Long ago, a clever cat dressed a peasant as a prince. Far away, in a field of cheap shoes, magic seeds multiply crops and destroy soil. In a painting field, Jack exchanges his mother’s cow. Tailors transform the Emperor. The global economy fails. Hansel leaves a trail.
Focusing on modes of transformation expressed historically through fairy tale, and through more contemporary forms of acquisition and mediation, this work explores the role that painting may still play in opening up a discursive space around history, material culture, narrative, globalization, and (what is evoked by) various historical forms of representation, both “high art” and vernacular.
In Puss ’n’ Boots, a clever cat reverses the fortunes of a miller’s son by changing the way he is seen. The magical and transformative quality of clothing in folk tales acquires its power from the historical context in which what one wore or was prohibited from wearing, by rite, custom, sumptuary law or scarcity, bound one to a social formation. Dress as a form of “representation” and as a modality of imagined transformation is predicated on a scarcity, as well as a hierarchical rigidity that, as socially mobile consumers of images and things, we can only dimly imagine.
In these paintings, roughly hewn paint “fields” may contain representations of mass-produced shoes or plastic bags, or juxtapose related copies of 17th or 19th century illustrations. The modeling of these illustrations on earlier, more rare versions poses questions about original and copy, and scarcity versus contemporary mass production and/or distribution. Tracing the handmade copies of illustrations depicting unique moments of magical transformation or acquisition forward to their more banal reproductions (and eventually to mass-produced commodities and emerging economies), we move from an echo of such transformative moments to what may be their erosion, or their manifestation in other real and imagined worlds.
Not “long ago”, but “in a land far away”, Indian farmers (whose ox, plough, and scythe recall the time of Charles Perrault) now buy costly “magic seeds” from Monsanto each year - no longer permitted to save those produced by their own crops for future planting. Like Jack in another tale, they may acquire these seeds by trading their cow - which previously provided the fertilizer they must now purchase. Soil depletion, the now needed pesticides, and increased water demands of “magic seeds” send rural areas “sliding backward into the middle ages”. In Andhra Pradesh, desperate farmers now drink the pesticides, while cities undergo a fairy tale transformation in which more pairs of plastic shoes may be produced and acquired.
Wall street. Tailors. Magic seeds. Corn for food or fuel. Children abandoned in woods or altered environments. Wishes and unintended consequences. A spell to put one to sleep.
The “picture books” in these paintings, and their sometimes full, sometimes empty illustration pages, frame some of these questions, or become crumbling monuments, reminiscent of provisional structures, or shanties, with empty shopping bags, shoes, or abundant stuffed (fairy tale) animals littering the foreground. There is an emphasis on both the materiality and construction of recurring book structures, and when they act as windows or empty frames, their transparency. They may embody a kind of wondering about representation, or about the fate of the kinds of skeletal stories of exchange, transformation or wish, which like myth or folk tale, had been filled in by individual telling or dressed up by different illustrators over time.
Later 19th century illustrators, like J.J. Grandville, present animals in a greater variety of social classes, evocative of a nascent modern moment (which may now take on a distant, fairy tale character - the capitalist and worker birds in Grandville’s illustrations have changed their appearance, or disappeared offshore).
Book forms in these works may become a bird’s wings, the doubled symmetry of their patterning making reference to a printing process. Mirroring may be reflected in the dressing of animals as humans in a kind of camouflage, as opposed to a more “natural” display. Plastic bags may come to resemble animals or figures, or cast shadow shapes on a painting screen. The animated, uninhabited, cheap clothing from a big box store flyer makes reference to the agitated drapery in medieval manuscript or northern Renaissance narratives.
The paintings combine different kinds of spaces, paint applications, and modes of figuration, in a kind of instability of representation. Tipped up foregrounds reminiscent of Flemish or northern Renaissance panels may hold a plastic bag or stuffed cat, rather than rich drapery brocade. Philip Guston’s investigation of the tension between mark as material and signifier (evident in his interest in the illustrations of R. Crumb) is appreciated within a vocabulary that tries to hold other forms of historical and vernacular drawing in a diverse and visceral painting field.
In a smaller land (another book), urinal or “merda d’artista” acquires great value. Wish and Exchange. Original and copy. Scarcity and excess. Things and representations. Words and pictures.
Perhaps those particular “illustrated books” where text might be seen to “dress” or transform common objects or waste into things of great value are the last dim echoes of clever cats and other figures of folk tale. Perhaps in the larger world a global collapse of fortunes may again remind us of Le Chat Botté. Fairy tale, consumption, scarcity, excess, representation within representation, “original” and various historical forms of “copy”, processes of transformation in a field of historical representation - these are some of the issues which these paintings attempt to address, or perhaps in a reclaimed sense of the term, “illustrate”.