Cheek to chic

ArtForum, May, 1999 by Lisa Liebmann

ON THE EVE OF PAINTER GARY HUME'S BRITISH PAVILION SURVEY AT THE 48TH VENICE BIENNALE, LISA LIEBMANN LOOKS BACK AT A DECADE OF WORK AND AHEAD TO THE JUNE OPENING.

Gary Hume has created a New Look for painting with the satin-gloved fist of a militant. "New Look" capitalized, because of its contagious fashionability: The devotional appeal of his nullified subjects, from the quizzical doors of the late '80s and early '90s to the more recent Pop-ish figures and slivers of freeze-framed landscape, has made its inexorable way westward from London to Los Angeles, which at present is witnessing a burgeoning painting style whose abstracted attitude and offhand panache seem indebted to Hume's nacreous palette and freedom with regard to subject.

I say "satin" rather than the usual velvet, because of the chill gloss of the Humean surface. The all-but-abstract paintings of doors - generic, mute portals - were so shiny you could see yourself coming and going in them. To the mildly depressed New York art sector, circa 1992, they looked like just what the doctor ordered - color therapy, a cleansing of the palette, new blood - and they came on like cheeky ripostes, twenty years ex post facto but still welcome, to Brice Marden's waxy, matte, monochrome paintings of the late '60s, which also had a young, sexy vibe and a privately conceived template of human scale.

Hume's reflective doors were an invitation au voyage - whether to a pink-and-purple love-in or to an emergency room out of A Clockwork Orange was up to you. Ineffably, they seemed naughty, perhaps secretly funny-mean in the Martin Amis vein, with their instant-chic housepaint flesh tones and suave puns on abstraction, not to mention their angry-young-man titles, like Long Distance Run Around 24 Hours, 1991, More Fucking Values, 1991, and My Guernica, 1992.

But Hume did not elect to be the Master of the Swinging Doors. In 1992, just as they were making their debut in New York, he moved on, occasionally to return to them over time. Immediately thereafter followed a period, lasting about a year in the artist's life, that was much romanticized in the British press: Hume, on his own and turning thirty, with a small child to support, experienced an artistic crisis and was poor again - to use a word rarely uttered in the States, even among struggling young artists, where it is widely considered to be a jinx. In the London of the post-Thatcher years, however, it appears to have been considered a badge of honor, as well as an obstacle to overcome (and which, once overcome, would seem to vindicate the flintiness of "the oppressor" along with the "grit" of the oppressed). Between 1992 and 1994, in any event, Hume accomplished a lot. For one thing, he regressed, in time-honored English fashion, producing his rude anti-classic, Me as King Cnut, a performance video, in which the artist-as-king-as-jester,a fat spliff stuck in his mouth, gesticulates and splutters in a bathtub full of water: This viewer was reminded of the 1966 film Morgan!, wherein the Russian Revolution-obsessed hero retreats to a gorilla suit for much of the duration. It was nevertheless during this period that Hume, in going Ubu, accomplished his first little revolution in content.

The artist had spent some months in Rome in 1991, and, as if Candide in the Eternal City, he was impressed by the Fascist-era statuary posturing along the banks of the Tiber. By the end of '93 he had produced Hero, a glossy black painting whose sharply incised lines limn the contours of one of those authoritarian Roman figures. Fascism's fascination, leavened with flashes of '60s Cinecitta, proved to be a rich source of ore for Hume over the next couple of years. He spun the Italian theme quite loosely, giving issue to a surprisingly varied number of paintings that can be counted among his master-works to date - Love Love's Unlovable, 1994, his perverse take on "abjection" in art in the form of a twin-paneled painting whose brocaded atmosphere enshrouds the statue-heroes like a lurid Roman sunset out of late Visconti; and Begging for It, 1994, with its nasty double entendre, colors that recall Juliet of the Spirits, Fellini's 1965 Technicolor tale of an Italian bourgeois housewife sex-starved into sublimity, and that elegantly prayerful silhouette, reminiscent of Vatican-approved religious art of the '50s and '60s, perhaps by the modernist Manzu.

But Italy has no monopoly on carny glamour and subversive popular allure - British specialties since at least 1966, when Mick Jagger donned his first Town, my Nutter suit. At home in London, Hume was surfing the English channels, painting friends (Cerith, 1997) with vaudevillian panache and coming up with "portrait" subjects such as Tony Blackburn, 1993, of the blustering British radio personality as a messy, matte black clover against a neat black shiny orb; and Patsy Kensit, 1994, of the latter-day dollybird and star of Absolute Beginners, a postcamp classic and milestone film for Hume, looking something like a daydream by Yardley.