| What do you get when you mix together hot-rod art, California funk, rock n’ roll, cartoons, 1960s psychedelia, tattoo art, surf culture, and retro kitsch?
Throw in a few dreamy (or nightmarish) Surrealist references, and an edgy attitude, and the result is an underground genre of art that is all the rage among cool young urban "hipsters," Generation X and Generation Y collectors who are crowding into galleries featuring works by artists like Mark Ryden, Eric White, Shag, the Pop Tarts, Becca, Georganne Deen, Robert Williams, Anthony Ausgang and graffiti artist Doze Green.
These new art collectors are being led by film stars like heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio, whose walls are adorned with Ryden's paintings about "God, religion, children and USDA grade A beef;' and Nicholas Cage, who favors the hyper, distorted yet lucid paintings of White, whose works are also collected by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The art works are shown at galleries with names like Culture Cache, Subculture, Dreamcatcher and, in Melbourne, Australia, Outre/Toon-In Gallery.
"This is the art that comes up from the street. Just don't call it ‘low-brow’-say it's art like you've never seen before pleaded Rick Manore, founder of Detroit's C-Pop Gallery. Giving it a name or singular definition, said Manore, is "like identifying a six headed Hydra-but its main aesthetic comes from the cartoon and comics.
Cartoons have permeated our lives. It could be considered a form of Pop Art, or kitsch culture, and Robert Williams, who is considered the grandfather of the movement, sometimes jokingly calls it `Art Toons.’”
This underground genre even has its own hip magazine, San Francisco based Art Juxtapoz (founded by Williams), which not only showcases these works but also co-sponsors gallery openings which, for art world cognoscenti, barely resemble your average white wine-and-cheese art gallery receptions. Instead, a Juxtapoz opening for that matter, a reception at any of the galleries showcasing the style-is more like a noisy, happening club party, with bands, lots of studded black leather and body piercings, and celebrities like Dennis Hopper or Crispin Glover in attendance. Creating a nightlife scene, said Juxtapoz editor Jamie O'Shea, "exposes art to someone who doesn't go to museums or galleries:”
That's certainly been the experience at Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica, Calif., which has opened its doors to exhibits by White, tattoo artist Don Ed Hardy and David Forbes, whose bright, saturated-color compositions teem with carniva-lesque creatures in hallucinogenic settings.
"We've shown Don Ed Hardy with some rather good success, financially speaking” observed curator Laurie Steelink. "What has sparked a lot of people's interest was that he is a famous tattooist, and you can buy his original works for reasonable prices" -a painting on paper fetches about $1,800.
Not surprisingly, some of the collectors showing up to the gallery openings and buying Hardy's works are other tattooists. In general, said Steelink, "A lot of the people collecting this work are young, computer-savvy and making a lot of money. It's a part of the pop culture scene, and pop culture vocabulary-these are the people who go to clubs and raves, who are into fashion and into music and into hot rods and into cartoons.”
Across town, art dealer Billy Shire, owner of La Lur de Jesus Gallery, is considered (in Steelink's words) "one of the kingpins of the movement. It's kind of low-brow, comic book, pop surrealism, and it attracts younger, less affluent collectors,” said Shire. "I get a lot of first-time buyers, hot rod kids, a lot of flea market types.” Shire started the gallery in 1986, concentrating at first on what he terms "new wave folk art. From there it evolved into illustrators and comic books, and now I've evolved into doing mostly illustrators like Ryden, Eric White, Owen Smith. And I have the artist Shag, who, along with Ryden, is a Pop wunderkind. He does a sort of 1950s lounge-chair look, and at $1,200 to $1,300, I've sold every piece I've ever had?'
In San Francisco, the ill Minna Street Gallery began in 1993 as a combination gallery/bar. "Rather than being a gallery that's stiff, we give people the opportunity to come in, have a drink, and be among the art works,” said publicist Cary Little field. "This art is provocative, not decorative and the environment stimulates discussion.” Some of the work Minna Street showcases is racy and always alternative, said Littlefleld: "the artists have chosen to defy the mainstream. We consider that it's not an artistic style-it's more of an artistic mentality"
The gallery represents Doze Green, a graffiti artist now painting on canvas whose works retail for $1,000 to $5,000. "His work has been great for us:' said Littlefield.
Manore started his C-Pop Gallery in the basement of an old church, selling old rock posters and producing new rock posters. "We were able to get tons of publicity, regionally. I realized that I sell things to people that they don't need, at high prices, so I had to make it compelling. I take my artists and turn them into rock stars, and this art really does reflect the mass media?'
Skirting the boundaries between this underground kitsch and its Surrealism fore-bears of the 1920s and 1930s (see sidebar) are the works of artists like Ryden, Paxton Mobley, David Bowers, Steve Galloway and Jerry Wayne Downs.
Galloway's loopy, and apprehensive, fantasies, recently exhibited at the Armory Center in Pasadena, Calif., involve oddly real vistas where crocodiles stand on stilts, skeletons dance, and hermits occupy a world beset with an apocalyptic disaster. Bowers' work also refers to the illogic of dreams, whether it depicts a vegetarian cow or a luxuriously dressed lady of a century or two ago, swathed in blue silk taffeta and with impeccably coiffed hair-but a bloodied jack-a-lantern for a face, and a knife in her hand. And then there is artist Paxton (Paxton Mobley)-who created a stir at Artexpo by wearing a blue ear-who calls himself a "Midrealist" His surrealist inspired paintings are filled with dream symbols, sometimes vaguely violent but not always. Paxton is represented by San Jose, Calif.-based InRepresentation.
Jerry Wayne Downs' work, too, crosses the border to the underground. Sue Greenwood, assistant director of Diane Nelson Fine Art in Laguna Beach, Galif, has advertised Downs' exhibits in Juxtapoz magazine, but along with Downs' publisher, Louisville, Colo.-based Kennebeck Editions, also looks to the mainstream for sales. "It's definitely a different kind of clientele for Jerry Wayne Downs;' said Greenwood. Downs is a former Disney illustrator whose works depict, as one exhibit was titled, "nonsequential reality and the fully furnished world.”
"Some would say he has a twisted perspective, and it is an acquired taste,” said Greenwood. "It's certainly a completely different audience-they come into the gallery, repeatedly, and spend hours analyzing the works. One of my best clients for Jerry Wayne Downs is a guy who used to be the road manager for the Grateful Dead." ABN
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