Mad Tv Song Parodies

California painter Jim Shaw, recently the subject of a 25-year retrospective, immerses his viewers in the psychically charged detritus of media overload and dream imagery.

In his complex series of paintings, drawings, sculptures and videos, Jim Shaw fully inhabits the pop life, scouring it for mysteries, exposing its pathologies and taking it to the analyst's couch. As a member of the first TV generation, he showcases a kind of remote-control esthetic. His exhibitions seem to flip through the channels of American culture, continually exposing new formats, art styles, newsbites and plots in progress.

Steeped in references to countless rock songs, movies and TV shows, Shaw's work reflects commercial entertainment's saturation of baby-boomer experience. Depictions of Marvel comics heroes, characters from "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and Norman Rockwell magazine covers drift into his works like snatches of nearly forgotten oldies overheard on an elevator. Juggling mass-market touchstones, he conjures the American pop unconscious, reinterpreting episodes and rewriting anthems that we thought we'd successfully repressed.

Earlier this year a sprawling retrospective, organized by Fabrice Stroun for the Casino Luxembourg--Forum d'art contemporain and Noellie Roussel for the Musee d'Art Moderne et Contemporain (MAMCO) in Geneva, presented over 450 works from Shaw's repertoire that involved over 2,000 components. A truncated version of the show was seen this summer at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. For its European audiences, the show seemed far from the usual Kunsthalle fare, emphasizing the over-the-top productivity and ebullience of a quintessentially American artist who delves deep into the quirkiest recesses of the mainstream.

Although the '60s paintings of Warhol, Oldenburg and Lichtenstein broke down many of the barriers between high and low cultures, most Pop works used the new subject matter to parodically twist classic art-historical themes or tropes, especially focusing on issues deemed sacred by Abstract Expressionism. For example, Lichtenstein's paintings of a school composition notebook or Oldenburg's splashily painted sculptures of food and clothing spoofed sanctified notions of the authenticity of the gesture. Warhol's "Campbell's Soup Can" paintings could be seen as sly comments on the Ab-Ex style of "soupy" paint slinging. For the most part, Pop artists commented on esthetic, social or cultural ideas, rather than producing close readings of specific everyday artifacts. Only in the last two decades have artists such as Alexis Smith, Nicole Eisenman, Raymond Pettibon and Shaw explored the histories and psychologies of specific pop icons and activities.

For most TV-bred Americans, daily life is inundated with the lyrics of countless Top 10 hits and the plots of thousands of Hollywood movies and syndicated sitcoms. Because these fragments have infiltrated our consciousness, we can't help but feel that, by comparison, our mundane experience seems structureless, missing catchy hooks and third-act revelations. This seeming inadequacy of the real world is the crux of Shaw's enterprise. His works grapple with media overload as a kind of irrepressible pathology, a neurotic condition that thrives on overstimulation. Although Shaw seems to relish his addiction to trash, he acknowledges its limitations. His work comically sifts through the confusion of our addled state, stripping down American culture not only to reveal its violence, misogyny and bigotry, but to expose as well its eccentricity, vulnerability, gravity and sweetness.

Shaw's mature work came into focus in a remarkable series of over 120 paintings, reliefs and drawings, each 17 by 14 inches in size, collectively titled "My Mirage" (1987-91). More than 70 of these were on display in the European exhibition. Conceived as a potential book, this project loosely tracks the story of a late '60s adolescent named Billy, whose Middle American values are uprooted by rock music, politics, cult religion and psychedelia. A highly skilled draftsman, Shaw mimics in the series the styles of a startling array of artists, ranging from William Blake to Robert Rauschenberg, from Tom of Finland to Dr. Seuss.

The project is organized into five chapters, the first of which chronicles Billy's childhood phobias, obsessional interests and sexual anxieties, revealed in parodies of such publications as "Classics Illustrated," The Golden Book of Knowledge and the Saturday Evening Post. Billy's Self-Portrait #1 (1986-87) presents Shaw's alter ego as an impish cover boy for the horror aficionado magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. Typically, Shaw's parodic cover wildly mixes references to Goya, a '40s radio serial and the '50s sci-fi film Forbidden Planet, in which "monsters from the id" threaten to wipe out an entire space colony.

Later chapters of "My Mirage" track Billy's inevitable initiation into sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Sharing the naive metaphysical aspirations of his generation, Billy scours his favorite rock albums for keys to the meaning of life. He discovers what he believes is an Apocryphal text in a schlock song by the group Iron Butterfly called "My Mirage," whose lyrics describe a vision painted "for all the beautiful people to come and see." That vision becomes a misguided reality after he joins a cult led by a hapless Manson-like leader. Billy's ersatz spirituality takes the form of visions such as the apparition of the leader's face in a pepperoni pizza, represented in Icon (1990). Finally awakening to the sham, Billy takes the role of Judas in a tripartite version of Leonardo's Last Supper entitled Debemus; Esse; Mortui (1990), which features V-8 juice and Wonder Bread as sacraments. Atoning for his involvement with the cult, Billy finally becomes a born-again TV evangelist, spouting a sermon taken from the lyrics to Jesus Christ Superstar.

The entire saga is told in homages to the cultural sources that shape Billy's development. Shaw meticulously creates parodic versions of Mad magazine, Milton Bradley's The Game of Life, the James Bond girls, evangelistic comics, Dali paintings, Haight-Ashbury posters and the "Paul is dead" conspiracy theory.

The complexity of the elliptically told tale is demonstrated in Beach Boys Weekend (1988). Here, comic-strip panels depict a very slow zoom--intended to evoke the structural device of Michael Snow's film Wavelength (1966-67)--toward a suburban dining-room table over the course of a single weekend. Snatches of Beach Boys songs from a radio mark time as the weekend--and the distance to the table--shortens. In the strip's final panel, the zoom's focal object can be discerned on the table: a copy of the 1963 Life magazine that featured stills from the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination. For a devotee of conspiracy theories, such as Billy, the Zapruder footage marks an end to the innocence embodied in the Beach Boys lyrics.

Shaw followed "My Mirage" with another mock epic, "Horror A Vacui" (1992), a fragmented comic-book tale of paranoiac entropy. This series of black-and-white paintings organized as single comic-book panels--10 of which were on display in the exhibition--chronicles the story, cowritten with Benjamin Weissman, of a serial killer, a special-effects man and a mad chemist whose lives come together in a single bizarre and fatal moment. The complicated plots coalesce in a final panel on which Shaw overlays the entire cycle of 45 images, one on top of the other. The resultant blur is an emblem of the paranoid experience, a concurrence of simultaneous direful events. Imploding his linear narrative in a single frame, Shaw creates on canvas a kind of literary black hole.

In Untitled (Giant Face Painting), 1992, Shaw created a huge portrait in which he divided his face into a grid of 616 panels hung in scrambled order like mismatched puzzle pieces. Psychological fragmentation was also inventoried in Black Narcissus (1992), a grid of 268 photo mug shots of the artist recording various facial expressions. Along with these monumental works, the European retrospective also offered a grouping of Shaw's early "Distorted Face" paintings, including two caricaturelike portraits of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan from 1986. On the facial features of each president, Shaw painted barely discernible miniature images of significant individuals in their respective lives. Kennedy's portrait, for example, which is distorted through a technique that resembles the pixelation of television images, features ghostly renderings of Fidel Castro, Nikita Khrushchev, Marilyn Monroe, Jack Ruby and Lyndon Baines Johnson painted within the president's hair, forehead, cheeks and chin.

Identity for Shaw is a slippery concept. His cultist tastes suggest an outsider sensibility, yet one repeatedly brought into contact with other cult followers. Although individualistic and definitely offbeat, "My Mirage" was predicated on the shared interests of the late '60s counterculture. In Shaw's ongoing curatorial project, the "Thrift Store Paintings," begun in 1990, he presents works by a more surprising group of kindred spirits: amateur artists he has discovered in the junk stores and Goodwill shops of America. Several hundred of the paintings were hung chockablock in two galleries in Geneva.

A connoisseur of oddball subject matter and off-kilter compositions, Shaw defines in his selections a style of homegrown surrealism that melds naivete with a genuine sense of the uncanny. Toppling traditional taboos against kitsch and bad taste, these queasily grotesque portraits, kinky allegories, dimestore versions of Magritte, gory animal studies and sexually overwrought narratives all conjure an American heartland of genuinely weird Sunday painters.

With an audacity unimaginable from more technically proficient artists, the "Thrift Store Paintings" describe fantasy worlds of poodles and schoolgirls, psychedelic spacemen and pink elephants, psychotic clowns and purple toilet paper. Perhaps most jaw-dropping in this array of oddities is a series of four intricately drawn nude portraits depicting Lady Bird Johnson, Nancy Reagan, Rosalynn Carter and--stranger still--the Duchess of Windsor, all smiling, posed with their legs spread and genitalia prominently exposed.

By incorporating these outre art works into his own oeuvre, Shaw accepts the sensibilities of true art-world outsiders with a kind of deadpan amicability. His unconventional connoisseurship implies an endorsement of the paintings' wild passions, pathologies and idiosyncrasies, in a sense claiming them as his own. In the "Thrift Store Paintings," Shaw socializes the fringe, broadening the scope of the art world to include misfits with genuinely alternate sensibilities. As he does so, he claims a broader, kinkier and more populist context for his own work.

In his next project, Shaw explored the most common source of Surrealist imagery: dreams. His first group of these works, from 1993, presents isolated single images that evoke the unsettling mood of the dream state. Visual analogues to Freud's concept of the uncanny, the subjects of these obsessively executed, intricate drawings are odd animals, plants, foods and pieces of furniture. Like the best movie monsters, his oddities--a Surinam toad, a pitcher plant and a pair of sticky buns--are replete with enough yucky textures and visceral ooze to jar the wart-fearing conscious mind.

Accompanying these images are short texts generated from Shaw's retelling of fragmentary narratives gleaned from TV and movies. When Shaw relates part of a James Bond film ("A Caucasian Man in a Tux ... ") or describes Michael Jackson's interview with Oprah ("A Young Person of Indeterminate Age, Race, and Gender ..."), the story seems to have crawled out of the collective unconscious.

Shaw has also made hundreds of sketches of his own dreams, both as an ongoing drawing project and as fodder for visits to his psychoanalyst. Inviting gallery-goers inside his head, he reveals the quirky paranoia, pop-culture obsessions and sexual insecurities one might expect from the maker of the "Billy" series. Serving a functional use in Shaw's psychoanalysis, the drawings communicate visual information in as brisk a manner as possible.

This accumulation of raw data does not, however, suggest specifically psychoanalytic readings; rather, the drawings seem to affirm the accessibility of the dream state. Shaw's fears, for example, of being caught naked at Metro Pictures, his New York gallery, or of being mowed down by traffic in front of the Whitney Museum are understandable to anyone at all familiar with the art world. By identifying with Shaw's dream narratives, the viewer completes the series' fresh and ambitious conceit, moving from the universal to the individual and then back again.

Regularly featuring well-known artists and art objects--as well as a host of art-world cronies--the "Dream Drawings" reflect Shaw's neurotic interest in his career and his compulsive desire to make art. In 1996, Shaw literally began to make his dreams come true in a series in which he created paintings and sculptures of objects that had appeared to him in his sleep. These pieces consist of bizarre imaginings of other artists' works, as well as strange pop projects, such as a trash can filled with tiny paintings, surreal greeting cards and a miniature golf green. Conceived while the artist was asleep, these works share a pedigree that would impress the most doctrinaire '40s Surrealist. Although at times employing bleak landscapes and grotesque monsters not dissimilar from those of Tanguy, Dali and Seligmann, Shaw's dream works achieve a uniquely contemporary effect through the addition of pop-culture references.

In a 1996 painting in the style of Matta, titled Dream Object ("An Archie horror comic painting in the style of Matta ..."), the comic-book character Archie confronts a couple of horror-film monsters. In a large Styrofoam sculpture also from 1996, titled Dream Object ("There was this painted head of Jesus ..."), Lilliputian-sized saints trek up the face of a nearly 6-foot-long head of Christ. Another Christian-themed sculpture from 1997, the more diminutive Dream Object ("I'm attaching yellow-green velvet ..."), features a smiling Howdy Doody puppet with an erection, hauling a large velvet cross on his back. New dream works for the European exhibition included a full-scale self-portrait sculpture of painted fiberglass in the style of Jeff Koons and a teardrop-shaped room made out of tall cardboard tubes, featuring murals depicting the sociopolitical plight of Native Americans.

With their strange visual rhymes and oddball allusions, the "Dream Drawings" and "Dream Objects" demonstrate the unpredictable nature and lunatic humor of the unconscious. Using this rich illogic, Shaw's project alters the traditional terms of art-making. Since he can't control his dreams, he can guiltlessly abdicate esthetic or moral responsibility for his art (as he does with his "Thrift Store Paintings"). These works abound in blatant--and funny--rip-offs of other artists' styles and tropes. Their content, though on the whole tame, is hardly politically correct. The drawings, for example, depict such unrestricted characters and incidents as a mentally retarded Santa Claus, actress Linda Hunt's protest on behalf of "midget actresses" during the Emmy Awards and a sexual encounter between the artist and supermodel Christy Turlington.

Chronicling the intersection of Shaw's psyche with the nearly random flow of daily experience, the "Dream Drawings" and "Dream Objects" construct a new kind of psychological self-portrait, one so weighed down with clinical evidence that diagnosis or analysis seems pointless. As they are folded into the seemingly never-ending saga of dream life, Shaw's libidinous episodes and incidents of neurotic self-obsession, xenophobia, paranoia and petty rivalry seem less personally revelatory than just exemplary of everyday fears and desires. Like the best portraiture, Shaw's project evokes the ineffable complexity and insistent perversity of the human species. Reflecting back on his other projects, his dream works demonstrate how the mind is a kind of thrift-store repository of both direct and mediated perceptions.

With a comic, neurotic neediness, Shaw seeks a healthy relationship with the world at large. His ongoing self-investigation has worked through the mass-culture onslaught of "My Mirage" and staked out kindred sensibilities in the "Thrift Store Paintings." The "Dream Drawings" and "Dream Objects" can be said to socialize Shaw's unconscious, making public his most private fears and fantasies. He melds these realms into a new kind of self-portrait--one accrued from glimpses of his psyche. Updating the stream-of-consciousness technique of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Shaw transforms his dreams into a droll epic crammed with postwar American flotsam and jetsam.

"Jim Shaw: Everything Must Go 1974-1999" was presented at Casino Luxembourg--Forum d'art contemporain [May 8-July 4, 1999]. A smaller version of the exhibition traveled to the Musee d'Art Moderne et Contemporain (MAMCO), Geneva, [Feb. 1-Apr. 30] and the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, [June 17-Aug. 20]. It was accompanied by a 127-page catalogue published by Smart Art Press. An exhibition of Shaw's "Thrift Store Paintings" was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London [Sept. 28-Nov. 5]. Selected works will appear next spring at Metro Pictures, New York.

Michael Duncan is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group

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