You'll need to put on your John Waters hat for this one.
For decades, the raunchy filmmaker has been the world's most vocal proponent of crap; in 1972's Pink Flamingos, he got drag queen Divine to eat feces onscreen. In 2006, his Top 10 list of films, published in Artforum, included Jackass Number Two, while other critics charged with the same task by the magazine unearthed a trove of obscure titles. Though his transgressive stance makes a critical point (i.e., what people think is in bad taste says at least as much about them as what they think is good), the man, god bless him, simply loves trash.
Don't we all, sometimes?
Invoke Waters as your patron saint if you happen upon New York Peep Show at Michael Murphy Gallery, an exhibit so awful that it can only be appreciated as an ironic display of high camp. It purports — quite sincerely, I presume — to bring "three fresh voices from the art capital for a peep into the New York art scene." What it actually offers is a peep into the hilariously horrific possibility that there might actually be a market for these works in Tampa or, even worse, that anyone here might take this show at its word. What these three New York-based artists share is a tangential association with wealth and celebrity; what's for sale is the hope that if you buy something, some of it might rub off on you.
Works by Damon Johnson, son of Richard Johnson, editor of the New York Post's Page Six gossip column, paint a portrait of the artist as slumming socialite. One image depicts "a crackhead," a gallery helper informed me; another, of a young African-American woman bears the title, "I met her downtown foxy and brown," which may or may not reference the '70s blaxploitation flick Foxy Brown, but that's no excuse. (Full disclosure: I saw only five or six of Johnson's paintings when I previewed the show — four more were scheduled to arrive later.) The artist apparently enjoys a bit of a reputation as a bad-boy graffiti artist; the best he could come up with (in this show) as a painter was the tiresome gimmick of rendering everything as a pixilated photograph.
Elsewhere, large-scale paintings by Alexander Charriol, whose family owns a luxury Swiss watch brand, are full of cartoonish figures and over-the-top symbols (which, like so much in this show, seems less a deliberate aesthetic choice than default mode for someone who barely knows what he's doing). A wizened king figure that appears in one of the images offers a grim laugh — perhaps an homage to a beloved patriarch? My favorite: a truly bizarre depiction of a bare-breasted woman enjoying a double ride — she sits backwards astride a bucking pink horse as an alien with a red Mohawk appears to penetrate her. Somewhere in the Bay area, a red velvet, heart-shaped waterbed is waiting for this painting to hang behind it.
With celebrity portraits by Olan, we hit paydirt. In terms of sheer crap, they're by far the most enjoyable. In haphazard explosions of neon paint, the 4-foot-square Warhol rip-offs immortalize the famous, as well as ordinary people cast in the role of pop icon. Even deliciously weirder are dozens of small sculptures, wooden blocks with the same celebrity photo pasted on each side, trimmed with troll fur in garish colors. On the streets of Soho or Chinatown or, yes, at Gala Corina, they would be endearingly obsessive tchotchkes; here, they are scandalously bad. That Courtney Love allegedly owns an Olan portrait of herself, I think, conveys in a nutshell the symbiosis between sycophants and self-affirmation-seeking celebs.
For an aesthetic and spiritual post-Peep Show colonic — and honey, you'll need it — head over to Florida Craftsmen Gallery, where something a bit more intellectually stimulating is going on.
The exhibit What's Next? directs its inquiry at the distinction between fine art and craft, showcasing works with one foot planted firmly in each tradition. Florida Craftsmen executive director Maria Emilia, at the helm of the organization for just about a year now, says she's determined to provoke conversations about craft rather than showcase the expected. To put on this quietly ambitious show, she enlisted some A-list help in the form of Miami gallery owner Bernice Steinbaum, who rustled up some of her craftiest artists.
The pièce de résistance — "My Life As a Tree," by Edouard Duval-Carrié — is a tapestry-like meditation on the artist's Haitian ancestry. Atop a wooden framework with strings of glowing lights nestled inside, six square sheets of aluminum serve as a canvas for a mixed-media family tree. At 12-by-8 feet, the massive piece is a feat of storytelling that does not shy away from some of the stickier issues of representation: Images the artist has appropriated for his biographical network evoke the exoticized/eroticized ethnographic portraits made during colonial times — e.g., a young black woman with an Afro whose loincloth teasingly droops as she languishes, hands bound to a tree branch overhead. Floating voodoo spirit ancestors' eyes gleam, and transparent hummingbirds flutter from branch to branch, cross-pollinating strains of African diaspora cultures and histories.
María Brito's re-creations of Goya's "Los Capriccios" in polymer clay, a substance used by jewelers to make models before casting the real deal in metal, have a nightmarish beauty. Flies (as in a rusty brown paste of smashed-up bug guts) on white canvas are the medium of choice for Cuban duo Elsoca and Fabian, and a curious metal toy by Kate Moran, designed to mimic a baby's hands reaching out for a mother's breasts, makes creepy machinery of infantile desire.
This article appears in Jan 24-30, 2007.