examines the obstacles in defining generational identity. Although on another level he comments on basic physical human function, born out of his own personal investigation of the ageing process. Transmuting cartoons by mixing and matching body parts from two different animation generations, he creates hybrids. Classic cartoon characters from Looney Tunes, Flinstones and Peanuts are married to more satirical and often lewd personalities from South Park, The Simpsons and Beavis and Butthead.
When Sally and Charlie Brown urinate uncontrollably in public, Cuoghi blatantly conveys the inescapable consequences of ageing. Dyeing his own hair white, growing his fingernails in spirals to reduce dexterity, wearing special glasses to distort his vision, and assuming the mannerisms and habits of his father, Cuoghi disregards the dimension of time. By prematurely initiating the ageing process, he brings himself closer to his father in years and in physical experience. Similarly, in his video montage “Goodgriefies” Cuoghi flattens time by piecing together characters from different decades. Imagine the unsettling image of Butthead’s face sucking Linus’ thumb while clutching his blue blanket or Lisa Simpson’s head on Woodstock’s body, each scene set to a hypnotic rhythm of snaps.
Like Cuoghi, Nate Lowman takes inspiration from his father, a bearded man seen in various ‘70s style photographs that become part of his sprawling More or Less, 2003 mixed-media installation. On the adjacent wall, photographs, newspaper clippings and paintings are tacked up from floor to ceiling, each portraying figures from his collection of men covered by facial hair. In Lowman’s appropriations of sinister male images, he skews perspective creating raw, blown-up images that heighten dramatic effect. A photocopy of John Walker Lindh hanging above the viewer’s head is enlarged to project the intensity of his radical violence and possible insanity.
One of his most striking images is of an anonymous, bearded man on a “law enforcement target” pierced with bullet holes. Aiming his gun at the viewer, he becomes a criminal archetype and a tool in training instinct and sharpening fear.
Influenced by past appropriation artists Andy Warhol and Richard Prince, Lowman causes us to reconsider meaning in familiar icons. With images of Serena Williams’ bearded German stalker Albrecht Stromeyer, Ted Kaczynski, Jerry Garcia, Roberto Cuoghi himself (hardly the sketch of a
thirty year-old man) and others, Lowman’s collection becomes a wall of non-conformists united in infamy.
Kaz Oshiro, a native of Japan, reinterprets American popular culture from a foreigner’s perspective. Creating memorabilia without memory’s context, he hopes to make a “still-life of his generation”. Recalling predecessors such as Rauschenberg and Warhol from Pop, Minimalism and Neo-Geo, he aspires to blend elements of appropriation and Photorealism with each movement to create Post Pop art. In his first exhibit in New York, Oshiro’s meticulous tromp-l’oeil works Fender Amp (PIL), 2001 and Bumper (beer), 1999 subtly reveal the sinew of cultural symbols for better or worse.
The mysterious and presumably fictitious John Dogg has two works in the show, Untitled, 1987 and John Not Johnny, 1987. His unaltered Econoline wheel covering made of silver speckled white vinyl with cursive letters ‘John’ in John Not Johnny mocks the ‘80s art movements like Neo-Geo. Seigel suggests John Dogg should be seen as the father figure to the three other appropriation artists. It seems that while his offspring were each reinterpreting this shared concept they added something new. Depth in meaning.
2003 Summer Program on view from Jun 25-July 26, 2003; Apexart 291 Church Street, NY, NY; Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 11-6; All exhibitions and events are free to the public; www.apexart.org
