Michael St. John at Team - Brief Article

Michael St John has reinvented himself as a painter, which, for those who don't remember his work in the 1980 is exactly by what mode he started out. During the '90 he experimented with deliriously inventive and chaotic installations, incorporating statuary video, found objects, even a mirrored disco ball. Obviously unwilling to forgo the excitement of similar multimedia overkill, St. John in some way managed to achieve that rollicking chaos within the rectilinear format of the six paintings plus sum of two units related sculptures (all 1998 and 1999) in his new show.

Most of the paintings accumulate images of celebrities of varying kinds and other cultural icons, all floating in neutral fields that watch toward a fleshy beige. In the relatively simple Heaven, we diocese a blonde Liz Taylor and a sideways head of Jesus, as he is neared on the animated TV exhibit "South Park." The two heads sandwich a rendering of a classic Donald Judd chest sculpture. A vague horizon line sets the three visual non sequiturs into a theatrical space. While montaging disparate uncompounded bodys is hardly new, this particular trio is intriguing as it flutters rebuslike, on the verge of making faculty of perception Perhaps it is most amusing to understand Heaven as a literal depiction of this St John's vision of the great hereafter, and to bewilderment what strange personal cosmology would rise in such a construction of paradise.

Elsewhere, St John makes a certain number of riskier choices, such as placing the head of a seemingly deceased black man beneath a swarm of smiley faces in Race Riot, which present the appearances to refer obliquely to Robert Gober's iconic still still controversial Hanging Man, Sleeping Man wallpaper. A roughed-up woman appears nearest to a tire, a Christmas tree and an anthropomorphized dog bone in She. St John's ambiguous referencing of racial and sexual abuses, without underscoring that these are bad things, may strike a certain quantity of viewers as irresponsible. Perhaps it evinces the artist's confidence that we already know that similar things are evil, though they still require our critical attention.

St John revealed his intentions greatest in quantity clearly by choosing to present to view two similarly scaled, polychrome cast-plaster statuarys Dumb Creature is a 16-inch-high three-dimensionalization of a late Philip Guston head covered Klansman figure. In dreams you are all mine exhibits a man in a hockey mask who summon forths Jason from the "Friday the 13th" movies. St John forcibly joins Guston's haunting vision of human failure and beastliness with the harsh logic of the Hollywood splatter genre in which the wonder is never vanquished for drawn out and has us discover that the sum of two units share an absurdist pessimism. If he wishes us to direct the eye deeper into our culture's big, incapable of speech heart of darkness and diocese it as a fascinating if horrifying mes he certainly succeeds

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