by Jerome du Bois
Pseudo-art writer Wynter Holden describes a painting by pseudo-artist Adam Allred:
Take Adam Allred's mixed-media piece Barefoot and Patriotic, for example. A fat, balding man wearing a gas mask and a tight, white tank top perches on his front lawn, watering the concrete driveway where his trusty pickup is parked. The cascading stream from the hose drips down beneath the main image, where book illustrations of missile launcher instructions and injured soldiers peer through a thin veil of muddy brown. A pile of skulls caked with blood is the foundation of the painting.
It's a powerful piece.
The smoky pastel tones and thick impasto technique of the painting are reminiscent of local artist Colin Chillag's cityscapes, but Allred's message about Phoenix is far more insidious. We post American flags on our pink stucco houses like badges of honor at the same time we're becoming obese, wasting water and sending friends and relatives to die so that we can keep our redneck American dream. Yee-haw.
Holden enjoys anti-Americanism; its simplistic and submental notions bypass any critical thinking. From a mini-review, in the same issue of New Times, of the next crew of clones coming out of ASU's MFA program:
"Annual Summer Juried Exhibition" at ASU Harry Wood Gallery: This year's crop of MFA hopefuls shows a surprising awareness of domestic issues including water conservation, racial profiling and changing family values. Look for tongue-in-cheek political lampoons, like Exhibitions Class Award winner Corie J. Cole's ceramic caricatures of cowboy Bush and his Elmer Fudd sidekick. The well-modeled figures grin over the carcass of a white elephant, gold blood dripping from two bullet holes in its head. In R. Eric McMaster's Lawn Ornament, a molded plastic businessman perches in Astroturf. He wears a tight suit and tie, and flashes the frozen grin of a good corporate drone. These young artists can't predict the future, but they certainly seem to know what awaits them in the real world
Cole and McMaster, who are too young to know much at all about the real world, are two years late for the anti-American, grossly-misnamed "Democracy in America" show that Marilyn Zeitlin, John Spiak, and Heather Lineberry tried to fob off on the public during election year 2004. They would have fit right in there.
By the way, on the same page as the mini-review, the paper runs an ad about its art listings with the heading "More Creativity Than Dubya's Vocabulary." Oh, ouch. These losers sure know how to stay stuck on stupid.
Back to Allred. Let's try to wedge ourselves into his tiny brain for a moment, the better to understand this clutter of clichés.
It's easy to see the influence of his anti-American teachers and professors, and his own uncritical adoption of their dispositions. They doled out the predigested pap, he swallowed it, and Wynter Holden regurgitated it. Why think for yourself when it's already been done for you? Because thinking is difficult, and the complexities and subtleties of real life are far beyond his mental capacities. Better to stick with the cartoon outlines he has already assimilated.
So there he is in front of a blank canvas with not one original thought in his head. Typical day. What to do, what to do? He reaches into the shallow drawer of his mind and chooses a few snapshots of stupidity, old and faded from overexposure. But he thinks, Whoa! This is a powerful idea. This is new. This will truly expose all those fat white redneck pickup dudes.
So, to own your own home, your own car, and to take care of both, is somehow wrong. To recognize that these achievements are only possible under the aegis of American law, symbolized by the flag, is somehow wrong. And of course only rednecks --a word as odious as nigger-- are fat. Really? What about anti-American artists like Jon Haddock and Heidi Hesse? They're porky. Oh, but they trash this great country, so they get to keep stuffing their faces. And complex social dynamics like water conservation and war can be blamed on the suburbanite.
Well, hell, turnabout is fair play, idnit?
I won't even try to top Catherine King's wicked portrait of Blue McCool --the best parody name ever, followed closely by sloan23 and JenJusJen-- so I'll just draw a quick composite sketch of the kind of people who turn out this kind of crap.
You emerge from the Hamberger school with your BFA ticket in hand, and straw men stuffed in your head. It's official: you're an artist. You must be. All your teachers, all your life, have told you how talented you are; it's how they justify their jobs, and satisfy school administrators: attendance means money. You could not have failed, and you haven't.
You move to the downtown Phoenix "arts district," a skanky carnival of unmusical music, bad fashion, burlesque, and crystal meth. Oh! and art, of course; the art.
You're already pierced and tattooed, with triple-hued hair, but who isn't, so you need more. You begin your blending in by ducking into Ret Lab and coming out wearing an overpriced and undersized pink t-shirt with The Knaked Knitters printed thereon. You pin an anti-Bush button on it. Baggy jeans by Nobody. Local artist fridge magnet in your left front pocket, shrinklet in your right. Sideways gimme hat. Rubber rainbow wristband. Skull ring. Cross neckchain. New Sonic Youth CD. Timberland and Idiotic. Congratulations: you look like everybody else.
As you check out the downtown galleries you feel right at home, because your art looks just like everybody else's, too. This is a good thing. You don't want to stand out, you want to fit in. You won't have to pound the pavement for years, like Wayne Thiebaud, or labor in obscurity for four years, like Jasper Johns. People like Scott Sanders and Kimber Lanning will take you under their wings right quick, because you're safe as milk, and just as common. And as long as you agree with their embedded and enduring hatred of the great country which suffers their presence, you can't go wrong.
So you party, snort, and paint, in that order. You're a Phoenix artist. And if that seems an unfair and reductive portrait --well, you asked for it. And it's a lot closer to the truth than Allred's painting.
Posted by Jerome at June 9, 2006 07:49 AM | TrackBack