The artist Jim Shaw’s
STUDIO SITS IN A WHITE stucco building on North Figueroa Street in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Highland Park, sandwiched between a jiu-jitsu academy and a small art gallery, across from a cluster of bungalows. I wonder if I’m in the right place when I arrive there this past winter, just as a red Kia slows to a stop and parks in front. Out climbs Shaw. Wearing a pronounced stoop, paint-stained khakis, and a teal Members Only jacket, he ushers me inside the three-room studio and clears a seat for me on a beige vinyl-upholstered bench that reminds me of a 1970s Ford pickup truck my father used to drive. Soon, his studio manager appears, followed a few minutes later by Sarah Watson, director of Gagosian Beverly Hills, where Shaw’s exhibition “Thinking the Unthinkable” is currently on display. She’s brought pastries, and as she unboxes them, she tells me she often drives right past Shaw’s studio and has to double back. Such disorientation is similar to the not unpleasant feeling of talking with the artist himself. Like his adopted city of LA, Shaw’s mind is sprawling: regardless of what he’s talking about, his voice maintains a consistent, almost reportorial register, like a stripmall advertising diverse businesses with identical signage. (At one point, he manages to invoke chicken houses, magic mushrooms, and the Iran-Contra affair in scarcely more than a minute.) Upon greeting me, Shaw confesses that he’s discombobulated, having just traveled from Connecticut, where he and his wife, fellow artist Marnie Weber, recently bought a second home to be closer to their daughter in Brooklyn. They’ve owned their LA home, not far from Shaw’s studio, for 30 years. Though he’s lived here most of his life, Shaw seems ambivalent about the city. He observes that, like New York, LA has grown almost prohibitively expensive for artists. “You have to have a fairly high income to not put most of it into the cost of living and taxes,” he says, noting that his middle-class childhood in the 1950s involved far more “privation compared to today.” After graduating with an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in the 1970s, Shaw discovered that “the art world basically didn’t function economically” for him and his fellow graduates (including his friend the late Mike Kelley, with whom he co-founded the experimental noise band Destroy All Monsters). At that time, Shaw assumed he couldn’t cut it as a professional artist. “I thought I was too weird for the art world,” he remembers. For several years, he worked in the visual effects industry, lending his skills to such diverse cultural outputs as Barbra Streisand music videos (“She was the most picky perfectionist ever,” Shaw says of the singer, “more so than myself”), The Abyss, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4, and the musical science fiction-cumromantic comedy Earth Girls Are Easy. He didn’t quit his day job until the success of his epic series “My Mirage,” 1986-91, comprised of nearly 170 paintings, drawings,
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silkscreens, photographs, films, and sculptures that follow Billy, a fictional middle-class white man, through adolescent angst, psychedelic hallucinations, pagan occultism, and evangelical conversion during the 1960s and ‘70s. Formally channeling comic strips, posters, and religious propaganda, the series functions both as a Boomer bildungsroman and an associative chronicle of the eras’ anxieties and visual influences. It also draws upon Shaw’s own feelings of alienation, if only obliquely. Growing up in a small town in Michigan with “three sisters and a mother, and a father [who] was a workaholic,” Shaw felt he was “not male enough to fit into boy society,” he recalls. “I found going to school disturbing and sad.” He uses similar language to imagine how his mother, a medical transcriber, must have experienced midcentury America. “I’m sure it was a very weird and depressing time to be a woman.” Shaw’s practicality—and his propensity for charting the vicissitudes of the art economy—might seem surprising given the surrealist nature of his art, but it is part of what makes his prolific output so varied and interesting. “Shaw shows us that art is work,” wrote the artist and critic Matthew Weinstein in a review of “The End is Here,” Shaw’s 2015 massive retrospective at the New Museum in New York. “He does not apply cooling filters over his sweaty industriousness… 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.” “Thinking the Unthinkable” further demonstrates the truth of this observation. It’s the artist’s first show with Gagosian since leaving Metro Pictures gallery, which represented him from the 1990s until it shuttered in 2021, and it’s a reminder that although he eschews seriality, he embraces his fixations. Chief among those fixations is Hollywood, which he depicts with anthropological trippiness. In Going for the One, 2022, a Myra Breckinridge–era Raquel Welch, clad in an American flag monokini, extends four arms in the manner of Kali, the Hindu goddess of creation and destruction, while standing atop the headquarters of 20th Century Fox. A naked young man faces her, his back to the viewer, while Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra, flanked by Mark Antony and Julius Caesar, slinks in the background among vertiginous skyscrapers that look like pyramids. Keep looking, and you might realize that Caesar is also the evil emperor from Star Wars—who in turn bears an uncanny resemblance to today’s Rupert Murdoch—while the naked man echoes the album cover of Yes’s best-selling 1977 record from which the work takes its title. Made using silk screen, acrylic, and airbrush (to an “almost too perfect” effect, says Shaw), the artwork feels both ironic in its iconography and earnest in its meditation on gender and power. What myths continue to stir us?
