WHEN PUSH COMES TO SHOVE
Artists who depict violence, brutality, and oppression face a paradox that’s troubled Western art at least since medieval painters began creating spectacular images of hell. If a work of visual art is powerful and compelling (if not “beautiful”), the viewer tends to develop an empathy with the subject. Simply put, it’s hard to create a strong yet repellent image of something one hates.
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The careful arrangements on the other walls make similarly strong statements about violence. The pleasant wallpaper provides a discordantly tranquil setting for photos that obsessively insinuate guns into every aspect of a household. The more one looks at these snapshots, the more fascinating guns seem. Though the weapons in the photos are definitely out of place, intrusive, and creepy, when one sees guns in every setting (and most of the photos are themselves repeated several times on the wall), it’s hard not to feel a certain attraction to guns.
Also compelling is Darrel Morris’s Family Album (1987-’93), a large wall piece consisting of 16 works. Morris, a Chicagoan, describes himself as coming from an abusive and “very dysfunctional family situation” in rural Kentucky, and most of these 12 fabric assemblages and 4 line drawings tell stories in pictures, some with speech balloons, of children neglected and abused by adults and other children. The drawings are awkward, a bit childlike; and the fabric pieces, which have some of the rough-edged directness of folk art, are different kinds and colors of cloth stitched together to make images. It’s as if a person with access to little else but scraps of material has brought them together, however crudely, in a cry for help. Particularly effective is “Hole,” a square fragment of a mass-manufactured shirt imprinted with a photo of a ghetto street. Near the center of the work Morris has placed the fabric figure of a youth, its center ripped out. If some of his other images show one person doing violence to another, here the violence has been done to the artwork itself, as if Mor- ris’s subject–brutality–were strong enough to cross representational boundaries and inspire an attack on the art object.
The diverse elements of Llyn Foulkes’s striking, sometimes stunning paintings–really more like assemblages, with their combinations of paint and three-dimensional objects–clash in a way that seems destructive to the works’ very autonomy and unity. Double Trouble (1991) is a semiprofile portrait of a man whose face, smeared with blood, is broken by a masklike band of blue paint covering his eye and nose. His upper teeth are not painted but are three-dimensional and embedded in the work’s surface; within the indented mouth sits a fetus, also three-dimensional. Most striking, the man’s left arm extends well below the picture frame and holds a painted gun, pointed horizontally as if aimed at someone.
But there’s an additional irony to this painting. The colors are bright, solid, certain, evoking both comic books and pop art. The rock formations in the arid landscape recall the “heroic” Hollywood western. Comics, pop, and the western all share a characteristic American optimism and sureness of purpose: by simply following one’s innate rhythms, they suggest, without an ounce of self-doubt, one fulfills one’s righteous destiny. The gulf war was fought in that “let’s do our job and get it over with” tradition. By placing doubt in the mind of Superman himself, Foulkes creates a powerful irony, suggesting that this self-righteous tradition should be questioned by those in power.
If one ignores the enigmatic cartoon mouse on the official’s shoulder, there’s a fairly simple narrative here. The official who plans freeway developments and office towers, an amalgam of corrupt politicians and developers, has chopped down the desert plants–though there’s a lone survivor potted on his desk–to build office towers. The everyman at right, which one source identifies as the artist himself, is excluded. Formally the composition is a study in vertical lines–the cactus, the towers, a lone man on the roof of one tower, the official’s necktie–all echoing each other almost phallically: a study in male power. But it is through his mixed media that Foulkes achieves the strongest effects. While the cactus has some of the presence of an actual cactus, the window view covered with a thick sheet of plastic is more ambiguous. The plastic makes the office towers more distant but also more picturesque, recalling picture-window views of the grounds from a manor house or of the factory from the head office. The buildings behind glass contrast with the sculpted artist-loner at right; there’s no place for a real body in this constructed desert. The “Bastards” thought-balloon has the certainty of a comic-book exclamation, while the money is privileged, placed near the composition’s center and the only thing represented by a photo.
