Unpublished Interview with Thomas Woodruff

Abby Hertz

Interview with Thomas Woodruff

September 29, 2008

The week before his solo show at P.P.O.W. gallery, I sat down with artist Thomas Woodruff, who is the head of the Illustration and Cartooning Department at the School of Visual Art. Woodruff’s work had just been featured in the first major retrospective of “Low Brow” art, “In the Land of Retinal Delights: The Juxtapoz Factor,” at the Laguna Art Museum, curated by Meg Linton. The artists in this exhibition never agree on what to call their movement, and even if it can be called one singular movement at all. Woodruff has a lot to say on this matter, and about where he thinks he fits in as an artist inspired by, but not constricted to, the things of “lower” culture(s). The following are excerpts from Woodruff’s statements during our interview, edited down into something across between an essay and a fluid train-of-thought. -Abby Hertz

I don’t know if I’m actually considered a Low-Brow artist. I was recently in the Juxtapoz show, which is different from the term “low brow,” a term that came from the Juxtapoz editor Robert Williams, who said himself that it’s not the best term for this type of art. Pop surrealism isn’t any good either because it certainly doesn’t apply to my work, although I do prefer it to Low Brow.

The truth is I’ve been working way before Juxtapoz even started being published, let alone before the term “Low Brow” was coined. I’m actually surprised that I am linked in with Low Brow art, since the content is not used in a clear way, it’s used almost as a jazz riff. I’m a lot more specific in the way that I present my images. It’s not haphazard and it’s not meant to be kitschy. It’s meant to work with a vocabulary of images that people can associate and then come to some sort of realization or reaction, which is a little different from a gonzo surrealism. Pop Surrealists throw a lot of stuff together to get a warm fuzzy feeling. I have nothing against a warm pleasant feeling, but I have a different approach to imagery.

Surrealism in general isn’t all that interesting to me because it’s based on dreams and I think we live in a time where people’s bodies do really horrific things1, so the nightmare is not a Freudian dreamscape, it’s a reality. And I hope that in my work there’s a certain plausibility that’s not fantasy related. A lot of the artists that are considered part of this movement have a sort of “fun” quality to their work, which ultimately isn’t that satisfying to me.

I feel more of a parallel to artists who have been using figuration in a subversive way in terms of communicating ideas. I know who all of the interesting figurative artists are; we say hi to each other on the little figurative Disney Land ride that goes around in circles. I always thought figurative art was subversive because people other than the “indoctrinated” couldn’t enter into it. And I always thought that that was just a really subversive thing to do. When I first started making pictures with imagery, people thought that my work was conservative. It’s a complicated thing to try and walk all of the different lines at the same time--but it is changing, and you know when you refuse to move, eventually you’re somehow kind of respected.

So it’s not like it’s a wasteland. What I could do is a show on conceptual figuration. That is a movement. It’s not as loose and sloppy as Low Brow, which essentially came up because of Juxtapoz magazine, and all the people that were in Juxtapoz were in there because of some kind of personal relationship with Robert Williams or with Jamie O’Shea. Now it seems like Juxtapoz is older and that without the original publisher, it has gone corporate. Unless an artist has a deal to design sneakers and skateboards they’re not a “real” artist. And that’s totally contrary to the magazine’s roots. A lot of people are very saddened by that.

What happened was that all of a sudden a lot of poseurs were doing the look of some of the original artists without the skill or the depth. There are a million talented, good-looking, young artists trying to get someplace. You have to be serious about what you’re doing and not be in it for the wrong reasons: there has to be a cutting-off point. You can’t just be interested in what you’re interested in, you have to be interested in the tradition of making images. There is a strange, Low Brow cultural war that involves being working class and proud, and sort of stupid. The best artists that I know go to see everything and they really think about imagery. They go to films, they go to the opera, they go the ballet, and they’ll do all of these things that are not just a cool “surf thing” and not normally associated with low brow culture.

A lot of the Low Brow artists are very savvy commercially. I just wish it was a little smarter. There’s nothing really engaging me in ways that I wish I could be engaged. I’ll show you pretty stuff, and you can be amused by it like a child with a mobile above their basinet, but there’s other stuff out there. Most Low Brow artists aren’t doing anything except for the shiny mobile. It’s very seductive art. I myself like to use everything. I know as much about high culture as I do about low culture. The idea is to be able to navigate all of those things. It’s as much about the Pompeian fresco as it is about the sideshow banner.

When it comes down to it, there’s too much of a distinction between high and low art. The “good” artists are the ones that are usually off the beaten track. They are the minor notes on the scale, not the do re mi’s. I usually like the Juxtapoz artists who are not the superstars. A lot of these artists do need a lot more time prove themselves and to develop, though. If they’re doing their one-trick-pony over and over then they won’t end up being important. They’ll just remain one-trick-ponies. These artists don’t have a tendency to grow. I haven’t seen a lot of growth in the past 15 years; they’ve been using the same forms, same techniques. It’s the idea that if you hit a bank, you don’t have to work harder. The “look du jour” of Pop Surrealism is fairly easy to reproduce. The same thing happened with Abstract Expressionism where everybody and their brother were doing Ab-Ex because it was easy.

In modernism process trumped content. And I just never really understood that as being a value judgment. It always seemed an arbitrary distinction and huge swaths of our history have been minimized because of it. So, what is happening now is very similar. I’m called a mere illustrator, as opposed to a pure abstractionist, because I’m more interested in content rather than process. I’m still interested in process but it’s not fetishized the way it is in modernism. I’ve had to fight battles for it. The modernists are the real enemy to picture-making. And that’s simply because it’s just a bizarre bias that’s happened: loose is good, tight is bad. There’s no reason why that should exist. That’s a silly rule.

The big issue with Low Brow is what’s going to happen to this work. Because frankly there’s no major collector, there’s no Peggy Guggenheim. So that means, at least not at this point, that it’s not being protected. Serious collectors have been going elsewhere. Essentially it’s in the collections of a lot of people’s homes and not in institutions. Until it becomes the stuff of museums it’s very problematic. Real collectors and real curators aren’t taking that work and putting them into museums. I’ve been approached by a lot of the “low brow” gallerists and I’ve had to turn them down because I don’t want my work to be in the collection of Leonardo DiCaprio because you will probably never see that work again. It just gets sucked into this big vortex of celebrity which is driving Low Brow because most of it is on the West Coast.

The way that the art world works is that very influential people hook up with certain artists. They’ll buy a certain piece and give it to a major museum. Billy Shire, one of Low Brow’s biggest collectors and a gallerist, isn’t going to be giving his collection to LACMA. He doesn’t have those kind of relationships with bigger museums. Supposedly the Nike CEO is amassing a collection now, so his collection might end up being the most important for these artists. But the jury’s still out on that one. Either this guy is like the Gertrude Stein of Pop Surrealism or all of this great work is being heaped into a big black hole that’s never going to get out.

It’s going to be very hard to write criticism of Low Brow work as well. In the same way that serious collectors have not embraced it and museums have not embraced it, critics have also really been nasty about its relevance. I was one of the first curators to combine high brow and low brow art in one show in Chelsea. I think that the distinctions that have to be made are just whether it is good art or bad art. The exhibition I curated with Becky Smith at Bellwether Gallery was called “Idols of Perversity,” based on the book of the same title by Bram Dijkstra. He writes all about the pre-Raphaelites and that whole period in the 19th century where the male gaze created this sick girl or the demon girl and how every man wanted her because of her weakness. It’s a phenomenon that still happens today in both high and low art, so we explored that.

For example, on one wall we had a Ray Caesar of a girl smoking a pipe or something, a John Currin of a bald woman who almost looked like she was going through chemo therapy, and an exquisitely beautiful watercolor drawing by Mel Odom, who’s an illustrator from the 1980’s. So those three things were on a wall together and they were making this very interesting little song. And it was a kind of fascinating phenomenon, because the truth is, if I were to take one home with me, I would probably take the Odom because it’s just so beautiful. But the reviews were all about the Currin, because it was selling for, like, $600,000 while the others were much lower.

I don’t want to get into this whole Sarah Palin-insipired argument, where you like her because she’s like us and we don’t care if she’s not qualified, she’s not “elitist.” We have to very careful when we talk about low brow that we’re not talking about elitism. So that the artists involved are in fact trained and educated, once again, for the right reasons.

But, on the flipside, what’s really creepy in the art world, is that there is this certain bizzaro logic that artists like Elizabeth Peyton or Banks Violet are somehow the connection that out-of-touch collectors have with the youth culture. People think that Banks Violet is actually cool. When in actual fact, if he ever went to one of these heavy-metal concerts, he’d be beat up. So, there’s a total sense of falseness that these artists are tapping into. The high tapping the low, but it’s fake.

I remember at one point I was talking with an artist friend about what was happening in cartooning with manga, which is truly revolutionary. At that point, Marian Boesky had Murakami’s show of his art assistants doing manga work, and she said, “Oh! You have to send all of your students over to see this show!” And it’s like, uh, why should I send them? That show is the fake version, the commodified version, the whimpy version to appeal to rich, uptight collectors! It’s not anything authentic. What’s authentic is in ‘zines coming out. It’s like saying, “oh you like punk rock? There’s that Mama Mia on Broadway you should see.” What’s happening is that there’s these highfalutin, rich art kids going to these fancy schools, hooking into a little bit of pop culture and doing their first few shows on it. You walk into these shows and it’s like, “oh, ok. You’re doing a skateboard ramp. Isn’t that fantastic.” So, you know these tired, old collectors can feel like they know what’s going on with “kids today.” It’s sad.

I chose to dwell in academia because it’s a world of ideas and not a world of commerce. 

All of these issues are things that I’ve had to wrestle with a lot, because I’ve been doing a traditional, fine art trajectory and creating work that doesn’t necessarily fit into any of these boxes. If you were to define what Low Brow art is, and start putting people into these boxes, than I don’t think I would fit in there, even if people lump me in to that category. First of all, because I’m gay. Everyone in the movement is a straight male doing images of girls. Or girls doing images of themselves. Essentially there’s an underlying misogyny that I don’t agree with, and that my work doesn’t reflect. I’m getting sick of seeing all these Christina Ricci portraits with surrealist bells and whistles attached. I’m over it. If that’s considered a movement, then what are we left with? Who’s included and who isn’t? It’s going to be interesting to see what kind of an impact this art will actually have.

1 Woodruff has often referenced the AIDS epidemic in his work, such as in his series The Secret Charts (1994) and Apple Canon (1996).

Camille Rose Garcia at Jonathan LeVine

Camille Rose Garcia’s second solo exhibition at Jonathan LeVine, “Ambien Somnambulants,” just might be the perfect exhibition for adults who like their fairy tales served with a hefty dose of quasi-nihilistic sociopolitical observations. Garcia, who is increasingly considered one of the leading ladies of the Low Brow movement, is known as much for her glossy finishes as her cultural criticism. As in her first exhibition here in 2006, “Subterranean Death Clash,” the artist paints a series of panels that warn of the planet’s imminent destruction using frilly fairy tale characters, decorative design and a spattering of glitter.

Innocent and insidious at once, Garcia weaves a story of a witch with poisonous apples who casts a spell on languid-looking swans, Bambi-esque deer, wolves, bats and butterflies. The illustrated characters are painted flatly against colorful backgrounds of splatters and drips, as if they have been collaged by a morbid Disney-dropout, or a highly-skilled teenager armed with a set of sparkly stickers and a can of spray paint.

In the 48 by 48 inch painted wood panel The Sleepwitch, one of Garcia’s signature sad-eyed, dark haired girls is metamorphosed into a flying witch with butterfly wings and a worm-like body. Set against a background of dripping and lightly blended blocks of color, the witch hovers over bottles that pour red liquid onto apples, down-turned flowers, black mushrooms, and a swan that is crying bright orange tears in a swirling pattern. The forms seem to be stuck onto the colorful background as in the flat-based field of design, without regard to depth of field or perspective.

The sociopolitical content of the series is not obvious at first glance and the work definitely has the potential to come off as purely fluff and gloss given its sheer “prettiness.” In her artist statement, Garcia describes the series as telling the story of, “a powerful witch [that] delivers apples poisoned with sleep elixir to the Ambien Somnambulents, a sleepwalking army of fancy dressed revelers, innocent and content in their dream world of complete denial.” The artist intentionally veils her dark subject matter with beauty in order to provide an entrance to difficult issues such as the destruction of the environment, abuses of the pharmaceutical industry, self-medication, escapism and an ultimately destructive conquest for shiny objects. Black, oil-like drips surround the edges of several pieces, providing both a stylized frame for the composition and a reference to the world’s dangerous addiction to petroleum. Oversized Ambien pills are cradled by swans and cartoon deer lick apples that leak blood red poison. Underneath the glitter, there is chaos.

Garcia’s first solo show at LeVine featured the same bottles of poison, cartoon swans, black drips and a fairy tale about the destruction of the planet. There are a few welcome changes in the new show, however, that demonstrate some artistic growth. For one thing, Garcia’s established palette of dark grays, smoky purples, and muddy blues is now integrated with a shockingly bright arsenal of day-glow oranges, sea-foam greens and candy-apple reds. The compositions are more filled-out, detailed, and utilize space better than before, which could be seen as a progression from her previous method of creating a central figure with surrounding embellishments. The collage-effect is taken up several notches demonstrated by an intense layering of forms and glazes of paint combined with actual collaged pieces of wallpaper. Although her forms and subject matter remain the same, Garcia is experimenting with technique, color, and space.

Because of the overtly commercial nature of most Low Brow work, many of the artists rely too heavily on what’s worked for them and don’t show sizeable artistic growth. There is some evolution apparent in Garcia’s "Somnambulants", but the question remains whether it is enough to give her a place as an important and interesting artist both inside and outside of the Low Brow world. The visual seductiveness of her paintings far outweighs any political content, which is still too vague and cookie-cutter to be the most significant element in her work. And yet, the fact that there is any underlying message to her work is refreshing in a movement that tends to fixate on glossy surfaces and meaningless symbolism. Garcia may never deviate from the method of using beauty and pop to convey sociopolitical messages, and that just may be okay: her art is greatly aesthetically appealing and the content is generally accessible. If she keeps using the same forms and characters (sad-eyed girls, swans, deer, and more swans) to express these messages, however, her art will be in danger of dying from commercially-induced repetition. Garcia, as well as the rest of the Low Brow staples, still needs to prove that she is dedicated to the same level of artistic development as more conventional artists and not just the marketability of her style.

“In the Land of Retinal Delights: The Juxtapoz Factor" at Laguna Art Museum

Come one, come all and behold a real, live art movement, right now, in the 21st century!

It’s hard to believe that in the age of fissures and post-post modern indecisiveness, a cohesive art movement exists. The idea seems to belong in a sideshow theater, as an anomaly or a relic of the past, but there is proof at the Laguna Art Museum that the practice is not yet extinct. “In the Land of Retinal Delights: The Juxtapoz Factor,” brings together 145 artists in the first large-scale display of art from what is commonly called the Low Brow or Pop Surrealist movement. Defying a concrete definition, the painting-based tendency of art is influenced by illustration, comics, car culture, street art, poster art, album covers, and many other veins of popular or “low” culture. Curator Meg Linton provides a focus for the potentially overwhelming exhibition by emphasizing the importance of Juxtapoz magazine, founded by artist Robert Williams in 1994, and its role in the dissemination of Low Brow art. Nearly all the artists in the exhibition were promoted in the pages of Juxtapoz during the first 10 years of its existence, helping to create what followers of the movement would eventually refer to as a “Juxtapoz” style.

Covering two floors of the museum, the show begins with spacious galleries neatly displaying blockbuster paintings. The first visible work is the Clayton Brothers’ sprawling, unstretched canvas titled Behave Be Kind (2000) that features cartoonish characters painted in a carnival aesthetic. The adjacent room holds underground icon Alex Grey’s monumentally-sized triptych Journey of the Wounded Healer, a hyper-detailed and brightly colored painting that combines anatomical drawing with psychedelic and spiritual imagery. So many of the paintings presented in the first two galleries are tour de forces exalting classical techniques and realistic rendering. Most notable is Mark Ryden’s crisp The Creatrix, a Renaissance-style portrait of a doe-eyed queen set against a surrealistic landscape containing dinosaurs, sea creatures, and a pipe-smoking Santa Claus with four arms. The painting could be the poster child for the term “pop surrealist” with its disparate images and novelty appeal.

The exhibition continues on the basement level of the museum, with a plethora of small and medium-sized works by staple Low Brow artists. Gary Baseman’s creepy-cute canvas featuring little girls clubbing strange characters greets the viewer at the bottom of the stairs, and it is set next to two small canvases from Takashi Murakami’s DOB series. While there are individual, strong pieces on the bottom floor, such as the more historical works by forefathers Henry Darger, R. Crumb, and R.K. Sloane, the rooms lack the fluidity of the first floor. The vibe is also generally thrown-off by Kevin Ancell’s noisy, chintzy installation Aloha Oe (2000) which consists of about 20 life-size, mechanized hula dancers holding guns and grenades. The swaying pieces of plastic take up far too much space in such an important exhibition.

Another weak point of the mostly well curated show is the appearance of “high brow” favorites Kara Walker, Wangechi Mutu and Patricia Piccinini, who have small pieces in side galleries on the main floor. Thrown in as references to the influence of Low Brow aesthetics on mainstream art, their inclusion comes off more as an attempt to legitimize the surrounding work than a way to diversify the content of the exhibition, as stated by Linton in the wall texts. There are valid arguments that can be made for other blue-chip artists in the show, such as Raymond Pettibon, Takashi Murakami and Andre Serrano; Pettibon was a part of the scene in the 1980s before his leap into the mainstream, Murakami is the father of Low Brow Japanese art and Serrano is featured in the exhibition as a representative of the culture wars of the late 1980s, which Linton states in the catalogue helped further Low Brow artists’ agenda of pushing boundaries. The strength of “Retinal Delights,” however, is its intense focus and the nod to the high brow world is mostly a distraction, even if a few of the artists’ involvement can be justified.

Presenting a large and complex movement for the first time is an enormous undertaking, and Linton could have easily tried to explore too much at once. Starting out with a small slice of the pie and moving forward from there is definitely more conducive than trying to tackle everything. Putting the focus on Juxtapoz, the artists that sparked its creation and the first group of artists that were, in turn, influenced by the magazine is an effective route to presenting Low Brow art to the public. Having said that, it would be wonderful to see an even larger retrospective at a major museum that outlines and organizes the movement as a whole. Although this is a West Coast-based exhibition, the influence of East Coast artists is greatly missed and the dynamic that the art of the two coasts creates is essential in providing an accurate scope of the movement. More scholarship in general needs to be dedicated to dissecting the intricacies of the multi-faceted style being that is the most cohesive and accessible movement of art in the past 20 years. Linton has planted a much-needed seed in the “established” art world, now others need to join in helping it to grow.

Anne Faith Nicholls at La Luz de Jesus Gallery

Every so often one finds a treasure amidst trash. The premise of La Luz de Jesus gallery in Los Angeles evokes the treasure hunter in us all, even if the art it presents isn’t always a gem. Located in the center of a larger, brightly colored shop filled with artsy odds and ends, the 22-year-old Low-Brow mainstay run by art guru Billy Shire continues to deliver new artists to a dedicated and appreciative public. This month a recent transplant from San Francisco, Anne Faith Nicholls, has her first Los Angeles solo show, “Neofolk.”

The aptly titled display of folksy, urban-influenced oil and mixed media paintings can be best described as cute and streamlined. The fare has stereotypically Low Brow characteristics such as an overload of tattoo-style swallows, five-point stars, poster-style letters and spray-paint drips. This borderline formulaic use of symbols is paired with an illustrative, flat perspective, and a compositional symmetry that all contribute to a design-oriented feel. Although the surface of the medium-sized canvases lacks texture, an illusion of layered media is created by painting images one-over-the-other. While there is no actual collage, the works definitely display a collage aesthetic.

Aside from the predictable application of swallows and paint drips, Nicholls’s distinct point of view shows through in her fusion of a whimsical folk-based style with urban landscapes and throw-backs to street art. Some elements are reminiscent of turn-of-the-last-century relics of pop culture, such as black paper silhouettes and ornate Victorian-style patterns, while emblems of 1950s California beach-culture make frequent appearances and a general “vintage” vibe dominates. Contemporary components are also easily identifiable, such as tattoo designs, clusters of modernistic skyscrapers, and an abundant use of spray-paint.

Described by the artist in the press release as “unapologetically autobiographical,” the content outlines her struggle for identity in paintings such as Looking Out From Within and The Plunge. Nicholls paints herself in seemingly internal conflict, surrounded by flames, lightning bolts and storm clouds in disjointed picture planes. In the former, she is trapped in a snow globe filled with rain and a burning building; in a surreal touch she has the body of a woman and the head of a pigeon. Dream-like fragmentation underlies the body of work as a whole, adding to Nicholls’s diverse pool of sources and her identification with the Pop Surrealist/Low-Brow movement.

The outcome of the amalgamation of old and new pop symbolism is a quaint and personable aesthetic that fits well in La Luz de Jesus’s low-key setting. Nicholls is not ready to show, however, at Shire’s bigger and more professional gallery in Los Angeles, Billy Shire Fine Arts. The artist has not ventured outside of using simple aesthetic equations set by the Low Brow movement, making it apparent that her art benefits greatly from being presented amidst the fantastic ambience of La Luz’s surrounding shop. Her paintings would gain strength if they were to express her own emotional reality without clinging to familiar symbols and techniques, a practice that is holding Nicholls’s back from growing as an artist.

Marcel Dzama’s Marriage of Violence and Sexuality

Marcel Dzama’s world of disturbed characters has expanded into the third dimension and the cinematic realm. For his fifth solo show at David Zwirner, Even the Ghost of the Past, the young Canadian artist departs from his typically quaint drawings in a showy display of dioramas, film, and complex compositions. With the added complexity, the artist probes more deeply into issues surrounding the connection of sexuality to violence, violence to sexuality, and larger themes of gender-related power constructs.

The first room of the exhibition contains several of the artist’s characteristic whimsically demented drawings, where cute animals intermix with a perverted array of carnival-like men and women engaged in lascivious acts in muted colors against a white background. In Poor Sacrifices of our enmity, a cluster of female archers hunch over their drawn bow and arrows, aiming at a central bull figure or randomly into space. The women are desexualized through their plain dress and hidden bodies, representing a threatening female archetype reminiscent of the Amazons.

In the thematically rich drawing The Hidden, the unknowable, and the unthinkable, an oversized naked woman is being stretched from each limb while other naked women with masks, naked men, and a few clothed figures play on her body like a jungle gym. One man is seen lynched from her extended arm. Another naked woman crawls out of the neck of the headless body. Possibly alluding to the mythical story of the Maenads ripping their victims limb from limb, the drawing represents a vicious yet playful destruction of the female body, possibly by the male artist. A fully clothed male is suspended in the air with a paint brush and a half-finished canvas, suggesting that the stretched central figure is a model or muse.

In the drawing The ghost of Picabia will corrupt the souls of the youth, the Dadaist artist Francis Picabia, who was known for having affairs with his dancer models, is referenced through the depiction of a male figure clothed head-to-toe in black and holding a bull-whip that is directed at a line of young girls dancing. Once again investigating the relationship of male artist to female subject, Dzama creates a troubling look at sexual dynamics in relation to positions of power and submission.

The characters from Dzama’s small-scale drawings are inflated into 3-D dioramas in the second room of the exhibition, recessed into the walls and dimly lit. In First Born, a large bear figure stands holding a woman’s legless and armless body in the air while his other arm is outstretched, grasping a club-like object, ready to strike the woman. A man in a suit reaches up to stop the bear from beating the woman, a static and generally expressionless look on his face. A woman (the man’s significant other?) stands cautiously behind him, holding his hat. Strongly suggesting domestic abuse but portrayed with a surrealistic distance, Dzama’s cool depiction of violence against women is intriguing and discomforting in its ambiguity.

In what is the most disturbing piece of the show, the diorama The Underground, three masked terrorists with guns stand over a naked, squatting woman with a tube running out of her vagina and into the mouth of a man in a suit lounging in a stomach-shaped mole hole. Dzama typically leaves his art open for interpretation, but this particular piece has an accompanying artist page in a display case in the first room of the exhibit. The artist notes that there should be a yellow light shining on the tube to represent urine, erasing what could be a less provacative perception of the tube as an umbilical cord and the man as gestating in a womb-like structure. With this information the violent undertones of the scene are centralized, placing the woman in a position of shame, intimidation, and sexual victimization at the hands of the men.

The sound of a piano (live on certain Saturdays) beckons the viewer to sit in one of the two rows of theater seats to watch the silent film, Lotus Eaters (2005), in the final room of the exhibition. The most prevalent female archetype in Dzama’s drawings, the femme fatale, comes to life as the artist’s deceased wife whom he, like Orpheus, frantically searches for in the afterlife. Although the film is ultimately entertaining and enjoyable from a formalist standpoint, the puzzling sexual dynamics between man and woman, artist and subject, linger unanswered.

The suggestion of male dominance and female submission underlies Dzama’s current body of work. While a few examples of sadomasochism are present in the drawings, the overall power dynamics relate mainly to gender constructs. If the general context of the exhibition would have been sadomasochistic, then the submission of the females would have taken on a new (and less negative) connotation, representing sexual play rather than a real inconsistency in power. Aside from the overtly negative portrayal of women, the psychological complexities behind Dzama’s art are ultimately intriguing partially because they represent an innate connection between sex and violence that is often ignored but consistently present throughout human history.

Recycling the Past, Anticipating the Future

Death, sexuality, domesticity, childhood, Life. These are the themes artist Robert Gober has explored since his emergence in the New York art scene in the 1980’s, a decade known for decadence as much as for death and disease, the AIDS epidemic. As an antidote to these issues, the openly gay Gober created hand-made, non-fabricated objects that addressed the confusing connection between the activity of sex and the act of dying. Now, more than twenty years later, the artist uses his own body of work as a source for appropriation, recycling central imagery such as faucets, rifles, apples, bird nests, and isolated body parts to continue a discussion of facing life and sexuality in the face of death.

Following a large-scale solo exhibition at Matthew Marks in 2005 focused on religion and politics, Gober presents a more intimate and personal show at Marks’ two smaller galleries on West 21st and 22nd Street. Each gallery presents untitled sculptures of a partially dismantled chair mounted on the wall, with large breasts protruding outward from the seat and various other Goberian elements included.

One of the cast gypsum polymer chairs has the surreally rendered legs of a female child wrapped flaccidly around its rungs, dark human hair accenting the pale flesh on each limb. The treatment of the seemingly lifeless legs have a violent yet playful quality, provoking thoughts of either a crime scene or a jungle gym on a playground. The stark contrast between innocence and the loss thereof provides an eerie and thought provoking element that continues in surrounding works in the exhibition.

Another of the breasted-chair sculptures features a handcrafted rifle entering the empty space between the legs of the chair and curving (flaccidly, again) around the front so that the barrel is pointed directly between the two breasts. The curvature morphs the gun from threatening and phallic into a faucet-like object, thus emphasizing the non-functionality of both the gun and the faucet.

Of the more gentle pieces present is a chair without any presentation of violence, but of life and birth instead. The tiny, blue eggs of a robin sit in a nest that rests inside the framework of the chair, appearing as though it is delicately balanced on top of the rungs. This piece could address the struggle in becoming a woman, whether it is letting go of childlike qualities or becoming a mother, or simply the act of creation amidst life’s injustices.

Superficially, Gober’s sculptures can seem violent and misogynistic. It would be easy to dismiss Gober as a woman-loathing male due to the violent undercurrents of his representations of women, but within these pieces there also exists a tenderness, and a sense of personal struggle. Deeper investigations need to be forged in order to understand the artist’s use of gender, sexuality, and his allusions to death or violence.

The exhibition at Marks has neither a title nor a press release, even though there are a plethora of essential details in the body of work that necessitate explanation. Luckily, a surprisingly friendly gallery assistant, Jonathan, informed me that the chair featured in the show is a replica of the first piece of furniture that Gober purchased when he arrived in New York City. This little bit of information is instrumental in interpreting the rich iconography present in the sculptures, which are full of possibilities for a Freudian analysis. Sans press release, interesting details about the show such as this or that the frames surrounding small linoleum block prints are handcrafted in apple wood (the same wood as the butt of the rifle), are lost without a thorough interrogation of the gallery staff or an insider’s knowledge of the artist’s work.

After learning about the history of the chairs, a more personal interpretation of the exhibition comes into focus. Being as that the chairs represent the artist’s entrance into the New York art world, one can conclude that when combined with the incorporated symbolism they represent both the birth of his life as an artist, and the death of a child-like naiveté.

Another tidbit I received from my long conversation with Jonathan was that the artist brought his mother and his sister to the gallery the day before to revisit his pieces during an afternoon outing, and that he has a close relationship with them both. This information led me to reevaluate my Freudian analyses and conclude that Gober’s sculptures are based more on an analysis of his own experiences than a meditation on gender specifically.

The artist’s entrance into the New York art world in the 1980’s inevitably included a loss of innocence tied to harsh realities, such as the discovery of the AIDS virus and his position as a gay male in the scheme of these issues. By reusing his own arsenal of images related to death, sexuality, childhood, and rebirth, Gober continues on a path of self-discovery that is directly linked to larger and complex societal concerns.

The World Famous *Bob*'s !BadAss! Birthday Bash

photo by Stacie Joy

In case you’ve been in a cave for the past ten years, the art of burlesque has experienced a vast revival, pervading not only popular culture but the high brow halls of museums. This Neo-Burlesque is not your classic striptease but a theatrical, humorous, dramatic, intelligent, political, and sexy revision that is also a new brand of performance art. A combination of satirical sketches, modern dance, classic striptease, and avant garde theater, the end product is entertaining, thought provoking, and diverse depending on the venue and the performer.



New York City is the center of the burlesque revival, and any given day there is bound to be a performance occurring somewhere in the five boroughs. While many troupes practice a more traditional form of burlesque (stripping+comedy), a few are intent on breaking rules and expanding the definition of the nearly lost art. !BadAss! Burlesque describes itself as the underbelly of the New York burlesque scene, bringing together performers that push boundaries and are often too unusual for mainstream audiences. Producer Velocity Chyaldd has organized a monthly show for the past three years at The Bowery Poetry Club that is dedicated to politically and socially conscious performance art where almost anything goes. If you have a weak stomach, a vanilla outlook, or want to ogle perfectly proportioned bodies, you’d be in the wrong place.



This month was the third annual birthday bash for The World Famous *Bob*, whose name says it all. Perhaps the most well-known burlesque performer in New York City, the blonde bombshell chose fifteen of her favorite performers to wish her well in celebration of her 36th year (which she calls “thirty-sexy”). Hosting in a sheer, black nightgown and displaying her gigantic sense of humor, Bob proved that it is her razor sharp wit that has catapulted her to pastie stardom.



The most prominent member of the line-up was certainly high art sweetheart Julie Atlas Muz, a Whitney Biennial 2004 and Valencia Bienal 2005 artist. For her act at BadAss, Muz performed a parody of the disturbing and now infamous You Tube sensation “two girls and a cup.” First stripping with the cupcakes in front of her and then perching on top of a stool, the nude Muz somehow shat (chocolate pudding) onto the cupcakes. She then turned around, stuck her finger down her throat and puked onto both of the pastries (she had a balloon full of vomit-like material in her mouth throughout the performance which she punctured with a pin). With a big smile on her face, Muz ate the two cupcakes at the dismay of the audience. After applause, one girl in the front shouted “Oh! I get it! One girl, two cupcakes!” Bob then congratulated her for finally catching on.



Another standout was Tigger! (there’s lots of exclamation points in burlesque). Dressed as a Frenchman, the male burlesquer began his act by parading around the stage telling jokes about Americans into the microphone. Keeping in character, he began stripping and dancing in a comical yet highly skilled fashion until he was fully nude, doing what looked like horizontal jumping jacks on the floor. Combining politics, comedy, intellectual banter, modern dance, and striptease, Tigger! proved that while burlesque is traditionally a woman’s game, men can create just as dynamic of a performance.



A disappointment of the night was the usually jaw-dropping Jo Boobs, who runs the NY School of Burlesque. Jo most certainly understands the dynamics of traditional and non-traditional burlesque alike, but her short performance at BadAss did not convey her strengths. A chair was set on stage with a dildo strapped on, facing conveniently upward before Jo pranced out, quickly stripped, lubed up the phallus, and sat on it for about five seconds. Penetration for penetration’s sake is not very artful and today’s desensitized audiences expect a more dynamic act, especially from the anointed high-priestess of burlesque instruction.



The World Famous *Bob* is a practitioner of a more traditional burlesque, so most of the performances at her birthday party were less unorthodox than is typical at a BadAss show. There was plenty of comedic striptease, provided by the fat-positive newcomer Della Dare, the young Kit Cat, and the beautiful Legs Malone. Although the avant garde was pushed to the side by most performers, the night was cohesively light, funny, and fitting for the celebration of the larger than life Bob.



What makes the Neo-Burlesque movement so important is the blurring of lines between high and low art, theater and performance art. Existing somewhere between the poles, the unique art form brings together humor, talent, entertainment, and creativity in a way that can expand to fit mainstream interpretations, underground sensibilities, and high art interest. So, chose your venue according to your expectations, but be assured that BadAss will provide an unusual mixture of all the spheres of burlesque, although it might not be suitable for everyone.