Brett De Palma: Dreaming on the Bowery: post-apocalyptic paintings

BRETT DE PALMA DREAMING ON THE BOWERY: POST-APOCALYPTIC PAINTINGS HOWL! HAPPENING: AN ARTURO VEGA PROJECT

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BRETT DE PALMA DREAMING ON THE BOWERY: POST-APOCALYPTIC PAINTINGS

Published on the occasion of the exhibition November 18–December 20, 2017 Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project Howl! A/P/E Volume 1, No. 21

Brett De Palma’s Aesthetic Disobedience

By John Yau This is how Roberta Smith described the artist in 1989: “Brett De Palma continues his unrepentant ways as a maker of ugly, energetic paintings, crammed with history and offensive brushwork and exuding a palette that threatens blindness. Take it or leave it, the artist seems to be in his element when he pushes his colors to the height of fluorescence and his compositions to the point of meltdown.”

I don’t know about you, but I think anyone with half a mind and at least one eye would want to get up and head straight out to see if De Palma’s paintings lived up to such a billing. How could they, you would ask?

De Palma is a chronicler of our times unlike any other. He is in touch with our death wish and does not shy away from addressing this unsettling fact. What are we to make of a work such as JFK Contemplating His Own Bust (1984)? The painting is done in acrylic and collage, a Newsweek cover as one of its elements, presumably what got the artist started. In the painting, Kennedy turns away from his bronze bust, which has a bare tree rising out of its head. Meanwhile, the bust gazes up at the large figure of the slain president, leading this viewer at least to ask, “What is the bust thinking? What does it mean that a work of art is looking back at its dead subject?”

The turbulent, electric colored sky surrounding Kennedy could be a sunset or the latest sign of our penchant for polluting the planet, or both. Kennedy’s eyes are closed—he is a youthful Frankenstein come back from the dead to contemplate his bust. Think of all the different artists who have taken up the subject of someone contemplating a skull and you get a glimpse of what De Palma is up to. His update of a classic subject that reaches back to the Renaissance is opaque. He has taken a familiar image and turned it inside out.

De Palma can be excessive or, as Smith wrote, “unrepentant.”

The dance between his collage elements and the images he paints is disarming, funny, smart, disorienting, and right on target. On one hand, the parts of a De Palma often do not add up, but they make a stubborn kind of sense. Look at the collage elements (with their fanciful depictions of children) and the image of the purple alien in We R Aliens All/Phone Home (2011). The fact that the children and the alien bear some resemblance to one another is funny, weird, and a bit distressing. What does it mean? What about the pairing of the monumental foot and hand with its middle finger raised?

This is the other thing about De Palma’s paintings—they feel like

a multitude of possibilities that are simultaneously raveling and unraveling. Even in the relatively calm painting Quantum Utopia (2012), so much is going on, as pattern against pattern add up to a jarring, fragmented vision. This is not what you would expect of a highly desirable society. De Palma’s world is topsy-turvy and alluring, a kooky combination. Smith was right—De Palma is unrepentant, but I do not think everyone would find his brushwork offensive or his palette blinding. In fact, he is a deliberately seditious artist who refuses to make his subject and palette soothing and acceptable.

Everything about his work is impolitic and eye-catching: an unlikely combination that has a particular frisson to it. Given the bitter tonic of reality we must drink every day, De Palma’s disjunctive miscellany feels right.

JFK Contemplating His Own Bust, 1984 Acrylic and collage on canvas 90 x 78 inches

Brett De Palma

By Carlo McCormick There was once a time—back in the Old World, in an age of darkness—when justice, liberty, and equality were non-existent in fact or thought. Life spans were about as short as the people themselves, while calendars were marked by seasonal eruptions of utter transgression. The streets would flow with the great mob of the masses unchecked by discipline or order, and the fields would teem with open displays of fornication and defecation. This was the carnival of yore, a spectacle of the world turned upside down, where the village idiot might parade as a king or the town whore serve as communal representation of the Virgin Mary. For all that has changed in the centuries of progress since then, so too is a constant measure of atavistic regression. There’s just something about the way Brett De Palma smudges the veneer of civilization, to roil the comedy of manners, that reminds us how close we remain to the abyss of social upheaval. He’s a poet of pictorial disruption, an anarchist clown who hurls the cream pie of pop culture confection right in the kisser of the hegemony that continues to control and contain social unrest with the pageantry of distraction and disaffection. His paintings are the laughter that rises above the screaming, the shattered narrative of our many lies.

Crazed and confusing, De Palma’s art has been spilling out in a torrent of insight and invective for somewhere going on nearly half a century now, a kind of lunacy that is casual and urgent, the voice on the street that echoes in darkest places we dare not visit, a vision prurient and profound, a joke that packs a wicked punch line. Fully modern in its swashbuckling romp through the glorious expanses of representation and allegory, but rife and redolent of post-modernist pastiche, De Palma’s paintings are mutant and mangled, pictures that rage like the life of the party and stumble forward blinkered and hung over from excess.

I’ve not known Brett to be much of a drinking man, but his art is a wealth of what we might call drunken wisdom. These paintings speak to the appetite of surfeit, a kind of collage mayhem that finds focus in distraction, a parable of infinite digressions with a scorching truth that gets told through countless cold-hearted lies. Without ever so much as waxing eloquent, De Palma’s art gets as close as paintings can get to sheer poetry. Nothing fancy mind you, something closer to the banter of a pool hall, disjointed and weary, silence punctuating impact, a nonchalance spread thinly over raw nerves, the kind of nervous jokes we tend to make when the stakes are a bit too high.

What is striking about the politic of De Palma’s art is not any polemic so much as an effusive uncertainty. Humor consistently undermines the larger specter of dread, but irony never dulls the urgency so much as sets it loose on the slippery slopes of relativism. Being funny for this artist is a strategy for being critical, never so far from the lineage of parody, by which spoof and caricature have long been the favored acerbic literary and visual tools to evis-

cerate consensus reality, but it’s all so self-reflexive in Brett’s hands, a kind of cool that runs hot, a determination built of doubt. Even as he shows us the world for the spectacular travesty that it is, he eschews proclamation and riddles his pictures with doubt. If there is an uncanny sense of history repeating here, of memories ceaselessly crowding in too many like big-footed clowns into a circus car, it is more the bitter irony expressed by Marx’s admonition that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” His is a composite history, less linear than circular, monuments to the folly of our contemporary world constructed from fractured antiquities and the half-forgotten lessons told in the old tales of triumph and failure by which our past shows its true self through myth. Knowing and naïve, it feels so often like the wisdom of the ancients as imagined through the wonder of children.

In De Palma, where the picturesque, the perverse, and the apocalyptic vie for dominion—opposites that far from nullifying one another seem, like old lovers, to finish each other’s sentences—it’s as if our collective trials and tribulations at least make a good story in the end. Perhaps this is something very much Southern about Brett, a masterful way of spinning a yarn that leans into his art with something quaint and colloquial, and utterly cutting, that holds its spell no matter his tenure in New England and decades in New York.

But wherever it is from, it is above all unmistakably American, a wit whose ridicule might be honed on the barbs of Thomas Nast and steeped in the vernacular tradition of writers like Twain and Faulkner, the kind of truth and trauma that resists polish, an expression so guttural it might well belong in the gutter.

These are the stories rushed out in the dark, the honesty we afford when we’re already half-hidden, blurted when we can no longer keep silent. And this compelling voice is everywhere in De Palma’s art, manifest most in a freedom let loose we suspect from the speed of execution, though that is perhaps just an effect for I’ve never actually asked Brett how long he works on these paintings.

The point is, however often and painstakingly he returns to his craft, the impulse and necessity remains exigent, unstoppable. When I commented to the artist how psychologically fraught his work can seem, he just said his father was a psychologist, enough said, like screaming fire in a theater. Is it choked by sobs or laughter, I can’t tell, but it comes in fits and starts, fragments forming a whole with a compositional integrity and dissolution so deft it comes across more as a matter of entropy than design. Subconscious doodles writ large, the moments come unglued from a scrapbook scattered in the winds, to be recovered and reassembled by Brett De Palma as something completely alien but wholly familiar—here is the carnival come back to town, standing at the edge of history and beholding the uncertain future with a sigh of recognition.

Hiroshima Morn

By Edward Sanders

Einstein’s Dilemna, 1984 Acrylic and collage on canvas 100 x 76 inches

(I was thinking about Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt urging him not to drop the bomb on Japan —just before Roosevelt passed away— and how General Groves insistently wanted one target to be Kyoto.... when suddenly there was a “trundling” sound on the roof above me so I went outside thinking it might be a bear while assuring myself it couldn’t be but sure enough it was a young black bear which lifted its head and we locked eyes I put my hands on my hips and stared and it trundled down the front side of the roof & plopped to the bluestone front porch

then went around back to eat the sunflower seeds and millet I had tossed by the ash stump for the wild birds)

By Daniel Wolff

The Slaughter of Innocence, 2016 Acrylic and collage on canvas 78 x 62 inches

She’s carrying two children. Or is it more? Her face is half dark brown, half light, with a white stripe down the middle. She has African features. The child in her right arm is yellow and appears to be alive; a hand is raised. The child in her left is red-skinned and hangs sideways, wounded or dead, with red drops dripping down to…. Is that a third child, upside down, tangled in the others? And if so, could that be another in red stripes? Is the woman carrying four children as she comes forward, out of the picture frame, towards us?

Behind her is another figure: a red-headed dwarf-like creature holding a rifle across his chest. He’s what we call a white man.

The figures stand in an alcove, like a niche in an old Italian church.

Except this alcove is a collage constructed out of brightly painted arches, a photograph of buddhas that recedes into infinity, a snapshot of an inner temple, the corner of what looks like a gazebo. The lower wall—from her waist down—is made up of what might be embroidery squares with mottos: “THE GOOD LIFE” “THE FREE LIFE”. Their words carry too much weight. There are also ads for ammo plastered nearby. All of this washes around the central figure and her dangling children.

It’s called The Slaughter of Innocence. Not the slaughter of the innocents from the Gospel of Matthew. That’s where King Herod ordered all of Bethlehem’s young male children killed because one might be the newborn king of the Jews. Not Peter Paul Rubens’ The Massacre of the Innocents from 1608. That’s another dynamic tangle of bodies painted against a receding perspective, but Rubens shows the murder itself: baby raised to be dashed, others dead and strewn across the floor.

No, this is The Slaughter of Innocence: the massacre of a concept.

Here, the deaths have already happened. The bodies are presented to us after the act, as evidence not of the event but of what we once believed and no longer can. Nothing in the painting is innocent: not the buddhas, not the retriever carrying a box of ammo, not the “abstract” shapes that pile up to one side.

The loss of innocence is one thing. It’s inevitable, happens to all of us, may even offer a chance to learn. The slaughter of innocence is something else. It comes forward carrying more than we can count, crazed with color, infiltrating the future.

Excerpts from The New Yorker, 1989 and 1991

By Lisa Liebmann edited by Brooke Adams

Skullduggery, 1988 Acrylic and collage on canvas 95 x 128 inches

Brett De Palma is a maverick not given to “editing” what he paints.

He sometimes makes easy art. Over the years, he has put his name to a large and acquiescent body of offhand drawings, clever sculptural pastiches, and deftly altered objects that rely on calligraphic panache, an ingratiating talent for concocting something out of nothing, considerable mimetic skills, and a small but salient inner precinct of good taste.

Not an installation artist at all, De Palma deploys an arsenal of styles—from Cubism to psychedelia—in paintings, found objects, sculptures on pedestals, and works on paper that show rare daring and a fond insubordination to painterly fashion that is healthier than mere disregard. What’s funny is that De Palma’s paintings—however polished their frames, and for all their domestication—are really wild at heart, a lot wilder, in fact, than Fauve art.

Even during the early 80s, when an international profusion of generally chaotic figuration was taking gallery after gallery by storm, the mud pie aesthetic of many of De Palma’s canvases—furious scuffles of fomented paint spawning half-smothered epic-historical subject matter—was hard to take, or even to see.

De Palma’s new paintings still fly in the face of comely fashions but are relatively refined. Most of the obscuring, glutinous gestures, for instance, have been replaced by an intricate, fairly lucid collage-oncanvas technique. Like Nicolas Roeg’s inspired shaggy-dog movies and Robert Arneson’s intensely hieroglyphic commemorative sculptures, De Palma’s paintings may offer cameo appearances by world figures, along with riffs on world events. Einstein’s Dilemma includes looming portraits of the physicist and the Führer along with the words, reminiscent of Fugs lyrics, “Hitler was in my face,” and Skullduggery—a giant farmscape in which fresh earth is plowed over a multitude of poor Yoricks—is an allegory of the birth of modern art. De Palma, in short, follows in the wild-and-crazy, slightly paranoid, beatnik-pundit tradition: he paints, willy-nilly, what he thinks.

Brett De Palma Biography

By Tony Shafrazi, for the exhibition Champions, January 15–February 19, 1983 Born in 1949, Lexington, Kentucky. Father a psychologist. Moved to Nashville in 1956. Captain of the high school football team at John Overton High. From 1970-72 at the Boston Museum School, then Tufts University, MFA 1973.

Conscious of the various art scenes in New York. In 1973-74 he taught at the University of Tennessee and at the Tennessee State Prison, while at the same time a member of an “Anti-Music” group. ln 1976 he started painting again, then “Escaped from Nashville” and arrived in New York City, 1978.

Late 60s, had a small record company in Nashville. Met Roy Orbison and Hank Williams Jr. At this time did paintings of country singers and their homes, trying to survive as an artist. During the early 70s he was greatly influenced by two people’s ideas about art and music: Elvis with “Jailhouse Rock”, and Randy Stone, a very close friend from military school and diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic.

ln NYC, worked for Sperone Westwater Fischer gallery “posing” as an art assistant. During this time he met several artists, yet never showing or speaking about his work: always resisting “the desperation on the part of the artist” to exhibit. Observing rather the “changing of the guards”—until he met Diego Cortez in 1979. In 1981 was included in the PS1 show New York/New Wave. Later, with the encouragement of Cucchi, Chia, and Clemente, he accepted Emilio Mazzoli’s invitation to show in Modena, Italy, in May 1982. By the summer of ’82, he was invited to participate in documenta 7, Kassel, Germany.

He acknowledges that painting is an act which brutally confronts doubt and uncertainty, accepting the fact that doubt comes only through knowledge. There is keen awareness of art history in his work, from Cubism, Futurism, and Expressionism, yet he insists that the past, present, and future exist simultaneously. Fragments of these methods appear in his work, but they are used to transcend any one pictorial language in particular. More specifically, he employs these styles as a means of constructing a framework to paint with. To take these different styles, to touch them and then distort them in order to make something else, is extraordinary. He uses the primitive means at one’s disposal, in all its stupidity and blunder; forgetting expertise and education, he teaches himself to work against pre-knowledge so that the process of each is an act of suspended disbelief—one of not thinking. Unveiling and learning through painting.

Taking the leftover form of a found canvas with broken wax encaustic, where the paint had fallen off, he makes his own type of “hybrid-mutant” painting: “Holding things together, keeping them from falling apart, and at the same time realizing that they are crumbling—learning to let go.” From totem to allegorical stories and unfolding visions derived from fragmented thoughts and dreams, the flow of paint with a few strokes conveys crisp information in a diffused manner—comparable to seeing in the dark. And so when looking at the work something else in one’s peripheral vision suddenly becomes clear, and with amazement one experiences “seeing something”—a tree, a fence, a cloud—painted and drawn in precise detail, where before there had appeared nothing but paint.

Plates 1

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Circus Trump, 2015

Yeats’ Beast, 1984

Acrylic and collage on canvas 78 x 62 inches

Acrylic and collage on canvas 78 x 78 inches

2 Tree of Life, 2012

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Acrylic and collage on canvas 78 x 78 inches

Acrylic and collage on canvas 100 x 76 inches

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Acrylic and collage on canvas 90 x 70 inches

Acrylic and collage on canvas 78 x 62 inches

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Dreaming on the Bowery, 1982

Fiddle on Nero, 2013 Acrylic and collage on canvas 78 x 78 inches

Einstein’s Dilemna, 1984

The Slaughter of Innocence, 2016

JFK Contemplating His Own Bust, 1984 Acrylic and collage on canvas 90 x 78 inches

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Incognito, 1982 Acrylic and collage on canvas 90 x 70 inches

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Sales R Up, 2013 Acrylic and collage on canvas 78 x 62 inches

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Iraq-O-Ribs, 2012 Acrylic and collage on canvas 62 x 78 inches

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Stupid Economy Still, 2012 Acrylic and collage on canvas 78 x 62 inches

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U Know Who Meets Hamlet and Lear in the Graveyard of Empires, 2012

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Acrylic and collage on canvas 62 x 78 inches

China marker on paper

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Mazeppa, 1990

Sex and Death, 2017 19 Foot Foot, 2017 China marker on paper

Acrylic and collage on canvas 95 x 128 inches

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China marker on paper

Acrylic and collage on canvas 95 x 128 inches

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Skullduggery, 1988

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The Devil Is in the Details, 2014 Acrylic and collage on canvas 78 x 78 inches 11

Doomsday, 2015 Acrylic and collage on canvas 78 x 78 inches

Ganesh, 2017

We R Aliens All/Phone Home, 2011 Acrylic and collage on canvas 78 x 62

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Brett De Palma Dreaming on the Bowery: Post-Apocalyptic Paintings Nov. 18–Dec. 20, 2017 Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project © 2017 Howl Arts, Inc. Howl! Archive Publishing Editions (Howl! A/P/E) Volume 1, No. 21 ISBN: 978-0-9975565-9-9 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Howl! A/P/E. © 2017 John Yau © 2017 Carlo McCormick © 2017 Edward Sanders © 2017 Daniel Wolff © 2017 Brooks Adams edit of Lisa Liebmann’s 1989 and 1991 New Yorker reviews. In memoriam. © 2017 Tony Shafrazi Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project 6 East 1st St. NY, NY 10003 www.HowlArts.org 917 475 1294 Editor: Ted Riederer Copy Editor: Jorge Clar Design: Jeff Streeper for Modern IDENTITY

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