Charles Ray Helter Skelter La Art in the Nineties
ART VIEW
Art VIEW; 'Helter Skelter' Reveals The Evil of Banality
See the article in its original context from
March 22, 1992
,
Section 2 , Folio
37Buy Reprints
TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for abode delivery and digital subscribers.
About the Archive
This is a digitized version of an article from The Times's print archive, earlier the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization procedure introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.
It's not hard to figure out why "Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990's" has get the most talked-about exhibition hither in a long time. Everything nigh this big survey show, organized by Paul Schimmel of the Los Angeles Museum of Gimmicky Art, aims to be provocative -- from the intimations of Charles Manson'due south bloody rampage in the title, to the violent and ranting essays and poems past Los Angeles writers in the catalogue, to the actual works on view (through Apr 26) in the museum's Temporary Contemporary warehouse annex. Those works, by 16 artists, are as full of images of tawdry sex and serial murderers equally are the tabloid tv set shows that masquerade as news programs.
"Helter Skelter" seems even more than closely related, in fact, to another recent small-screen phenomenon. Similar David Lynch's defunct "Twin Peaks," beneath its veneer of surreality is a platitude of America as one vast, roiling, sexual activity-crazed, gun-toting wasteland. The disappointment of the exhibition is less its attention-grabbing sensationalism than the pretense that this sensationalism amounts to something substantial and challenging. At a time when the fine art world, always desperate for the latest trend, can cling to no dominant movement, the show eagerly celebrates one in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, the movement turns out to be good quondam adolescent nihilism.
"Helter Skelter" tries vainly to elevate this nihilism, lauding its borrowings from lurid fiction, cult religions, extremist politics and cartoons. "The artists' use of debased signs and symbols, and their embrace of raw subjects from everyday life, stupor and disorient the viewer into another state of heed," Mr. Schimmel writes in the catalogue, adding somewhat hopefully: "Indeed, by presenting such graphic explorations of sexuality and violence -- which implicitly question gimmicky standards of obscenity -- the institution now becomes every bit much at risk as the artists themselves."
Those artists include familiar figures like Chris Burden and Mike Kelley likewise as newcomers like Victor Estrada. At 26, Manuel Ocampo is the youngest in the show; Llyn Foulkes, at 57, is the oldest. The bear witness claims that this varied and loosely formed grouping presents an "updated" vision of Los Angeles that contrasts with the stereotype of the urban center every bit a "sunny dreamland of fun." Only the culling picture that "Helter Skelter" proposes of Los Angeles every bit a nighttime and unsafe identify has been no less a stereotype, at to the lowest degree since 1939, the year Nathanael West published "24-hour interval of the Locust." Equally the work of Ed Kienholz makes clear, information technology has also been an attribute of the art scene here for decades. That the catalogue cites West and the history of picture show noir, and as well suggests that the art on brandish somehow breaks ground, illustrates the fuzziness of the show's thesis.
In part because its subtitle misleadingly implies it is a survey of the whole of Los Angeles fine art in the ninety'due south, "Helter Skelter" has provoked criticism for not including more than works past women and minorities. This criticism seems to miss the point. The show deserves to exist faulted on political grounds for including artists like Robert Williams, a co-founder of Zap Comix, whose paintings full of naked bimbos marker the exhibition's nadir.
The works on view are a disconcertingly mixed bag. Perchance the strongest piece is Mr. Burden's "Medusa's Head," a four-ton meteorite strangled by dozens of miniature railroad tracks. The sculpture, which was on brandish last yr at the Brooklyn Museum, serves every bit a parable of ecological catastrophe all the more potent for acknowledging the nostalgic connotations of trains.
"Baby/Baby," past Mr. Estrada, presents one of the exhibition's few truly haunting images, a sculpture of ii gigantic, pinch-faced, chimera-gum-pinkish babies joined at the crotch past an enormous phallus in the shape of a nuclear cloud. Charles Ray provides an amusing flake of trompe 50'oeil -- a custom-made mannequin of a woman in a business suit, set apart in its ain room and then that a viewer does not realize at first that she stands 8 feet tall. Mr. Ocampo's antiqued canvases, full of religious symbols and references to the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, convey a raw energy despite their melodrama.
And Mr. Foulkes's paintings-cum-relief-sculptures bring to mind the art of Francis Bacon in their combination of careful finish and macabre sense of humor. One portrays Superman as an aging, shellshocked begetter, glued to his tv. Even Superman, it seems, is defeated by the boiler of American life.
For every interesting work in "Helter Skelter" there are too many others, similar Richard Jackson's pointless clock-filled installation, that simply fall flat. The few contributions by women artists are clearly weak. Liz Larner's installation with mirrors and chains called "Forced Perspective" is one of them. Nancy Rubins'due south mountainous pile of trailers and water heaters, a humorless imitation of something Vito Acconci might contrive, is another. And Meg Cranston'southward video installation, with its paradigm of a fireplace and its Muzak soundtrack, is all the same some other.
This sort of work doesn't then much transcend every bit mimic the stereotypes of middle-American life, with its canned music, its trailer homes and its stupid function humor. Mr. Schimmel describes the attitude of the artists in the show, his offset equally principal curator at the museum, as "in your confront." He writes that "none are 'do-gooder' artists who seek to use their fine art for directly political ends."
If the 1980's gave rise to political correctness, which sees everything in moral terms, the decade also in its glorification of greed and selfishness fostered the spirit of amorality and breach that suffuses "Helter Skelter." It sometimes seems that for art to attract attention present it must accept place at one extreme or the other. What ultimately makes "Helter Skelter" such a chilling event is not the preponderance of blood and gore only the absence of compassion.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/22/arts/art-view-helter-skelter-reveals-the-evil-of-banality.html
Post a Comment for "Charles Ray Helter Skelter La Art in the Nineties"