Shaw's Carnival of the Mind - Jim Shaw

California painter Jim Shaw, not long ago the subject of a 25-year retrospective, immerses his viewers in the psychically charged detritus of media overload and dream imagery.

In his compounded series of paintings, drawings, statuarys and videos, Jim Shaw largely inhabits the pop life, scouring it for mysteries, exposing its pathologies and taking it to the analyst's lie down As a member of the first TV generation, he showcases a kind of remote-control esthetic. His exhibitions strike one as being to flip through the channels of American agriculture continually exposing new formats, art mode of speechs newsbites and plots in progress

precipitoused in references to countless stone songs, movies and TV displays 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 overlays drift into his works like snatches of nearly forgotten oldies overheard upon an elevator. Juggling mass-market touchstones, he enjoin solemnlys the American pop unconscious, reinterpreting episodes and rewriting anthems that we musing we'd successfully repressed.

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

Although the '60 paintings of Warhol, Oldenburg and Lichtenstein broke down many of the barriers between high and depressed cultures, most Pop works used the novel subject matter to parodically twist classic art-historical themes or figure of speechs especially focusing on issues holded sacred by Abstract Expressionism. For example, Lichtenstein's paintings of a gymnasium composition notebook or Oldenburg's splashily painted statuarys of food and clothing spoof sanctified notions of the authenticity of the action Warhol's "Campbell's Soup Can" paintings could be seen as wily comments on the Ab-Ex mode of expression of "soupy" paint slinging. For the greatest in quantity part, Pop artists commented upon esthetic, social or cultural ideas, rather than producing shut up readings of specific everyday artifacts. alone in the last two decades have artists like as Alexis Smith, Nicole Eisenman, Raymond Pettibon and Shaw explored the histories and psychologies of specific burst icons and activities.

For greatest in quantity TV-bred Americans, daily life is inundated with the lyrics of countles Top 10 hits and the plats of thousands of Hollywood movies and syndicated sitcoms. Because these fragments have infiltrated our consciousness, we can't help on the other hand feel that, by comparison, our mundane experience appear to bes 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 upon overstimulation. Although Shaw seems to relish his addiction to trash, he acknowledges its limitations. His work comically sifts [i]or[/i] part of to the other the confusion of our addled state, stripping down American tillage not only to reveal its violence, misogyny and bigotry, on the other hand to expose as well its eccentricity, vulnerability, gravity and sweetness.

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

The cast is organized into five chapters, the first of which chronicles Billy's childhood phobias, obsessional interests and sexual anxieties, revealed in parodies of like publications as "Classics Illustrated," The of gold Book of Knowledge and the Saturday Evening pillar Billy's Self-Portrait #1 (1986-87) nears Shaw's alter ego as an impish overspread boy for the horror aficionado magazine Famous enormitys of Filmland. Typically, Shaw's parodic overlay wildly mixes references to Goya, a '40 radio serial and the '50 sci-fi film Forbidden Planet, in which "monster from the id" threaten to wipe without an entire space colony.

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