Jim Shaw
Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Imagine driving down a road in a rural area when suddenly your car is overtaken by a heavy-metal kid on a moped going 50 mph. As he hurtles past, you can see he’s sporting a moustache, stone-washed stretch jeans and a bomber jacket with the words ‘born to kill’ across its back. It’s an experience close to the spirit of Jim Shaw’s work - one big patho-pedia of white trash culture.
This massive retrospective of Shaw’s oeuvre starts with work he produced as a student: untitled drawings which combine imagery from 50s fetishistic porn and horror comics (Untitled, 1974). Next are giant anamorphic portraits of, among others, JFK and Ronald Reagan (Distorted Faces, 1986), followed by My Mirage (1986-91), a series of images that recount the biography of ‘Billy’, an average American white middle-class boy: after a childhood spent among Marvel superheroes, pubescent Billy discovers the joys of masturbation and sniffing glue. He then goes all the way from LSD hippie heaven through drug hell to his final ‘rebirth’ as a Christian preacher man.
The images that tell his story are drawn from sources as disparate as Jehova’s Witnesses’ Awake magazines, hard rock posters, high-school yearbooks and paintings by John Baldessari. Shaw skillfully mimics both the style of his source material and adapts it to the story of Billy, making My Mirage a homogeneous narration composed of wildly heterogeneous parts. A special highlight is the spin-off video Billy goes to a party #4 (1986), which reveals Shaw’s delight in psychedelic idiot culture. Bleached blond Billy gets stoned and successively enters the reality of his favourite horror B-movies: in The Fly (1986) he meets a wisecracking hippie guru who advises him: ‘You should never kill a fly. You should BE a fly’, while Iron Butterfly’s Wagnerian anthem ‘In a gadda da vida (Baby!)’ blasts away in the background.
On the second floor of the Casino, two rooms are filled to the brim with Shaw’s infamous collection, ‘Thrift Store Paintings’. These amateur paintings are filled with imagery which ranges from the slightly deranged to the fully psychotic: portraits of Dr Spock, adolescent attempts at Surrealism, petty-bourgeois erotica, such as housewives with glaring eyes and Symbolist penises. The air of psychosis lingers on in Shaw’s very own series of ‘Dream Drawings’ (1993-99, ongoing). Every morning (so the legend goes), Shaw adds to a visual diary of his dreams. Drawn virtuously in a story-board style, they document dreams of sex, superheroes, the art world, strange organisms, sexual organs etc. Each drawing bears a caption such as ‘I was in a car with Christy Turlington...’ or ‘There was this painted head of Jesus...’. The diary also works as a source book from which Shaw selects single motifs to reproduce as Dream Objects such as oil paintings of Heavy Metal gore icons from 1997, or surrealist surrogate sculptures of wobbly skyscrapers with noses from 1996.
Every psychic defect or trauma a psychoanalyst could wish for is present in Shaw’s art: compulsive repetition, anamorphis, the ‘stain’ from which tentacles or abject fluids emanate. But is it serious ‘abject art’? Of course it’s not. The second-hand nature and self-mocking cheapness of Shaw’s imagery turns what Hal Foster terms ‘traumatic realism’ into ‘traumatic schmockism’. It’s about as serious as Freud on a moped. But then again: the effect of walking through room after room crammed with phobic images is seriously nauseating. Comic relief only comes in the final room with the hysterical picture of two generic bug-eyed aliens doing it doggy-style.
Jan Verwoert
