JIM SHAW
ENTERTAINING DOUBTS
“SAY WHAT YOU WILL ABOUT THE SWEET MIRACLE OF UNQUESTIONING FAITH, I CONSIDER A CAPACITY FOR IT TERRIFYING AND ABSOLUTELY VILE.” –KURT VONNEGUT, MOTHER NIGHT
Jim Shaw is a cultural polymath who devours the essentials of American cultural detritus, from comic books, pulp novels, and album covers to vintage advertisements, movie posters, and noise rock. Though based in Los Angeles since the mid-1970s when he moved there with fellow artist and Michigan native Mike Kelley, Shaw’s work comes from a more distinctly midwestern point of view. His production is vast and spans all media, but is always steeped in vernacular culture—from bric-a-brac and thrift store paintings to dime-store novels and B-movies —along with the Bible Belt belief system of the Midwest. Shaw brings to that heartland sensibility a distinct nod to California hippie/ earth-mother culture, creating hybrid works that equivocate between a dream state and mundane reality. Entertaining Doubts focuses on Shaw’s interest in fallibility—fallen heroes, collapsed economies, compromised political figures, and the idea of sin and doomsday predictions. The works in the exhibition feature a recurring cast: the artist, his friends, fictional superheroes, politicians, film stars, and mythological figures. Through paintings, video, and sculpture, Shaw toys with verbal and visual puns, reminding us that the end is near, and reality is often absurd. He allows us to entertain our own
doubts, all the while making the very act of doubting—and its reciprocal impulse, faith —thoroughly entertaining. THEATRICAL BACKDROPS AND PAINTINGS Shaw’s paintings, like much of his work, contain a density of cultural references. In works such as The Rhinegold’s Curse, Whistle While You Work, The Rinse Cycle, and Delilah, figures from Jimi Hendrix, superheroes, and the Seven Dwarfs to Wagner’s Ring Cycle and Farrah Fawcett’s feathered hair all appear. Other paintings refer to the technique and history of painting and image reproduction, such as the Cake series, which begins with ink-jet prints of vintage 1950s household magazine images of cake. Through a multilayered process of adding “splatter” painting over the cake ads and then rendering anguished male figures as the final layer, the cakes are turned into abject abstractions. In 2004, Shaw was consumed by the grotesqueness of the impending presidential election cycle and wanted to make a series of works that would function as overblown political cartoons. To do this he began by gathering large-scaled decommissioned
The House in Mississippi, 2013 (detail) Acrylic on muslin; 72 × 108 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles
theatrical backdrops. Stemming from his interest in vernacular art and the hand of the scene-painter, these provided a perfect not-blank canvas onto which Shaw could project his own references. Works in this series contain somber moments, such as in The House in Mississippi, in which ghost-like characters carry a coffin-house with them, making a startling reference to Hurricane Katrina. Other works land in the realm of the absurd, such as The Rinse Cycle, a reference to Wagner’s opera but also a clever pun, with wigs swirling across the painting’s surface. These backdrops are as elaborate and as densely layered as works such as Pablo Picasso’s Guernica or James Rosenquist’s F-111. Shaw, however, populates his work with strangely disparate elements, including masonic ritual imagery and popular cultural
icons (The Miracle of Compound Interest) and Barbara Bush as the Burning Bush (The Burning Bush)—giving us false prophets for the 21st century. DREAM OBJECTS In the mid- to late 1980s Shaw realized that he was dreaming of artworks at night and decided to make a series of narrative drawings (Dream Drawings) that would outline these dreams as plainly as possible. He also began to construct objects from his dreams, essentially using his dreams as an alternate studio. These works range from the surreal to the humorous, from mundane to profound, with jarring juxtapositions and meandering narratives.
A number of Dream Objects appear in Entertaining Doubts, from a couch in the shape of an ear to a nose wall sconce— both near-slapstick in their irreverence towards design and sculpture. More elaborate Dream Objects include: Dream Object (“A later room contains murals of Dan Quayle glad handling rich white people at an art opening and now I’m Paul Drake (from ‘Perry Mason’) and a Sandy Duncan like woman gloms on to me. You’re supposed to put your portrait and recordings on a shelf and I try to fashion my self portrait out of a slice of bread, when someone tells me the Dan Quayle in the mural symbolizes me.”) or Dream Object (“I was in my gallery in Japan...Next I went into an organic shaped room with flattened columns on the bud shaped walls. The paintings were of Native American Indians gambling painted in such a way that upon entering you saw regular South Seas “tribal” graphics but when you turned back out you saw a figurative scene projected and painted from the P.O.V. of one exiting, the wall designs sort of animated as you walked out.”). In these works viewers are drawn inside Shaw’s dreams, where, alternately a painting of multiple Dan Quayles offers his hand for a shake or a series of painted tubes suggests a labyrinthine Indian casino. OISM “Oism” is a fictional religion created by Shaw that draws from the uniquely American history of religious practices, from Mormonism to Scientology. Supposedly founded in the 1840s by Annie O’Wooten, who chanelled a prophetic testament about “O,” Shaw’s religion centers on a virgin who gave birth to herself at the dawn of history and brought writing and agriculture to society. “I”—a stand-in for patriarchy/ego
Nose Sculpture Wall Sconce (Brown), 2007 (detail) Mixed media, light and cord; 351⁄4 × 203⁄4 × 16 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles
—eventually toppled this matriarchal religion. Shaw weaves a believable tale, but mostly presents us with the idea that his religion, like all religions, comes from the imagination of its inventor. In this way, Shaw can criticize what has, for some, become the business of faith in contemporary society. In Entertaining Doubts two films reveal the dual sides of Oism. The Whole: A Study in Oist Integrated Movement focuses on the matriarchs of the religion and their tree of life, the banyan, through a Busby Berkeley/1970s style earth-mother modernist dance, while The Hole echoes a low-budget horror film dream sequence of zombified men in suits. Also on view is Oist Opera Video Dance / 4 Elements, a four-channel interpretive dance film, each representing a different element—wind, fire, earth, and water. This series serves as a sort of introductory light show for Shaw’s long-term project, an epic Oist prog-rock opera.
SUPERMAN A number of works in Entertaining Doubts— from paintings and ink drawings to a theatrical backdrop installation, wall drawings, and collages—meditate on the humanity and death of Superman. Starting with his Blake/Boring drawings, Shaw brings us the Superman of his youth, often drawn in the 1950s by Wayne Boring. Boring was known for giving Superman more gravitas—wider hips and a jutting jaw—essentializing the Superman we know today. Shaw takes Boring’s style of line work and combines it with the fantasy world of artist William Blake. The drawings in this series have a comic style simplicity in their line work but are otherwise dense with fantasty—placing Superman alternately into the Garden of Eden and the underworld. These works are shown alongside Forces of Nature, a series that takes the swoops, whooshes, and action lines found in comic books and turns them into elegant abstractions.
The final work in this section of the exhibition is Not Since Superman Died. This two-part installation begins withdrawings that Shaw’s father, Mark, made while enrolled in a drawing correspondence course. These images have a 1950s vibe—men in suits, women in the home—and some include the overlaid corrections of the instructor. This “hallway” gallery of works leads directly to a painting of Superman’s groin—always rendered as a black-ink swath—inside of which sit six sculptures of kryptonite. This hallway sets the stage for a series of shredded banners onto which Superman is painted falling down, weakened, and in danger. While the superhero in peril is a well-known motif, much like the heroic father, Shaw shows us the mistakes rather than the escape, turning these Supermen into mere mortals.
Blake/Boring, 2010 (detail) Ink on paper; 9 x 12 in. Courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery, London and Hong Kong
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Jim Shaw (b. 1952, Midland, Michigan) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He received his B.A. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and his M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts. His work has been shown extensively and has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including a career retrospective at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom; CAPC musée d’art contemporain de bordeaux, France; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York; Magasin Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble, France; ICA, London; and Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland. Shaw exhibited at the Encyclopedic Palace in the 55th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands; and the Chalet Society, Paris, France. His work is also featured in prominent public and private collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Center. Shaw is represented by Blum & Poe, Metro Pictures, Simon Lee Gallery, and Praz-Delavallade.
1 D ream Object (Irregularly Shaped Canvas: Milk Mustache), 2013 Acrylic and digital ink-jet print on matte canvas; 72 × 36 in. Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles 2 M ississippi River Mural, 2013 (detail) Acrylic on muslin with metal and wood support; approximately 230 × 480 in. Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles 3 The Miracle of Compound Interest, 2006 (detail) Acrylic on muslin, MDF particleboard, plexiglass, wood, light, plastic, foam; variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles Photo © Fredrik Nilsen
COVER Not Since Superman Died, 2014 (detail) Acrylic on muslin; 22 1⁄2 × 50 ft. Courtesy of the artist Photo © LeeAnn Nickel
Jim Shaw: Entertaining Doubts Curated by Denise Markonish On view March 28, 2015 – January 2016 This exhibition is supported by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Blum & Poe, Metro Pictures, Simon Lee Gallery, Atelier 4 Inc., and ArtNet.
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