“San Francisco”, 1973, vintage gelatin silver print, 12 x 7 7/8 inches

When the New Topographics exhibition appeared at the George Eastman House in 1975, it did not feel like a history-making event.  Ranging from bland to butt-ugly, the 168 images that comprised the show seemed destined for obscurity or worse.  That it upended the prevailing notions of fine art photography ranks as one of the greater ironies of art history, since few people saw the original show and even fewer saw its limited-run catalog.  Socially engaged photographers got it immediately.  Eager to engage with the actual circumstances of American life (as opposed to gilding its fading myths), they joined with a group of curators who wanted photography to be taken seriously as fine art.  The shift wasn’t sudden.  But the differences between old and new – when they came to light – couldn’t have been sharper.

Before New Topographics, American landscape photography meant Ansel Adams and the f/64 group.  After New Topographics, idealized visions of Half Dome and the California coast gave way to images of subdivisions, industrial parks, parking lots, strip malls, telephone wires, mobile home parks and factories. These the New Topographics artists rendered in a point-blank, documentary style so lacking in affect or subjectivity you could easily have mistaken their typological studies for the work of camera-wielding robots.  Walking through the re-creation of this show that is now on view at SFMOMA, it seems as if the photographers were challenging each other to see who could make the dullest, most abject pictures.

“Point Richmond, 1974”, vintage gelatin silver print

That their anti-aesthetic so completely dominates landscape photography today speaks to the triumph of banality, both in life and in art.  As Ed Rusha put it in 1972, in a remark that forecast photography’s role in postmodernist thinking, “Sometimes the ugliest things have the most potential.”  If that sounds like a grim assessment, take heart.  Of the nine photographers who appeared in the original show there was a dissenting voice.  It belonged to Henry Wessel.  Where his cohorts (Robert Adams, Baltz, the Bechers, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott and Stephen Shore) avoided interpretive acts that could be construed as demonstrating a subjective viewpoint, Wessel seemed to be tipping his hand at every turn.

Seven works in the SFMOMA exhibition and 12 prints in a concurrent show at the Rena Bransten Gallery demonstrate that Wessel could make bland pictures with the best of them; but his real forte was creating images that demonstrated a highly cultivated sense of the absurd; mixing the high irony of Walker Evans with the street-wise alacrity of Cartier Bresson.

 “Coronado, CA, 1976”, vintage gelatin silver print, 16 ¾ x 20 ½"; “East Bay, 1978”, vintage gelatin silver print, 10 1/2 x 15 1/2"

As such, his photos greet you with a nod and a wink. Albany, California (1973), a night shot of a tract house, parodies real estate photography, treating the home as if it were a celebrity, caught unaware by paparazzi.  In Tuscon (1974), tall weeds appear well on their way to consuming a house.  You can almost hear the photographer in the background shouting , “Score one for nature!” The ticky-tacky bungalow cantilevered into a hillside in Point Richmond, California (1974) feels like an optical trick.  It’s not, but you could take it as such if you didn’t know Bay Area topography.  New Mexico, with its minimalist rock garden and denuded tree, mocks the notion of a desert garden, while Las Vegas, a strip mall fronted by a sculpted figure balanced on a fingertip offers a precarious visual metaphor for unsustainable development.

“Las Vegas, 1973”, vintage gelatin silver print

Contrary to its title, New Topographics wasn’t about topography; it was about the “built environment”. Logically, such pictures should have included people since the environments pictured are man-made, but for the most part they don’t.  The sole exceptions are a few images from Stephen Shore.

Here again, Wessel broke with convention.  In the works on view at Rena Bransten, all from roughly the same period as the NP photos – the mid 1970s — we see a pictorial sensibility that had more in common with the previous decade’s street photographers than with the NP photographers.  Peopled or not, they beg more questions than they answer.  What, for example, is the man in a suit (who bears an uncanny resemblance to LBJ) doing on the beach at Crissy Field?  What is an airplane engine doing next to a swimming pool in Tuscon, Arizona, 1977?  And why is the house in San Francisco, 1972 enclosed in a cage, as if the inhabitants were lions in a zoo?  The “built environment” for Wessel was an alien place.

“San Francisco, 1972”, vintage gelatin silver print, 8 x 11 7/8 inches

No doubt, other NP photographers felt this, too.  But what they failed to express — and what Wessel showed in abundance — was humor.  His photo of a man walking on Coronado Beach makes the town in the background look like a distant planet.  In Waikiki, 1975, three shirtless men appear almost alien, too, strolling down a palm-studded street amidst high rises.  Then there’s his amazing shot of the East Bay hills shot from a BART train where the view is framed twice: once by a window and again through the space between an overpass and the 880 Freeway.

Making the quotidian look both strange and familiar was Wessel’s specialty.  His cohorts may have recorded the bald facts of our surroundings and elevated their impact through repetition.  Wessel didn’t need to.  His photos are self-contained stories that bring us face-to-face with our overbuilt, unsustainable existence.

–DAVID M. ROTH

Henry Wessel: Vintage Still Photographs @ Rena Bransten through August 21, 2010

New Topographics @ SFMOMA through October 3, 2010

Katherine Westerhout, "Mishkan Yisroel Synagogue", 2007, archival pigment print, 43 x 52"

Before museums, knowledge of the world beyond our immediate reach could be found in cabinets of curiosities – rooms that literally housed collections of everything under the sun, from natural history and ethnographic artifacts to archeological fragments and antiques. These early attempts to collect and categorize, which began during the Renaissance and remained the province of elites for some time to come, were designed to elucidate and impress. That such practices became a common activity, engaged in by legions of collectors everywhere, can be adduced by the widely variegated impact they had on 20^th century art.

Wondrous Strange: a 21^st Century Cabinet of Curiosities pays homage to these traditions. It contains all the things you would expect (boxes and bottles of artist-scavenged curios), but it also pulls in things not generally seen in this realm, such as painting, ceramic sculpture and tapestry. In all, 21 artists of disparate persuasions are represented in this sprawling, category-defying show.  Most express, in some elegiac fashion, the human impulse to excavate and order. 

Sharon Beals, "Nest with Soft Leaves, 2007, pigment print on etching paper, 32 x 32"

Chief amongst the excavators is Oakland-based photographer Katherine Westerhout. Her color-drenched images of abandoned and decaying buildings begin as documentation but quickly slip into a more rarified zone, as demonstrated in Mishkan Yisroel Synagogue (Christian Altar), Detroit. In the exquisite light that permeates her forgotten buildings, we see not only the details of their decrepitude — we almost smell the rotting timbers, the humid air and the pools of rain water that collect through broken ceilings.  The experience of looking at these pictures borders on synesthesia, the phenomenon by which information from one sensory mechanism triggers or co-mingles with another. Sharon Beals’ natural history photos also, on occasion, push past genre-imposed bounds. Nest with Soft Leaves, for example, with its swirling detritus, might be taken for a microscopic shot of molecular activity.  Donald Farnsworth’s 13-foot-long, trompe l’oeil tapestry, Antiquarian Library, performs a similar feat through illusionism. From across the room it achieves the desired impact; up close it dissolves into abstraction. Look closely at how this mash-up of digital photos is translated by a computer-controlled machine and you see an incomprehensibly dense thicket of woven fabric. The effect is strangely bifurcated, like what happens when you view Chuck Close’s painted portraits at varying distances. What’s significant about this visual bait-and-switch is how it elicits nostalgia without actually permitting it. Steven Allen’s ceramic set pieces echo that approach, employing with less persuasive deception, the clay-based verisimilitude perfected by Richard Shaw and Marilyn Levine.

Donald Farnsworth, "Antiquarian Library", 2006, cotton and metallic jacquard tapestry, 62 x 158"

George Pfau’s drawing on canvas, Represented In-Flus Bodies, Cyborg Architecture, Geographic Enclosures, tickles the optical nerve, too. It reads like a dizzying treasure map, with layers of lines and skeletal shapes that appear to have arrived through some combination of stenciling and photolithography. Embedded into the picture at various depths, these forms, which are obscured with hand-painted gestural marks, trace an archeological journey that has no beginning or end.   

George Pfau, "Represented In-Flus Bodies, Cyborg Architecture, Geographic Enclosures, 2009, mixed media, 72 x 48"

Stephen Berkman, “Songbird and the Sharpshooter”, tintype

Looking at photography these days, it’s hard not to wonder if the medium hasn’t been drained of aesthetic value. For nearly two decades, big, banal, theory-driven pictures have occupied a disproportionate amount of space in galleries and museums. Yet despite this apparent hijacking, there’s a quiet counterinsurgency gathering force, composed of hundreds of photographers who are turning antiquated photographic methods to surprisingly contemporary ends. 

Baron de Meyer, “Shores of Bosporus”, C. 1905, photogravure, collection of Stephen and Connie Wirtz

Joy Goldkind (L to R): “Dora”, “Rose”, “Contest 6”, 2000-2009, bromoil, hand inked

Andreas Hablutzel, Untitled, 2001, archival pigment ink print

Ben Nixon, “Falcon’s Den, City of Rocks”, 2009, collodion negative, silver print

Chris McCaw, “Sunburned GSP #277”, 2008, unique gelatin silver paper negative

Liz Steketee, photos from “Reconstructed Memories”

Michael Stevens, “Three Wishes”, 2009, pine and enamel, 72 x 46 x 24"

Contrary to Bay Area opinion, which holds that Sacramento is a backwater, Flatlanders, now in its third installment, stands as a sharp and smart rebuke.  It not only serves as a showcase for emerging artists, but also spotlights area artists who long ago established regional, national and international reputations.

The haul during these past few years has been rich and diverse, and if nothing else, a testament to the taste and well-known eccentricities of Renny Pritikin who, like any good curator, scours the landscape to unearth novelty and quality, both of which appear in equal proportions in this bi-annual show of Sacramento-area artists.

Where in the beginning, in 2006, Pritikin included nearly 50 artists, he has now culled the herd to a manageable eight: Michael Stevens, Irving Marcus, Jim Albertson, Suzanne Adan, Jack Ogden, Patrick Marasso, Ianna Frisby and Mitra Fabian.  They range in age from their mid-30s to 81– a fact that normally wouldn’t mean much; but here age really does matter: The older artists – those in their 60s, 70s and 80s — who grew up under the influence of the Chicago Imagists, exhibit a gnarled, battle-hardened cynicism that simply isn’t present in the younger artists.

Pritikin didn’t set out to build a theme show, but certain themes do jump out. A fitting and encompassing subtitle for this one might be Americana. Each artist, in their own way, speaks about American culture and history, sometimes through the jaded lens of harsh personal experience, sometimes not.  That the pieces don’t all fit together perfectly doesn’t really matter; there’s enough coherence and quality here to more than compensate. Clearly, the loudest, most boisterous “conversation” in the show takes place in the main gallery between Stevens, Albertson, Marcus and Adan. 

Irving Marcus, “Cult”, 2010, oil on canvas, 38 x 65”

In Stevens’work, deceptions, double crosses, abductions, disappointments and bad outcomes play out in wood sculptures based on fictional cartoon characters that recall early days of television –days of supposed innocence.  Into that fiction, which exploded in the ‘60s with assassinations, violence and protest, Stevens, 65, lobs a grenade of his own.

His meticulously carved pieces, which often employ thrift-store paintings as backdrops, posit a Howdy Doody-meets-Alfred Hitchcock universe where demons lurk behind every white picket fence.  As the artist explained in a Squarecylinder profile last year, “I’m a satirist.  I draw on universal situations, like being out on a limb and using a comedic saw to cut yourself down, as in Three Wishes, “where you have three choices for the place where you will fall.  The imagery that I use talks about the human condition, that theatrical predicament that we’re all in.” Chop Suey, a floor mounted work that acts as a focal point for the exhibition, is also a signature piece for Stevens.  In it, symbols of an American dream run aground – a hatchet, a saw, a fish, a suitcase, a log cabin and a lunch pail – pile up on the back of a dog: a teetering structure of idyllic, homespun icons that flash like a warning signal saying: “This could happen to you.” 

Jim Albertson, “Art Lesson”, 2008, oil on canvas, 40 x 30”

Dark visions emanate, too, from Irving Marcus, 81, but they’re brightened and considerably softened by his Fauvist color palette — and by a floating cast of characters (devils, terrorists, prostitutes, politicians) whose positions in space are ambiguous.  As Mark Van Proyen observed some years back, these fractured allegories “express a confused consciousness of their own disembodied state, as though discontented with their reality yet unable to do anything to improve it.”  The paintings on view here — 911, Brothel and Cult – work similarly; they insist on the persistence of evil, yet their hallucinatory colors and disjointed structures vehemently deny it, like a person who’s witnessed a crime but can’t acknowledge having seen it. 

In contrast, Jim Albertson seems to have witnessed all manner of nastiness with his eyes pinned open. In 1978 he achieved notoriety by being included in Marcia Tucker’s ground-breaking New Museum show, Bad Painting.  The term doesn’t refer to badness per se, but to the collective nose-thumbing certain artists gave to conventional notions of high and low, presaging the breakdown of categories that would soon follow.  Working in an imagistic style similar to that of his then-partner, Louise Stanley, Albertson repurposes classical themes and myths, rendering lecherous and often mute characters in a loose hand and in lurid colors. His oeuvre reads like a catalog of nightmares from a molested child.

Suzanne Adan, “Shorthand”, 2008, oil on canvas, 15 x 20"

In Young Fragonard, Albertson reworks The Swing, Fragonard’s painting of a woman’s skirt blowing open to prying eyes.  In this version, a zombie-eyed mother with exposed thighs stiffly attempts to caress a swinging boy.  The kid looks terrified, and so does a fleeing cat. Art Lesson, a self-portrait, shows the artist-instructor as a leering, tongue-wagging clown, towering over his acolytes.

Suzanne Adan, 64, to whom Stevens is married, makes some of the most mysterious paintings you’re likely see anywhere.  Filled with figures, objects, animals, text snippets and symbols, her paintings owe equal debts to ‘40s-era American cartoons, Joan Miro and to Jim Nutt, a seminal influence who taught briefly at Sac State in the early ‘70s, and whose roots in Surrealism are clearly seen in the frozen-in-time dream sequences that appear in Adan’s energetic canvases.  Like the visionary artists that first inspired the Imagists, Adan works in an obsessive manner; the backgrounds of her paintings consist of scalloped marks done in a heavy impasto which, in contrast to the representational elements, flatten out the action almost completely.  Emptied of emotion, they echo the mute, repressed qualities seen in Stevens and Marcus.  

Jack Ogden, "Two Men in Tuxes", 2010, oil on canvas, 21 x 23”

Unlike his peers, Jack Ogden, 77, has no personal or ideological axes to grind, and as such he seems like the odd man out in this grouping.  He makes pared-down oil paintings of cowboys and robber barons.  But rather than reframe myths of the American West as a postmodernist might, Ogden remains a formalist, committed to executing simple narratives and portraits with the fewest marks needed to establish, character, setting and mood.  His large-scale oils aim for a bravura effect, but it’s his small-scale portraits that show how much impact can be squeezed from the smallest gestures.  Imagine Luc Tuymans painting 19^th century American plutocrats and you get some idea of what Odgen’s up to in works like Two Men in Tuxes.  The faces are smears, the backdrop is built from a few black strokes, and the domes atop the silver service tray are opposing shadows.  But where Tuymans dispenses with painterly effects to make political statements, Ogden simply paints. At age 77, the former Sac State professor is vital as ever.

Patrick Marasso and Ianna Frisby, both in their 30s, offer visions of the past that are neither nostalgic nor critical.  Marasso makes oil paintings from found snapshots of white, middle-class, middle-aged Americans drinking and having fun.  While painting from photographs is hardly a new idea — Gerhard Richter did it most famously — Marasso’s glossy-surfaced pictures exert a unique kind of pull.  By themselves the throwaway snapshots he reproduces are unremarkable.  But by painting the original images at substantially larger sizes, and by exaggerating their blurry, yellowed surface textures almost to the point of parody, Marasso gives these images new meaning.

Patrick Marasso, “Xmas at Joann & Pat’s”, 2009, 11 x 11"; "The Move", 2009, 10.5 x 10.5", both oil on panel

They force us to look for tell-tale signs, and as such, they transform banal objects into cultural artifacts, capable of telling stories that the original photographs, by virtue of their artlessness, could not.  Ianna Frisby also turns one thing into another: she reproduces fashion illustrations as embroideries.  At a distance they look like the originals; but up close they’re all about texture and dimensionality – and, most remarkably, the skill required to turn two-dimensional representations of people and clothing into tactile objects.

Ianna Frisby, “Fashion Pattern # 3”, 2010, embroidery, 24 x 16”

Lastly, Mitra Fabian, using binder clips, constructs a floral-shaped sculpture that covers an entire wall in a room adjacent to the main gallery; it’s wondrously simple and it activates the space nicely; but given the narrow dimensions of the room, it is impossible to view at a proper distance.  To see what Fabian is really capable of, head to JAYJAY where several of her sculptures are on view through Aug. 7.  (I’ll have more to say about Fabian and the JAYJAY show in a future posting.)

Given Flatlanders’ inclusive past, some people may feel short-changed by Pritikin’s abbreviated take on the Sacramento scene.  But from this vantage point, less is not only more, it’s flat-out better: This is the strongest, most cohesive Flatlanders show yet. 

–DAVID. M. ROTH

Flatlanders 3: A Regional Roundup @ the Richard L. Nelson Gallery & Fine Art Collection, UC Davis, through August 15, 2010

Cover: Irving Marcus, 911, 2010, oil on canvas, 40 x 60”

Photos: David M. Roth

Katherine Sherwood (detail), “Mansur Nurse from the Yelling Clinic”, 2010, mixed media on canvas, 98 x 30 x 12”

Pairings of big-name artists, especially those of disparate sensibility, are always fraught propositions.   One always wonders how and why such combinations appear and what the connections might be.  In the case of Local Treasures: Six Extraordinary Artists, there are some obvious clues.  One is that co-curator, Richard Whittaker, who collaborated on this show with BAC Executive Director Suzanne Tan, interviewed all of the artists at length for his magazine, works & conversations, copies of which are stationed throughout the exhibit.  The other is that all of the artists have deep roots in the Bay Area art scene. 

By themselves, those are fairly slender pegs on which to hang a show.   However, if you scratch beneath the surface of this one, you find that most of the artists, divergent though their styles may be, deal with two issues: healing and transcendence.  

Berkeley painter and UCB Professor of Art, Katherine Sherwood, examines the workings of the human brain, a pursuit that’s been central to her work ever since she recovered from a cerebral hemorrhage that debilitated the left side of her brain and paralyzed the right half of her body.  The event, which occurred in 1997, forced her to not only relearn language and basic motor skills, but also to paint with her left hand.  Her pictures combine healing symbols that were once employed as seals by King Solomon and photo transfers of her own angiograms – both of which are united pictorially by congealed globs of poured paint that look like frozen-in-time geological events.  

Robert Brady, “Area 51”, 2010, freestanding wood sculpture, 112 x 27 x 32

Two of the works on view here point toward even greater dimensionality.  In Mansur Nurse and Burgundy Nurse (both from the Yelling Clinic series), the artist appends skirts to a pair of vertical canvases to create figures that are practically animate.  Where she once focused exclusively on what was going on inside her head, she’s now creating bodies and accessorizing them with dotted, Indian-looking details accompanied by text that appears to be Sanskrit or Arabic. 

Robert Brady, another long-time Berkeley resident and a former Sac State professor, also traces his beginnings as sculptor to a debilitating illness – one that struck twice: once when he was a teenager and again in adulthood never to return.  Though his work has never been about sickness, the experience pushed him to explore life’s essences, using the figure as a malleable template for wide-ranging explorations of what can be wrought from wood.  His best-known works are emaciated, long-limbed figures whose inscrutable, totemic features call to mind Cycladic sculptures.

They’ve always been highly abstract, but in recent years they’ve become even more so.  Area 51 is a good example.  It’s an outsized piece named for the U.S. Air Force base in southern Nevada, long been rumored to be harboring the remains of space aliens and their conveyances.  With its rocket-shaped, nose-cone of a head set on a platform held aloft by four skinny legs, and with its oval-shaped feet adorned with painted-on polka-dot “eyes”, it gives palpable form to the rumors.

A bigger surprise for Brady watchers, though, may be his drawings.  He’s made them for years but rarely shown them.  Unlike the informal sketches that we are accustomed to seeing from sculptors, Brady’s are exacting, detailed works that incorporate the full range of his iconography, illustrating a world view that could function as a backdrop for a theatre performance – a desert epic, perhaps — that has yet to be staged. 

Jim Melchert, “Untitled Rubbing of Verbs #1”, 1993-4, graphite and black lead on paper, 60 x 49”

Ceramic sculptor Jim Melchert, another celebrated Bay Area figure, gained fame by firing and then painting assemblages of smashed tiles to create wall-mounted sculptures that were at once Conceptual, Op and Minimalist.  The work he exhibits here is markedly different, and as a result it fits neatly into the theme of the show.Two oval-shaped “rubbings” (of graphite and black lead on paper) emit an inner glow through an epidermal surface texture, evoking ancient spiritual and fertility symbols.  There are also two ceramic boxes (Words in an Unknown Tongue) filled with serpentine forms that hit the eye like a kind of visual glossolalia, squirming incomprehensibly while remaining resolutely still.

Livia Stein, who’s traveled extensively in India and whose retrospective opened last month at the Triton Museum in Santa Clara, has for years worked with images of Ghandi, a healing figure if ever one existed.  One of them, a monotype simply titled, Ghandi, has an almost reliquary feel, as does the etching called Airplane.

Together, they sound the themes of flight and transcendence that echo throughout the room in works by Brady and by Gale Wagner.  Wagner, who was wounded in Vietnam and used art to self-heal, makes exquisite rubber band-powered model airplanes that dangle from the gallery ceiling, activating the airspace.  His works deserve permanent museum space. 

Squeak Carnwath, “Hours”, 1990, dog tracks, charcoal, graphite, paint stick, acrylic on paper, 72 x 68” framed

With Squeak Carnwath, who last year wowed the Bay Area with a 15-year survey at the Oakland Museum, the curators tried to go beyond the tried-and-true.  She’s best known for lushly painted word and number-filled canvases that function as illuminated diaries.  What we get here are more words than pictures.  They appear in two drawings and in seven framed notebook pages.

The notebook pages I read reluctantly because they seemed too intimate.  But two outstanding drawings– Hours and New Rule – demonstrate the central premise of her work, which is that our thoughts, however small or seemingly insignificant, are worth examining.  For Carnwath that process is the essence of consciousness, validating her own existence and affirming that of viewers as well.  While the absence of her oil paintings is lamentable, oil does show up in an unexpected form: cigar boxes overflowing with raw pigment.  The meaning of these Dada-like objects is hard to fathom, but whatever the intent, they’re a great tactile pleasure.

Flight is the show’s one visible through-line, but the idea doesn’t really fly.  The pictures and objects that relate to flight generate a certain synergy amongst themselves, but they don’t always relate meaningfully to the rest of what’s in the room.

No matter.  The act of bringing artists of this stature together in a community art center setting is commendable.  Each artist has a long history of delving into life’s mysteries and hitting hit pay dirt wherever they choose to strike.  Local Treasures proves it yet again. 

–DAVID M. ROTH

Local Treasures: Six Extraordinary Artists @ Berkeley Art Center through August 8, 2010.

Cover: Squeak Carnwath: Partegas Londres Finos #6, 2001, paint, cigar box (paper covered mahogany), 6 x 8 x 4”.

From de Tocqueville to Baudrillard, American history is filled with foreigners who have come to these shores to reveal truths that make us squirm.  When painter/satirist Enrique Chagoya burst onto the Bay Area scene in the mid-1980s, his charcoal-and-pastel drawings did exactly that.  Smash-ups of American pop culture and Mesoamerican myth, his art exposed the concealed ideological baggage that culture carries when it crosses national borders.             Practicing what he calls "reverse anthropology," Chagoya, 54, redraws Latin American history to show the conquistadores (represented by American cartoon and comic book heroes) being vanquished by the natives.  In this violent, sardonic oeuvre in which the artist upends the modernist practice of appropriating primitive art, Aztec and Mayan warriors and ancient goddesses clash with the likes of Superman and the Lone Ranger, oftentimes at length across multi-panel codex books that fold out, accordion-style, like the original pre-Columbian history texts that the Spanish destroyed.

            While such methods and concerns put Chagoya squarely inside the identity-obsessed, appropriationist milieu of ’80s and ’90s, his work has always seemed to operate outside the high-low fracas. No doubt, that distinction helped Chagoya catch the eye of Neo Expressionist painter Sue Coe who introduced Chagoya to the San Francisco dealer Paule Anglim who in turn helped orchestrate his 1994 exhibition at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco – a precursor to the current 25-year survey ("Enrique Chagoya: Borderlandia") mounted in 2007 by the Des Moines Art Center that travels to the Palm Springs Art Museum for three months beginning Sept. 27.  (The show’s three-month run at the U.C. Berkeley Art Museum ended May 18.)             In the intervening decades, Chagoya has had nearly 40 museum shows in which curators have linked him to the great Mexican muralists (Rivera, Siqueiros and Orozco); the 19^th century political cartoonist José Guadalupe Posada; the French caricaturist Daumier; and to the Russian Constructivists who believed as Chagoya does "that art should be seen as life."  Indeed, in the art verité mode, Chagoya has redrawn Goya’s "Disasters of War" scene-for-scene with contemporary political and religious figures and recast Philip Guston’s "Poor Richard" cycle with a Pinocchio-nosed George W. Bush standing in for Richard Nixon.              Chagoya’s best-known works – charcoal-and-pastel drawings on paper – are practically iconic in the Bay Area where he has lived and worked since emigrating from his native Mexico City in 1977.  Ronald Reagan and Henry Kissinger as Mouseketeers spreading graffiti from buckets of blood and former Gov. Pete Wilson being consumed by Aztec cannibals were two of his more sensational images.  More recently, he pictured the dramatis personae of the current Bush administration as "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" along with the unlikely triumvirate of Bin Laden, Jesus and Gov. Schwarzenegger dressed as ballerinas -  an undisguised swipe at the governor’s "girlie men" crack.              Chagoya draws these large-scale pictures (the biggest are 80" x 80") in red, black and white, fully aware of the color scheme’s agit-prop history, as well as its ancient roots in the legend of Quetzalcoatl who, according to Chagoya, transformed himself into a black ant to learn the origin of corn from a kernel-carrying red ant – a symbolic collision of "opposites that interacted to access truth." Chagoya also makes a frequent practice of creating paintings on canvas collaged with swatches of amate paper – the same fig-leaf bark used by Mesoamerican Indians.              Another of his trademarks is his use of stark differences in scale to represent gross imbalances of power.  In "When Paradise Arrived," the outsized middle finger of Mickey Mouse (inscribed with the words "English Only") flicks an immigrant child like an insect.  Similarly, "Thesis/Antithesis" shows the hard-shoed, power-suited leg of a corporate type pushing the upended bare foot (presumably that of a dispossessed native) into a sea of blood.   In a typical gesture, Chagoya often adds the imprint of his own hand, in smeared down strokes, indicating what can only be interpreted as a collective last grasp.             It’s a sensibility "related to death, which is different than here because in Mexico there’s a cultural influence that comes from before pre-Columbian times in which life is a dream and when you die you wake up," explains Chagoya who lives in San Francisco and teaches art at Stanford.  "It’s a reaction from people to protect themselves against pain."  The aesthetic translation of that ethos is seen in his penchant for dressing evil in the clothes and poses of comic heroes.  "The devil has a beautiful face, just like in the Bible, so I wanted to look for that face.  I never made a portrait of a politician with sharp teeth.  I wanted to make them clowns, and it turned out to be closer to reality."             Goateed, bespectacled and dressed in loose fitting denim with his thinning salt-and-pepper hair pulled straight back, Chagoya looks like a retiring anarchist.  His eyes twinkle when he speaks and he laughs easily, citing art-historical references in a supremely modest manner that betrays none of the anger that underlies his work.             Before moving to the U.S., Chagoya studied economics and contributed political cartoons to newspapers.  He also participated in the student uprisings of the late ’60s and early ’70s that the Mexican government brutally suppressed.  And though he arrived well-educated and politically savvy, he wasn’t prepared for the race-based identity politics that crisscrossed the U.S. art world.  "In Mexico," he explains, "we have conflict, but it’s a conflict based on class, not race.  "Here," he says, speaking of the nationalistic fervor expressed by Bay Area Chicano artists in the ’70s and ’80s, "I felt like I was in a foreign film without subtitles.  Suddenly there’s an ethnic war taking place that I was not aware of."                   Unable to express himself through the prism of race, Chagoya turned to headline news, ancient and modern European art sources and to his own newly bifurcated relationship with American pop culture which, as a youth, he consumed voraciously through translated comic books and TV shows like "Gunsmoke."             Contrary to the evidence in "Borderlandia," which seems to indict U.S. foreign policy unequivocally, Chagoya claims his work is "a mirror on humanity" rather than an exercise in finger pointing.  "There is," he maintains, a measure of "good and evil within every culture" that is accompanied by stereotypes that are designed to propagate ideology.  "All of these stereotypes are created to justify dominance, and that’s what I’m dealing with in my work.  Culture," he asserts, "becomes an imperialistic force, a colonialist force that replaces somebody else’s culture. "If you’d been conquered by the Aztecs," the artist points out, "we’d have pyramids instead of churches."

–DAVID M. ROTH

  Enrique Chagoya’s 25-year survey, "Enrique Chagoya: Borderlandia," is at the Palm Springs Art Museum from Sept. 27 to Dec. 28, 2008.  He is represented by Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco and the George Adams Gallery in New York.