Mark Kostabi at Stefan Stux

Mark Kostabi has been with us for a long time. In a brief item in the New York Post's Page Six on Jan. 11, 2002, he remarked, "I'm tired of being a joke." The reason for the item (which Kostabi says he planted) was to announce that he would move from the more-or-less poster gallery he has been showing in for years (Martin Lawrence, where actually he had a lot of great shows) to a more respectable contemporary art venue--the Stefan Stux Gallery. The essence of the Page Six announcement: he was coming in from the cold.

Kostabi's work has involved sarcastic and parodic elements all along. Though it's true that it was often regarded as a joke, it was usually a good joke. So the fretful question arises: Now that he has decided that his work should stop being a joke, will it just become a bad joke instead of a good one?

The Stux show--all paintings from 2002--was kind of not a joke while trying to still remain a joke. I mean that it was a serious attempt to make meaningful acknowledgment of his concern for art history without renouncing his painstakingly constructed, jaded persona. The first painting one encountered upon entering the gallery was Kostabi's version of The Last Supper. While the architecture--especially the coffered ceiling--is recognizable, the Christ figure is, surprisingly, absent--except for rainbow-hued feet under the table. One sees through the space his body would occupy to the blue sky behind the open door at the back of the Leonardian space.

None of the apostles (faceless tubular figures) is using a cell phone, but there is a laptop on the table and some video monitors are arranged above. Perhaps the most significant thing about the painting is the fact that Kostabi chose this moment (coming in from the cold) and this spot (the first wall you saw in the show) to quote this incredibly classic icon of the Western tradition. There seemed to be a statement there.

Let That Be a Lesson similarly suggests that the artist is applying for membership in a club, doffing his cap, though with a sardonic gaze, at a quoted version of Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp. All the figures are painted naturalistically in form and color. Kostabi's own face appears among the doctors, characteristically solemn as he wields the scalpel to sever a membrane of the arm of the corpse--who is Andy Warhol. So in a sense the painting is another joke--in reference to the controversy, after Warhol's death, as to whether Kostabi or Jeff Koons would inherit the mantle of Pop satire (finally, neither of them did); but in another sense it proffers a straight homage to Rembrandt, lurking behind the sly fore-grounded homage to Warhol. (The difference in palettes--the airiness of Leonardo, the darkness of the Dutchman--shows more formal range in Kostabi's work than is usually acknowledged.)

In addition to these two works, the show as a whole was a droll survey of art-historical icons: van Eyck's wedding portrait occupied by more of Kostabi's faceless drones; a Vermeer-like composition of a woman at a table; Kostabi's face glaring ominously from a canvas being painted by a person who looks like Picasso; Kostabi smiling alluringly through LHOOQ's eyes. It's as if the artist wants to announce himself ("no joke") as a whole-bodied figure of art history.

The most interesting paintings were Work in Progress and Pieces of Eight. The former shows a strapping female figure with skirt hiked up shoveling away a flurry of mixed pigments--an implied polemic against Abstract Expressionism. Pieces of Eight, however, is just simply a "good painting" in the old sense of the term. Lovely in the evenness of its texture, smooth in its presentation of a balanced and coherent surface, it is clearly no joke.

Many people who hate Kostabi's work hate it primarily because it ridicules art-historical tradition. But this exhibition seemed to show a lot of respect for art history--indeed, it revealed Kostabi's earnest desire to be acknowledged as a contributing part of it. And surely it is time to admit that he is.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group