California dreamer - artist Jim Shaw

Art in America, Dec, 1996 by Ken Johnson

For the past five years, Jim Shaw's work has centered on his dream life. A recent show of drawings, paintings, sculptures and photographs highlighted Shaw's efforts to lend palpable form to oneiric imagery.

Jim Shaw first came to the art world's attention with "My Mirage," a long and amazing series of mostly small-scale paintings and drawings documenting the tacky mental furniture of a fictive, 1960s-era teenager named Billy. Since completing "My Mirage" in 1991, Shaw has focused on dreams. With the the same industry, gift for stylistic mimickry and fascination with the nether regions of the psyche that he brought to the earlier series, this Los Angeles-based artist has worked at documenting oneiric experience.

Shaw's recent show at Metro Pictures, appropriately titled "The Sleep of Reason," comprised a bewildering hodgepodge of well over 100 paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints and photographs, each of which related more or less directly to a dream. A riotous stylistic cacophony prevailed. Deliberately watered-down forms of Pop art, Neo-Expressionism, realism, Surrealism, primitivism and other modes were scattered throughout the gallery upstairs and down, creating the feeling of an artistic flea market. Shaw can be a magical craftsman when he wants to be, but few items in this show displayed much traditional esthetic refinement. More pronounced was conceptual irony--a simulated box of Surrealist playing cards accompanied by an actual Salvador Dali doll, for example, or a clumsily painted Peanuts-style cartoon in which Charlie Brown and Lucy engage in a high-flown dialogue apparently lifted from Nietzsche.

The exhibition checklist provided dream narratives with which the show's objects were associated. A triptych of Gerhard Richter-like abstractions was keyed to this dream: "Bob Flanagan stuck some pins into his back, then began sticking bigger things into Mike Kelley, whose wife showed up with their son. It was decided he'd retain visiting rights even though he was doing odd, scary stuff. I was painting a stripe painting and I scraped them at a 90 degree [sic] so they became plaid." (Well-known artists often turn up in Shaw's dreams.) An obscene comic strip in black ink on paper representing a woman biting off Santa Claus's penis went with a long, elaborate dream narrative that reads in part, "I look at a sketchbook I found with a crude story about Santa Claus and start laughing uproariously and think, `I must show this to Paul McCarthy.'" In many cases the dream text simply describes an object, such as, "There was this painted head of Jesus with statues of saints inserted in his face and beard. Then I saw another tortured Jesus with suffering statues inserted." This accurately characterizes a pair of large, floor-bound, painted Styrofoam heads that look like the efforts of an eccentric autodidact dike the Reverend Howard Finster.

One view of Shaw's oeuvre--and this would include his famous collection of thrift shop paintings [see A.i.A., Dec. '91]--could discover its central motivation in its preoccupation with what we might call the inferior. Failure, embarrassment, confusion, insecurity, delusion, grandiosity, inadequacy, frustration, fragmentation: to such states--typically experienced in dreams--Shaw returns again and again dike a patient in psychotherapy. He wants to catch his mind with its pants down, if you will. The way he matches these states to cleverly imitated instances of debased style constitutes in part the artistic interest of his enterprise. But more profoundly, his purpose inheres in his will to explore not the upper reaches of the psyche but its sedimentary bottom. Think of him as a kind of latter-day alchemist sifting through the dross of consciousness in search of psychic gold.

What was problematic in this show was the artist's programmatic reluctance to edit, refine or otherwise develop his works into more self-sufficiently complex articulations. This gave the presentation as a whole an opaque and monotonous effect. Finally, as strange, intriguing and funny as were many individual works, one wanted to know what Shaw himself makes of this incoherent mass of raw material. If there is psychoanalytic gold to be found in it, it wants distillation, synthesis, organization or interpretation to reveal it. Ironically, the parts of Shaw you want more of--his manifestly superior and highly individualized capabilities as an image-, form- and narrative-maker--are the parts that he has here willfully suppressed in his effort to be true to his own perceived inferiorities.