Editor’s Note: Jim Shaw will be on the MASS MoCA campus Thursday, October 8, 2015, for an artist talk in Club B-10, at 5 p.m. The exhibit of his work, “Entertaining Doubts,” will be on display through January of 2016.
North Adams — LA-based multidisciplinary artist Jim Shaw is at his fascinating best in enormous sprawling exhibitions like Entertaining Doubts that is on display at MASS MoCA until the end of January.
Acrylic on muslin backdrop with two acrylic, muslin, and plywood cut-outs. Courtesy the artist
Just as Shaw sees no point in limiting himself to any particular medium – you will find paintings, sculptures, installation and video here, and equally significant nameless hybrids between them as well – MASS MoCA’s huge gallery spaces allow artworks to overlap with one another, to sit inside each other, or to appear unexpectedly around a corner or up a staircase. As a consequence Entertaining Doubts is less like an exhibition of discreet works of art and more akin to entering the seamless world of Jim Shaw’s beguiling imagination.
Shaw is the artist who invented his own phony religion and then employed it to parody the excesses and absurdities of all religion in contemporary America. He is also the artist for whom the graphic style of classic Superman comics (which turns out to be the work of the splendidly named Wayne Boring) is not merely one particular way of drawing but something nearer a universal visual language in which any subject might be rendered. Thus, he reimagines the 18th and 19th century prints of the great English visionary William Blake (another artist who invented his own religion, come to think of it) as though they had been published by DC Comics, and Superman himself as a twenty-first century everyman: no longer gifted with superpowers but weakened, disillusioned, and finally defeated by day-today cares.
This is a world where anything might mutate into anything else; where something as odd and unimportant as a hairstyle might enjoy its own independent existence, act as a surrogate for identity, provide a foundation for a building as sure as any rocky outcrop, or morph into a water spout or weather effect in a bizarre marriage of Wayne Boring and Leonardo da Vinci.
Not only an enormously prolific artist, Shaw also enjoys working at vast scale. He often uses old theater backdrops as his canvases, and combines their relatively bland subject matter with his own crackpot imaginings. So, in front of a snowy Berkshires-like landscape, a messianic Barbara Bush is engulfed in flames – and inevitably the piece is called The Burning Bush. In The Rinse Cycle those disembodied hairdos reappear, floating against a desert vista and providing a frame for yet another water effect – the one created inside a washing machine. (And yes, the title of this one is a deliberately absurd echo of Wagner’s.)
Just as unsettling as these apparently limitless transformations are the aspects of Shaw’s work that do not undergo the changes you might expect. Like many artists before him (including Blake) he draws upon his dreams for subject matter. But rather than adapting his dream imagery to lend it a broader metaphorical relevance, he produces it literally. Thus, a dream about an exhibition in which sculptures are shrouded in fabric that is blown about by electric fans results in an installation that presents precisely that.
Elsewhere in Entertaining Doubts you will find Shaw’s father’s less than perfect assignments for the Famous Artists correspondence school, a wall sconce in the form of a giant nose, an installation starring Dan Quayle, and a dimly lit grotto in which a group of gnomes huddle around a fragment of glowing Kryptonite.
Jim Shaw’s art manages to combine the flotsam of mid-twentieth optimism with an outlook rooted in present-day cynicism. But here is the final transformation in Shaw’s work – though its implications and meanings are pessimistic and filled with doubt, the work itself is decidedly entertaining. Just like this show’s title promises.
