Boy story: absent from the New York gallery scene for eight years, provocateur Steve Gianakos returned with a concise Chelsea survey. The show confirmed the undiminished energy of his trademark hard-core humor and revealed new possibilities for his unorthodox methods of picture-making

Art in America, Oct, 2002 by William R. Valerio

Although multicultural awareness has created a heightened sensitivity to the awful stereotypes churned out by the mechanisms of popular (and high) culture, taboo imagery continues to provide rich but not necessarily inoffensive conceptual terrain for a great diversity of artists. Lisa Yuskavage's baby-doll nudes, Kara Walker's silhouetted antebellum Negroes and R. Crumb's perverse cartoon characters, for example, are drawn from the vast sea of vulgar images that haunt our cultural consciousness.

Another artist whose work is likely to hit some raw cultural nerves is Steve Gianakos, who has been posturing as a bad boy since the 1970s. He revels in sexism, kiddy porn, cheap comics and coloring-book-style renditions of television characters, serving it all up with stylistic panache and a fine-tuned sense of irony. If you ever find yourself enjoying a politically incorrect joke because it contains a strange kernel of truth, then you might derive pleasure from Gianakos's work, which abounds in tawdry punch lines and visual puns. The recent exhibition, "Whatever Tickles Your Fancy: Works from the 70's to the Present," at Fredericks Freiser was the first major showing of the artist's work in New York in many years. It included numerous pieces, large and small, functioning as both a mini-retrospective and a showcase of current interests.

The photocopy machine is Gianakos's most important tool, and he uses it like a master. His images, generally culled from the lower echelons of popular culture, are mechanically enlarged, reduced, warped, repeated and recopied before being juxtaposed and joined together. Gianakos might use the same photocopied image several times to tease out different meanings in different contexts. Remarkably, after so much contrivance, the overall esthetic is relaxed and spontaneous, largely because he intercedes with a few gestural strokes of white paint here and there to unify the varied linear elements and textures. He manages to project a certain precision, too. Gianakos was an industrial designer before becoming an artist, and his training in exactitude is apparent.

To finish his works, Gianakos applies a layer of protective lacquer that makes the wrinkles and variegations in tone (and toner) permanent. The edges of most works are uneven and jagged, and Gianakos sometimes creates a pretense of the haphazard by integrating images of crumpled or overlapped papers from the margins of the copy machine's glass field. The layering of these abstract excisions and waste areas often produces a marvelous expressionistic aura. At the gallery, Gianakos's works were pinned to the wall without fuss, and this heightened the sculptural immediacy of the surprisingly rich textures. The exhibition was packed with a great number of confrontational and challenging works, and the decision to show many pieces at once was a good one. It made the innate perversity of the readymade images plainly evident.

Gianakos's blunt Ugly girl with big tits (1995) epitomizes his signature manipulation of aggressively vulgar subject matter and sophisticated design. This bust-length caricature of a young woman with enormous breasts is an assemblage of photocopied fragments. The composition reads as a fluid whole, thanks to the careful joining Of shapes and lines and the slapdash but strategic application of dirty-white paint that elides certain disjunctions. At the same time, the fragmentation of the figure and jarring leaps of scale provide for the brutally exaggerated appearance summarized by the title. The piece assaults any sense of acceptable taste and triggers embarrassing memories of high-school-level sexism.

Like much of Pop art, which commented satirically on the machismo of Abstract Expressionism, Ugly girl with big tits can be construed as an incisive reading of the treatment of the female figure in certain modernist art of the past 50 years. Works such as Willem de Kooning's Woman series (1950-53) come to mind. Some art historians have argued that the horrific, leering faces and misshapen breasts in de Kooning's paintings function as key elements in an exploration of masculine power and fear as they relate both to the artist's own subjectivity and to American popular culture in the post-World War II era. Gianakos, working a full half century later with the scrappy photocopies that comprise Ugly girl with big tits, preserves the sadistic adolescent humor of popular sexism in order to expose its weakness. For all Gianakos's unprepossessing technique and obsession with low-level, misogynistic imagery, he is no dumb sexist, nor is he remotely guileless. Ugly girl with big tits suggests that traditional straight, white, American masculine identity may be as desperate as it is transparent. At the same time, the work is effective precisely for targeting the sexism that pervades high art no less than the popular image-world that surrounds us.

Another strong work on paper from the last decade is Right from the beginning she was best viewed from a distance (2001), a caricature of a wide-eyed pretty woman applying lipstick. Her eyes and mouth have been laid over a wedge of cheese that sits on a plate with a knife, and this weird surrogate for a face is encircled by the patterns of a two-dimensional maze lifted from a child's activity book. It adds up to a peculiar, unsavory fetish, not alluring in the least, which may stand for all the terrible things that are done to women in the name of the senses and sensuality.