Jane Kaplowitz at Rupert Goldsworthy - Brief Article

Art in America, April, 2000 by Sarah Valdez

"Welcome to a world where life is truly beautiful. A world where Cristal flows from bottles like water from fountains. Every expensive car sits on chrome, Rolexes decorate wrists like cuff links, and every foot is covered with the hide of some endangered species of reptile. Every citizen in this utopia is adorned with a minimum of $10,000 worth of jewelry. At all times, women are treated like showpieces, bailers ditch their $100,000 cars for candy-painted helicopters, cell phones chime in unison like a well-orchestrated symphony, and players make paper airplanes out of $110 bills for fun. It's gross materialism, and you'll hear it on every Cash Money release."

So goes an admiring description, from the industry magazine Rap Pages, of the luxe ethos of Cash Money, the New Orleans record label, Universal Records subsidiary and home to Snoop Dogg, Master P, Juvenile and other extremely profitable creators of the latest in gangsta rap. And now, in her most recent show at Rupert Goldsworthy Gallery, Jane Kaplowitz has done with images from Cash Money's promotional materials what she had previously done with well-known modern art works and film stills from Gone with the Wind, Death in Venice and Taxi Driver: copied them into her own art works, adding conceptual layers by making lines of authorship fuzzy. It's not a new artistic trick, but Kaplowitz does it well.

In Pop-bright, yet washed-out hues of acrylic paint, with scrubby pastel that lets the white paper she works on show through, Kaplowitz re-presents portraits of black men posing with accoutrements of their rapperly financial success: crisp suits, bandanas, a fierce panther on a chain, fancy cars, ornate architecture and even gilt-framed art. The dandyish gentlemen are accompanied in these dreamy scenarios by text, sparkling and misspelled insider phraseology like "Boyz," "Big Tymers," "B-Legit" and references to ghetto authenticity. In the metaworld of the art gallery, the Cash Money esthetic is voyeuristically satisfying.

Refreshingly, Kaplowitz's paintings do not include moralizing signals as to what, exactly, viewers are supposed to think. The barely-thereness of her paint, the inexpensive quality of her materials and the simplicity with which her works are hung (unframed and nailed to the wall at the top) clash with the brash, anesthetized display of riches that defines the Cash Money way. The flimsy quality of her paintings seems to indicate a contemplative acknowledgment of just how ephemeral her rough and tough, wealth-wielding subjects really are. Still, by choosing to copy rather than to invent, Kaplowitz sympathetically places herself in a creative stance not unlike that of the rappers, who also find their distinct expression by obviously, enterprisingly embellishing what has come before.