The Bill of Wrongs: Will the Real William Powhida Please Stand Up – By James Kalm

Walter Robinson – Blowhard, Jerry Saltz – Hack, Mathew Barney – Fucker, Donald Rumsfeld – Cocksucker, John Ashcroft – Nazi, Takashi Murakami – Jap.

The Bill of Wrongs: Will the Real William Powhida Please Stand Up

By James Kalm

 

 

 

 

Walter Robinson – Blowhard, Jerry Saltz – Hack, Mathew Barney – Fucker, Donald Rumsfeld – Cocksucker, John Ashcroft – Nazi, Takashi Murakami – Jap. No these are not the rantings of a demented art world Don Rickles, or Triumph, the cigar chomping insult dog from late night TV. Nor are these the kinds of invectives that you might expect to hear from a politically savvy and sensible Williamsburg artist. The young careerists I know are all too charming and eager to avoid confrontations with the "powers that be" to express strong opinions about anything, except perhaps hating George W. Bush. These, and a long roster of caricatures and epithets, are the subject of Powhida’s drawing, Enemies List (2004), which was one of several controversial pieces from his recent exhibition "Persona" at Dam and Stuhltrager Gallery.

WHO THE HELL IS WILLIAM POWHIDA? A tough guy, a dork, a teacher, an angry young artist, a drunk, a lover? Yes, no, maybe. These are some of the questions Powhida seems to blurt out, like a Tourettes sufferer who just can’t help himself, and they seem to end up pissing off those people positioned to be the most helpful to him.

I spoke to him recently and asked how he would classify this current body of work, "Slice of life," He answered, almost apologetically, "It’s strange, because for so long I was content to just call myself a painter. I just read Robert Storr’s essay for SITE Santa Fe, (Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque), in which he refers to Freud’s "The Dream – Work" essay. A lot of "Persona" deals with those kinds of ideas, repressed desires, anger, and psychic censorship," said Powhida. "I wouldn’t call myself a performance artist, though there are elements of that in the videos."

The psychological process of personality development, as well as the concept of split personalities, (think of the "Three Faces of Eve") has exerted an irresistible attraction for literary and artistic exploration. Since Pollock transformed painting from depiction to performance, and as Harold Rosenberg presciently observed, changed the canvas into "an arena in which to act – rather than a space in which to reproduce," the barriers were down to exploit art as a shamanistic ritual practice involved in the weaving of myth. What could be more personal than one’s own personality, which is, in a sense, an individual’s mythology regarding their own identity? Powhida seems intent on cultivating and developing the various aspects and shades of his psyche until they become independent "characters," at least for the sake of art. The editing of the video "Persona" has jump cuts of the artist in various "drags," and the audio track sounds like a tweaked out encounter session ("Please don’t ruin my career") with all the participants speaking in the voice of Powhida.

Perhaps his dialectal pursuits of artist and critic provided Powhida with the genesis for this partitioned vision. The aesthetic tools used to assess art, like a double-edged sword, can also be used to evaluate the "art world" and ones own relevance or irrelevance within it. In the pseudo anonymous state of his various personas, Powhida, as if wearing a mask, is free to address and critique anyone and anything without consequence, like the psycho killers who blame their crimes on a suppressed alter ego; "Bad Billy made me do it."

The media with its ever more efficient means of penetrating our consciousness has distilled the face down to the perfect vehicle for emotional content, desires, contentedness and satisfaction. Ironically this may be the ultimate analogy of modernist painting, an image flattened into a state of total surface, capable of proposing infinite illusions, even illusions about not being an illusion. "IM MATURE" (2002) and "Look" (2004) are a pair of largish oil on vellum paintings. They recall the New England school of trompe l’ oeil painters. Harnett, Peto and Haberle practiced a uniquely American approach to painting which sought to elevate the most humble of objects through hyperrealistic depiction. Like Haberle, Powhida renders notes, sketches, rejection letters from galleries, photos and other self-effacing detritus of the artist’s studio, all tacked to the wall on a two dimensional plain. Around the edges the artist has framed the paintings with actual examples of the same kinds of notes, drawings and letters that the pictures depict. Much of this material has a diaristic content, a harsh "reality TV" kind of realism. Anger, frustration, boredom, anxiety, depression, disillusionment, the artist is referred to in any number of emotional states and guises, an intermingling of stand up comedy and primal scream therapy. In this instance, Munch’s "Scream" is a hydra headed mob that laughs, cries, twitches, coughs, burps, giggles, farts, insults, and screams all at once. In a way, this is portraiture, classic selfportraiture, but portraiture as critique of our narcissistic celebrity worshiping twenty-four hour a day web cam decadence. Powhida places today’s art world as the next episode of "Survivor," and your most antagonistic competitors may be aspects of yourself.