A Baroque Populism - Luis Jimenez

Art in America, March, 1999 by Charles Dee Mitchell

The pattern of political objections followed by working-class support is common to Jimenez's public commissions. A similar situation developed in Pittsburgh with the installation of Steelworker (1986). The sculpture's original title was Hunky Steelworker, a term Jimenez had picked up from the local publication the Millhunk Herald. "Hunky" is an old-fashioned, sometimes disparging slang term for Americans of central or eastern European background that was especially applied to industrial workers. Jimenez used it to honor the ethnic origin of many of the region's steelworkers, in the same way that in his Southwest works he uses Spanish slang terms. Pittsburgh officials objected to the word "Hunky" and the artist agreed to grind off the offending term. Afterwards, however, many locals who had understood the level of homage Jimenez meant to pay them came by the sculpture to touch the area where the inscription had been.

Jimenez's handling of another public-art project in Houston shows that the artist has developed a sense of humor about the political responses his works can generate. In 1996, when Jimenez viewed the Houston park for which the sculpture was being commissioned, he noticed a large homeless population and guessed that the commissions he and other artists were being given were part of a plan to clean the place up. The sculpture Jimenez proposed was based on Gericault's Raft of the Medusa, but in the place of shipwreck victims it depicted a lean-to encampment surrounded by homeless men and women. The present exhibition includes a large 1996 watercolor, Homeless Set Adrift (After Gericault), which was as far as the project got--this time Jimenez didn't even make the short list.

As integral as public work remains to Jimenez's practice, the definitive piece in "Working Class Heroes" may well be an installation made to be seen in a museum. Titled Honky Tonk (1997), the work (which unfortunately was on view only in Dallas) marks a striking shift in mediums for the artist. It's a re-creation of a Texas bar in which over a dozen larger-than-life-sized, cutout plywood figures dance, drink, sulk and give one another the eye. Jimenez has worked on Honky Tonk for the past 15 years, adding figures and adjusting their poses to suggest new narrative possibilities. The characters include middle-aged couples dressed for a night on the town, young people on the make, solitary drinkers and a dog in danger of getting stepped on. That the artist considers this the most personal of his works was made clear by his inclusion in the installation of watercolor and graphite works that seem out-of-place in the barroom environment. These are portraits of three generations of his family, portraits whose sensitivity takes a harsher turn when the artist depicts himself in a series of hand-colored lithographs from 1995. Looking gaunt and grim, Jimenez seems intent in these large prints on presenting the "skull beneath the skin."

Jimenez has explored the dance-hall theme frequently in prints and drawings, and one image that does tour with the exhibition captures much of the feeling of the installation. Sharing the same title as the Dallas installation, Honky Tonk (1981) is a 35 1/8-by-50-inch color lithograph lightly dusted with glitter that introduces one of the central images from the installation. On a crowded dance floor, a woman has thrown her arms around her partner's neck. Although he's grabbed a generous piece of her ass, his eyes stray to another woman whose expression conveys equal parts of encouragement and threat.