To call
Jim Shaw or any artist of his generation a neo-Pop artist is to do a
disservice. Sure, like all of us, he dreams Pop, swims in the movies, and marks
time by the covers of magazines and comic books. His intention, however, is not
to give the larger cultural moment meaning, but to enter that moment as a
positive force. He simply works and, by working, produces new meanings. |
All Too Familiar? Installations by Jim Shaw
|
Shaw has
mastered several forms artists generally don’t think require mastery. The
artists that wander into a Shaw exhibition will find on the wall examples of
the sort of work they do just to pay the bills, work for which they would not
claim authorship; and animation storyboards, trading cards, graphic design,
greeting cards, magazine covers and religious pamphlets all fall within Shaw’s
range. His drawings are minute and incidental. Most of them are refreshingly
unfinished, snapshots along the way to larger works or atomized bits of
something bigger that themselves.
In this
sense, it’s as hard to like every drawing in the exhibition as it is to not
like at least a few things. Among my favorites are his dream drawings from the
90’s. These are precisely drawn comic book pages that choose to incorporate the
complex formal attributes of Jack Kirby’s visual narrative mode– in which
panels swirl around narrative motifs, and dominant panels direct the eye in
descending order toward the total composition– instead of emulating the
kitschy surfaces of Lichtenstein’s work. They are interpretations of dreams
that are brought to independent life as objects– drawings– that overflow with
shared cultural signs, free of psychoanalytical symbolism. Here, Barbara
Walters shares space with evangelical Christians, and a parade float consists
of a massive can of Pepsi sprouting from the torso of a reclining male nude
assembled from legs and genitalia. Whatever private meanings exist in these
drawings are made public. You make of them what you want, or simply add them to
the surplus of your own dreams.
Shaw’s
interest in comic books is just a part of his wider interest in visual
narrative. He is drawn to create pictures that tell a story. Study for
Arrows, made in
1991, is a magazine cover that is one part business trade magazine and one part
Weird Zine. In this picture, men who epitomize the 1950’s Madison Avenue type,
dressed in sharp gray suits and reclining in the lobby of a modern office
tower, seem not to notice a pair of naked Indians drawing arrows from their
basket quivers and taking aim at them. If this is not more or less radical than
a lot of standard commercial imagery from the 1990’s, it still underscores
Shaw’s basic understanding of how we react to such imagery. To use advertising
parlance, it pulls us in: we permeate the image with our own imaginations, fill
in the blanks.
Shaw’s
abstract work is less interesting, though not inconsistent with what he does
otherwise. In some of his Dark Corner Drawings
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> (1992), for instance, he uses a
spirograph. Cheaply ironic, spirograph images puncture the pieties of abstract
art and non-random composition by using a mechanical toy; but we cannot forget
that Jasper Johns and Larry Rivers, with their flags and Dutch Masters cigar
boxes, probably had the last word on this a few decades ago. The most recent
drawings in the show, From The Book of O-ism
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>, are much more promising. They are
rigidly composed, and mimic stylized forms of writing, recalling the
geometricality of ancient Greek pottery while referencing 21st
century cults. One cannot help but read a story into these unreadable symbols;
we begin with the basic problem of how to look at them: vertically, as in
Japanese writing, or left-to-right, as in Western writing?
Doug
Harvey writes, “Shaw’s various strategies…seem to be largely driven by an
embarrassment about authorship,” meaning that Shaw seems to want to slip out of
his individuality, to empathize with the faceless producers of past Weird
magazine covers. But this can only be partly true of any artist who shows his
work in a gallery under his own name. Certainly, Shaw questions authorship in
these drawings, but his purpose here is to reclaim authorship, not only his own
but that of the viewer, as an active participant in the work being done around
him or her. |
