Gladys NilssonOne's associations are immediately jolted to Chicago upon entering this new show for it's a group of Chicago artists, collectively known as the Hairy Who, who's work has become immediately recognizable for its playful, hilarious and irreverent cartoonish satirization. These large watercolors on paper bear that imprint as strong as a wrong turn in a Looney Tune. All eight panels in this show depict overflowing crowds of men and women in different social and work situations. Whether it's a crowd of men packed on a golf fairway, or a dance hall scene, or a two-paneled construction site, the point is the satirization of the roles and social and primal interactions. Men and women eyeball each other in side glances of absolute hollars and the leering and barely contained lust is swollen to fever pitch by the total exaggeration of the erogenous zones—women's breasts are buoyant and whackily lopsided or vampishly threatening, sticking triangularly out like blades and their pants are so tight their crotches are defined. Men's penises stick out like flags of kielbasi. Hands reach around corners for feels and tongues drool out of mouths unabashedly. A coy posture is exposed as a come-on. Just as the lewdness of her characters assaults conventions of propriety, their entangling forms and merging into a decorative cacophony assaults the conventions of ideal picture planes. Vanishing points have vanished in her orgasmic frenzies. The artist's point is not to supply our need for a focal point, a method of entering and anchoring our sensibilities. Instead, like free jazz, we're asked to accept the story repackaged and reordered to the fervent intensity of the crystallized moment—everything splattered out at once and compressed to one image that contains the multitude. Side issues like perspective and composition that we're used to begging for are abandoned in the process. There's no time or patience for anything so orderly or polite. We're in a beer hall spirit here, a dizzying party of total abandon and decadence. Occasionally there will be some semblance of an overall picture arrangement. Hints and vestiges of those old concerns peek through as the bottom and top edges are sometimes broken off formally from the main images, as in murals or a jewel case, perhaps. The comedy of these caricatures in their almost cubistic make-up—angles and masses stretched and inflated—prevents most of a lewd or vulgar interpretation. These characters are ordinary folk stripped of any civilized pretenses, as well as, in some cases, their clothes. If Bosch or Blake had drunk bootleg whisky in a Chicago speakeasy, they might have been induced to these happy visions. (unpublished) |