Weinstein, Matthew. “The Spirals of his Mind are Tightly wound and Mysterious: Matthew Weinstein on Jim Shaw at the
New Museum.” ARTnews, October 29, 2015.
‘THE SPIRALS OF HIS MIND ARE TIGHTLY
WOUND AND MYSTERIOUS’: MATTHEW WEINSTEIN ON JIM SHAW AT THE NEW MUSEUM
BY Matthew Weinstein POSTED 10/29/15 11:17 AM
Jim Shaw, “The End is Here,” 2015, installation view, at New Museum. MARIS
HUTCHINSON/EPW STUDIO
The “First Papers Of Surrealism” exhibition, a collaboration between Andre
Breton and Marcel Duchamp, was held
in New York City in 1942. It was a visual manifesto for the European-born
movement, and Duchamp chose for its
catalogue cover an image of a piece of
Swiss cheese. Aesthetically, the American artist Jim Shaw, whose mid-career
retrospective is now on view at the New
Museum, can be located somewhere
between Duchamp and Breton, and
that piece of Swiss cheese. The Swiss
cheese catalogue cover, born ten years
before Shaw was born, is something
he might have produced. Much of his
work, starting with his airbrush drawings of the late 1970s and early 1980s,
is book sized, illustrative, absurdist,
and depicts enigmatic and dreamlike
scenarios. It is also deeply indebted to
Surrealism.
Art historically, in the U.S., Surrealism has tended to get short shrift, its purpose merely laxative: to ease Abstract
Expressionism out of the congested, technically academic and hyper intellectual sphincter of European Modernism. (I use this rectal imagery in the spirit of Shaw, in whose work the human digestive tract is often a protagonist).
Given its proper due, however, as it was in the Morgan Library’s 2013 show “Drawing Surrealism,” the movement
was revealed as a conceptual and stylistic laboratory investigating the relationship between subject and object.
In that respect, Shaw is one of Surrealism’s true heirs. His New Museum show is like a scheme for an impossible
gesamtkunstwerk by the end of which the mind of the artist dissolves into the object it has striven to construct.
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Jim Shaw, “The End is Here,” 2015, installation view, at New Museum. MARIS HUTCHINSON/EPW STUDIO
Shaw’s interest in Surrealism, and in theatricality, is exemplified by his 2009 room-sized installation Labyrinth; I
Dreamed I Was Taller Than Jonathan Borofsky. It consists of theatrical flats that one wanders among like an actor or
crew member, privy to the rickety backside of theatrical illusion. The piece has a backstory. It’s dominated by a cut
out of the artist Jonathan Borofsky’s sculpture Ballerina Clown, an enormous ballerina with a sad faced clown head
that appeared in Venice, California in 1989 as one of the many failed attempts to rehabilitate the neighborhood.
Ballerina Clown had a mechanical kicking feature, but the noise from it annoyed Venice residents to the point that
the feature was disabled. The piece was restored in 2008 and kicks once again; it presides over the entrance of a
CVS. It also presides over the expulsion of the current residents of Venice who cannot keep up financially with the
influx of tech industry success stories. The legacy of failure that Ballerina Clown presides over includes the very
history of Venice Beach which went from Venetian style beach resort to a place synonymous with people who
teach their dogs how to skateboard. The Tower of Babel and a giant humanoid vacuum sucking up the masses are
other images of abjection and failure that pile over each other in this installation. It’s moral nature and its inscrutability inclines one to attempt to read it allegorically; good vs evil signified by the rise and fall and rise again of
Venice Beach.
Surrealism found employment in Hollywood after it became a degraded brand in New York. The Twilight Zone,
Ernie Kovacs and Dali and Walt Disney’s film collaboration, Destino (not finished until 2008) are all examples of
how useful it was to entertainment. Something of Surrealism of course never left New York, but it is a trace of an
impulse that no longer has a name because the word ‘Surreal’ no longer contains specific meaning (it is overused
as a synonym for ‘strange’). Jim Shaw’s California Surrealism found a rapt audience among New York artists who,
in the ’80s, were searching for a way out of the anti-subjective structures of postmodern discourse. Like those of
Joseph Cornell or Lucas Samaras, his artworks are suitcases tightly stuffed with mystery and irrationality. His tight
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draughtsmanship— a style that bypassed Modernism and evoked a high schooler of prodigious talent who never
lost faith in representation–gave us something we had been taught not to like. He has more in common with a
medieval monk illuminating religious tomes (stylistically as well as his preoccupation with narratives of good befouled by evil) than with a contemporary artist following the well-worn postmodernist path. Take Shaw’s Dream
Drawings, illustrations of other people’s dreams in comic book form. His plain-speak draughtsmanship lends coherent narrative and sequence to the madness of dream space. Dream Drawing (A section in Speed 2 where they’re
going thru the ship’s files and come across Penthouse letters files and find my name and there’s a photo of me clothed
humping a denim covered globe.”), 1999/2009, is pretty much that.
Jim Shaw, “The End is Here,” 2015, installation view, at New
Museum. MARIS HUTCHINSON/EPW STUDIO
Jim Shaw, “The End is Here,” 2015, installation view, at New
Museum. MARIS HUTCHINSON/EPW STUDIO
Shaw’s abiding interest in religion is demonstrated in Hidden World, a sprawling installation of his collection of
religious material from the margins of faith. It contains Mormon Didactic Photos in which right and wrong are
demonstrated by a photo of the moral/safe/good way to do a thing juxtaposed with a photo of the amoral/dangerous/bad way to do a thing. It gets confusing. In one picture, a gleeful child is running down a hallway. In the corresponding one he is shown walking with a robotic expression on his face. Which is right? A highlight of Hidden
World is a wall devoted to the accomplishments of Dr. Velma Jaggers (Miss Velma). Miss Velma ‘honors the Lord
Jesus Christ with the most beautiful robes and gowns made by leading fashion designers, which she wears in the
pulpit to honor the reality of the Lord Jesus Christ…’ etc. Apparently Miss Velma has also been busy creating a tree
of life with ‘her artists.’ This tree (in the form of a spooky banyan tree) crops up in Shaw’s film, The Whole, A Study
of Oist Integrated Movement, 2009.
Oist is Shaw’s invented religion, a blend of New Age, Scientology, Christian Science, Mormonism, and Christianity. It has its own mythology, rituals and even its own entertainment industry. The film possesses the delicious color
and sparkly vulgarity of a Douglas Sirk film. A long abstract sequence of sparkles dissolves to reveal a group of
dancers with identical bobbed haircuts wearing identically cut chasubles in gauzy fabrics. They awkwardly attempt
some Busby Berkeley blooming-flower formations, and then, for no discernible reason, slowly drift over to a spinning artificial banyan tree and pose around it. There is something more than a sendup of Miss Velma’s bejeweled
charlatanism going on here. The piece’s circular motions evoke Shaw’s Beckett-like tendency to whirl within his
own kinks and preoccupations.
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I’d rather untangle silly string from a
shrub than curate a Jim Shaw exhibition, but New Museum artistic director Massimiliano Gioni and curator
Gary Carrion-Murayari have made
it look easy. Shaw’s work is laid out in
laboratory form, the specimens of his
consciousness marshaled into orderly grids within expansive vitrines. But
the spirals of Shaw’s mind are left tightly wound and mysterious. Like much
viscerally engaging work that takes on
the absurd, the abject and the disappointed, Shaw’s work transforms from
being about these qualities to being a
vessel for them. (The distinction is important.) But there are a lot of laughs
along the way, especially in the artist’s
collection of found thrift store paintings. These had a huge impact on painters and conceptualists alike when they
were first shown in New York in 1991.
The iconic painting among them is a
Protestant homemaker apparently experiencing the first ecstasies of demonic
possession–she’s Shaw’s Mona Lisa.
Shaw is like that boyfriend from the
West Coast who comes to New York,
expertly tinkers with your heart and
Jim Shaw, Dream Drawing (“A Section in Speed 2 where they’re going thru the
mind, and, the moment you are about
ships files and come across Penthouse letters files and find my name and there’s
to integrate him into your day-to-day
a photo of me clothed humping a denim covered globe.”), 1999/2009, pencil on
life, sends you a text from the airport:
paper. COURTESY GALERIE PRAZ-DELAVALLADE, PARIS/COLLECTION
he is going to India to get his yoga certiROSANA AND JACQUES SÉGUIN, SWITZERLAND
fication. But he’s no flake, he just doesn’t
fit into your timeline. The volume and
virtuosity of his work signify a solid
work ethic. Shaw shows us that art is work, and he does not apply cooling filters over his sweaty industriousness.
He is therefore, for many of us artists, an inspiring presence. He stands for the idea that art is made in the studio
and released into the world as raw material for thought; it isn’t bound by conventional notions of consistency, style,
rationality or connectedness to the conventional timeline of art history.
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In today’s hyper-professional art world, where an artist’s output is marketed in much the same pseudo rational
manner as a new sports drink or denim label, Shaw makes a show of artistic backbone. While many artists are
saying ‘here is THE thing,’ Shaw is saying, ‘here are a lot of things.’ This attitude towards art produces a generously
heterogenous realm of conceptual play that is both hilarious and melancholy. It accesses a rich range of experience;
it utilizes and exercises our potential to think on many levels simultaneously. His work’s surreality is unvarnished,
ragged, prodigal and tossed back into a culture that has grown accustomed to its absence. The mind, it announces,
may be a terrible thing to waste, but it is also a terrible thing to have.
Matthew Weinstein is an artist based in New York.
“Jim Shaw: The End is Here” runs through January 10, 2016 at the New Museum.
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