Lari Pittman
UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, Los Angeles, USA
Lari Pittman’s exhibition of works on paper from the past 15 years presents a non-stop cacophony of easy-to-identify symbols whose significance isn’t so easy to pin down. Promiscuously intermingling with one another, the imaginary figures, realistic silhouettes and graphic designs in these crisp, hyperactive images mean both more and less than they would signify individually. Every switch-hitting hermaphrodite, fecund biomorph, stylised diagram and spidery bit of calligraphy in these fastidiously rendered pictures plays multiple roles, simultaneously starring in various open-ended dramas and humbly supporting a host of neighbouring prima donnas. Figure-ground reversals happen with such whiplash frequency across the pungently coloured surfaces of these painted, printed, drawn and collaged works that it becomes absurd to presume that anything they depict ever settles into a singular meaning or predetermined identity.
As a whole, Pittman’s slippery, multiplicitous oeuvre seems to say, ‘there’s more where that came from’, repeating this phrase over and over sometimes breathlessly, at other times defiantly, often with glee, but always with absolute conviction. It’s important to emphasise that this bold declaration takes on radically different meanings depending on whether you imagine that it’s articulated (figuratively) by the images, or is stated (literally) by the artist. This makes Pittman sound like an ordinary egomaniac: a tight-fisted control freak who presumes to be totally in charge. Worse, it implies that his restless pictures are self-expressions.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Pittman’s identity is not at the centre of his art. Although this openly gay painter, Los Angeles born, but of Colombian heritage, may serve as ringleader for the rambunctious images that make up this wide-ranging show, the generous, indiscriminate circus that unfolds across their taut surfaces takes shape in an indeterminate world in which anyone so inclined is free to participate. Demarcated by Pittman’s exhibition is the radically democratic sphere of civilised sociability in which public exchanges occur all the time in politics and in art without getting bogged down in the personal. Sentimentality is out of the question, as is any kind of fixed identity. In place of these lazy, conservative formulations of the self, intimacy is invited, if you, as a viewer, are up to the risks, challenges and hard work required.
Beautifully installed in reverse chronological order by curator Elizabeth A. Brown, Pittman’s mid-career survey also makes a surprisingly strong case for his gritty realism. Although the 44 year-old is widely recognised for transforming the excesses of elaborately camp artificiality into a major, narrative-driven art form, the 49 pieces in this show reveal an even deeper desire to realistically depict the vicissitudes of contemporary urban existence. As a group, Pittman’s works on paper give snappy and serious visual form to the delirious thrills of society’s cosmopolitan splendour, without ignoring the trashy, highly accessible pleasures of its tawdry, lowbrow banality.
Five sets of symbols regularly recur throughout Pittman’s exhibition: figures, ships, birds, cities and gardens comprise nearly all of his highly stylised images. The earliest ones are simple and goofy, including grinning, gumby-like ghosts made of caulking on wallpaper; flying carpets and airborne sailboats; silhouettes of humming-birds and roadrunners; encampments of tents; and baskets of flowers or individual long-stem roses. To walk through the show backwards is to watch Pittman’s visual sophistication grow by leaps and bounds, arriving at the most recent and visually complex pictures which are jam-packed with smiling hermaphrodite puppets, soaring jets, chirping birds, sprawling cityscapes and overgrown gardens sprouting vines, leaves and plum red berries. All of Pittman’s images portray life in the modern city as it swings between utter anonymity and embarrassing intimacy, catching its inhabitants (both animal and human) in hyper-stimulating dramas in which overdoses of anxiety and excitement are readily available. Here, identity is anything but fixed. That all people have thoughts and desires typically ascribed to others is not merely endorsed, but joyously celebrated.
For Pittman, decorative adornment is never a frilly extra tacked onto some essential story like window-dressing. On the contrary, flagrant embellishment is a fundamental part of his life. As Oscar Wilde made clear, to appear, on the surface, to be over-the-top is a good sign that you might be vital, alive and dynamic all the way through provided you persuade your audience to go along with you. The swirling curlicues, sinuous tendrils and punchy, push-pull patterns in Pittman’s densely layered images inhabit a world in which art, like all forms of artifice, provides more than a merely pleasant diversion at the end of one’s workday. These cyclical pictures of regularly repeated patterns propose that human existence cannot be so easily compartmentalised. Aspects from one sphere always drift into the next if only as echoes triggering memories of satisfaction from a time before labour was separated from leisure, production from consumption, contemplation from amusement and wakefulness from dreams. With Pittman’s art, entertaining any idea is fruitless unless you’re also entertaining the inarticulate impulses of your corporeal self.
Although much is made of the artist’s enthusiastic embrace of discredited decorative styles and his love for an unfashionable palette of queasy greens (avocado, mint and olive), harvest golds, bright oranges and soft pinks, the fact that he refers to these discarded ‘looks’ is not as compelling as what he does with these stylistic clichés. Pittman is not a Conceptualist: his works stand or fall as ongoing, unpredictable performances as embodied ideals laid out to be taken up by viewers, in whatever ways we see fit. Mere deployment of standard ‘bad taste’ has no edge or kick until the artist makes what was assumed to be ugly look beautiful or at least attractive, enticing and worth getting involved with. The redemption that Pittman’s art tirelessly pursues has nothing to do with saving past styles from oblivion, but with orchestrating spine-tingling experiences of beauty in the present of getting your body to like things your mind might find distasteful, from whatever perspective you begin.
David Pagel
