Jason Lahr
“Riding With Pike”
Angela Messina and Derek Schartung
“Uncontrollable Self Amusing Monster Spasm”
Through Jan. 30 at Fugitive Art Center
The Frist Center recently showed a small group of paintings of Boy Scouts by Norman Rockwell, the artist who created icons for a sentimentalized vision of America. They’re the perfect Rockwell subject. In fact, they’re redundant, since any Rockwell painting and any representation of the Boy Scouts are at root the same thing: manifestations of an idealized Middle American ethos.
Well, we’ve got Boy Scouts on the walls again, this time in Indiana-based artist Jason Lahr’s paintings at the Fugitive Art Center. Surprise—Lahr uses images of Boy Scouts for much different purposes than Rockwell! He appropriates pictures from Boy Scout handbooks and the Scouts’ magazine Boy’s Life, along with other images of wholesome American boyhood: game birds and deer, guns, fighting vehicles from Star Wars and stock cars. By itself, the selection of images pinpoints one ethos of American masculinity.
One goal of Scouting is to prepare boys for a certain notion of life as an adult man. The uniforms and organized activities give instruction in conformity, in taking your expected role within various organizational structures, acclimating to hierarchy, competing and working for rewards. As Scene critic Julie Roberts pointed out in her review of the Rockwell show at the Frist, Scouting defines a kind of virtue, an ideal encompassing obedience, reliability and competence.
After establishing this ethos, Lahr subverts it, as you might expect. In several paintings, he messes with the images. In “A Bad Day for Scouting,” pictures of seven boys in various poses of play have been altered to include a spray of red erupting from each boy’s head, like they’ve been shot by snipers. In another, Lahr cuts off a boy’s torso at the waist, entrails and spinal cord sticking out and pieces of blood or guts spurting out. In other cases, he chooses images that may come from benign sources, but capture moments of violence like a car wreck with a body thrown to the road, or boys running from angry hornets.
The final element in each canvas is a section of text. The scenes selected invariably describe the commission, anticipation or aftermath of violence and crime. Several texts catch the critical moment in which a narrator screws up. The narrators seem incompetent, out of control, uncertain how to handle a situation, in pain or under literal attack, or mystified in dealings with women. It would seem to be the opposite of Boy Scout competence and wholesomeness.
Lahr’s paintings follow a consistent structure. To take one example, “Backcountry” features a color rendering of the perfect family—dad, mom and son in his Cub Scout uniform. Dad sits in a chair looking at the newspaper, and the mother and son stand behind him. A TV set with a tidy houseplant on top lurks in the background. On the right side of the canvas, Lahr has stacked three images. The top one is a drawing of a boy carrying a backpack held up by a headband; while probably some sort of alternative backpack, it could constitute a form of torture. The next picture is a grouse in flight, painted in color. The bottom image is a drawing of a scout lying on the ground, decapitated with his eyes picked out. The text starts, “The warm breeze washed over her face, pulsing her hair against her forehead. She closed her eyes and again saw their bodies lying in front of her at odd angles.”
Each painting works in a similar manner. The canvas has a lead image, larger than the others and usually in color, that establishes the world of wholesome masculinity with depictions of Boy Scouts and game animals. Secondary images, smaller or monochrome drawings, often contain defaced figures or violent scenes. The text, the element that most thoroughly turns the Rockwell world upside down, always appears in relatively small print. You have to get closer to the canvas to read it, and reading requires a different kind of looking than pictures. Each painting walks you by levels into a more troubled world.
These works expose the traditional notions of male virtue as a false consciousness that falls apart as you go into it more deeply. If anything, that construct of maleness deepens the pain from one’s inevitable failured and unfortunate violence, since they seem to be not only failures of a particular situation, but of a more fundamental sort—failures of pervasive incompetence.
Lahr relies extensively on appropriated images. In general, using appropriated materials distances an artist from the image. The image is not a product of the artist’s imagination, and his or her relation to it is hard to know. You usually assume there is some irony. Lahr goes further in reducing personal affect by using plain, expressionless backgrounds. In his notes on the show, he likens them to Brice Marden paintings, embodying “a constipated sort of masculinity.” The plain backgrounds leave the images and text floating in abstract space where they cannot connect to each other.
Lahr’s arrangement of images and texts tells a story, in fact the same story repeated in each painting, giving it archetypal status. The use of appropriated images makes one wonder whether it is Lahr’s story, or one he has observed or imputed. His material dampens the sense of personal expression. One effect of this is to push the works into a universal realm. The specifics don’t matter—they should all get you to the same place through Lahr’s consistent management of his paintings’ layers. That makes the stories more like myth, rendered here in a partially archaic language that combines pictographs and text.
Spilling Over
Where Jason Lahr exercises control at many levels, the exhibit of work by Angela Messina and Derek Schartung in Fugitive’s hallway space is haphazard and doesn’t really fit usual notions of art exhibits. It looks more like a museum display of artifacts from a forgotten or foreign culture, perhaps an archeological site reproduced as the team found it.
Messina and Schartung are most immediately known in Nashville for their music in bands such as Tan as Fuck and New Faggot Cunts. When it comes to classifying these bands, one tag would be “underground,” distinctly noncommercial music. A critical dimension of their music-making is that they are part of a national community that links similar local scenes where people are messing around with sound, all of it done in ways that set it apart aesthetically and economically from commercial music. Messina and Schartung are key figures in this community here in Nashville.
One aspect of the activity in this network of scenes is that it crosses medium boundaries. Some of the bands wear costumes, taking the music into performance art. Many of the musicians engage in graphic design, comics, video and even such traditional art as painting and drawing. They publish poetry, commentary and political and philosophical writing. One noted group in the national scene is Rhode Island’s Forcefield collective. Their activities include a number of bands, and stretch into hand-silk-screened LP covers and handmade knitted costumes they wear in performance. They are associated with the comics and graphics artists who worked in the now closed Fort Thunder facility. It adds up to a loud version of the Bauhaus. Forcefield achieved recognition within the art world when they were included in the 2002 Biennial at the Whitney Museum in New York. The Fugitive has done something similar by bringing Messina and Schartung into their gallery space.
The material on exhibit spills out in profusion. Drawings and posters are pinned to the wall flush against each other, filling it side to side and top to bottom. Fifteen handmade books are piled up on a pedestal. Hand-sewn pillows and packets with odd trinkets are strewn on the floor, and there are piles of small sketches. These items aren’t treated as art objects usually are, as something unspeakably precious. They are handled like everyday objects, stuff you might have lying around your house or stuck on your wall.
Some of the most telling objects are small packets with a cloth background and plastic front that contain little plastic trinkets or parts of a dismembered doll. They look like some sort of mass-produced throwaway product you might buy to keep a child quiet. However, unlike real mass-produced materials, these items are clearly handmade. The packaging itself is the most real thing, hand-sewn and anything but mass-produced. You can see the stitch pattern on the plastic. These are fake fakes, ersatz consumer products with no apparent purpose or capacity to be consumed.
Does all of this work as a visual exhibit? No, because I don’t think the true vitality of Messina and Schartung’s cultural work comes across. It isn’t intended for this. Their image and object-making is contextual. It is hard to extract from a life lived, within the particular local and trans-local community they participate in. Fugitive gallery director Jack Ryan said the center’s board wanted to bring the artists’ whole house over. An exhibit like this acknowledges important cultural activity, but where that activity really happens is in houses and numberless nights at Springwater or Guido’s. Exhibits like this, and Forcefield’s room at the Whitney, are the points at which the institutional art world intersects with a vital scene that resists cultural domestication.
