We
inhabit a visually compromised world, navigating an image glut in which pictures
have proliferated beyond super-saturated satiation to physically subsume our
senses. In a realm of growing redundancy and manifest manufacture, it seems
inevitable that among this great slew of contemporary artists and ever-expanding
art history some sort of radical recycling solution would ultimately have to
be devised. And for the many already familiar with the wryly subversive humor
of Anthony Ausgang's paintings, or even his penchant for collecting and recontextualizing
the culturally reviled and socially expurgated past ephemera of the incessant
American pop machine, it might be equally evident that Ausgang was the one to
rescue and reanimate the inane inventory of bad paintings cluttering our attics,
thrift stores and flea markets. Call it the aesthetic ecology for the twenty-first
century, call it the pictorial economics for the new depression, but Ausgang's
revisionist interpretations of the second hand and second rate perform a daring
salvage and provocative sacrilege on the bloated corpse of amateur art-making,
kitsch reproductions and cliched representations that is nothing less than utterly
fantastic.
Laugh
or leer as you most certainly will when it comes to looking at Ausgang's thrift
store transgressions, but know too that what makes these purloined and mediated
pictures work so well is that they're all about love. What we might otherwise
have to term post-modern about Anthony Ausgang's visual strategies here- the
appropriation of pre-existing imagery, the problematic questions regarding authorship
and originality, and the systematic inversion of hierarchical value systems-
is almost beside the point. Whereas the cultural critique endemic to much of
late 20th Century art historical deconstruction was engendered by a rather mean-spirited
sense of irony and a widespread polemics of intellectual intolerance, Ausgang
approaches each canvas with a highly democratic, inclusive appreciation and
relative equivalence. With his delirious comic interventions, Ausgang evinces
an open heart and free imagination that bears no condescension. He has no need,
nor desire, to demean the imperfect efforts of weekend painters, the over-circulated
repros of fine art classics or the forsaken expressions of passé` style.
Anthony proves that even the most debased of renderings contain an inherent
capacity for artistic elevation, and that we can enjoy the ridiculous without
ridiculing it.
Even
when he must know that the canvas before him is truly beneath the consideration
and efforts of a painter with his talents, Ausgang mines the most mediocre material
for what it offers- the affordable, available, and most significantly, expansive
possibilities for discursive dialogue. Entering into these already established
compositions, Ausgang's trespass of thrift store topographies is a sneaky kind
of voyeuristic intrusion where, no matter how outrageous his visual prank may
be, his own hand must remain true to that of the original, the trace of his
touch subtle and seamless. Each incursion is less an invasion than an investigation,
and though he may violate its former intentions he maintains its integrity.
In trying to change the message while maintaining the essence of the medium,
each painting presents this artist with a complex compositional puzzle. On the
one hand Ausgang must contend with the same formal issues regarding representation
that go into any painting- and problem solving, after all, is at the heart of
any creative process. On the other hand however, he must now also address these
concerns within a preexisting pictorial narrative.
Ausgang
doesn't paint over so much as paint within. He's not simply looking for canvases
to cover, but rather those spaces inside a picture that can allow him to insert
his ulterior visual information. "If you want to get it right," Ausgang
admits, "graphically you have to be a slave to what others have done before
you." Just as his most radical juxtapositions have to work conceptually,
and his most jarring alterations must conform stylistically, so too is an abiding
sense of scale essential to sustaining the perspectival logic by which we can
enter, and believe, this flat fiction. Working within such constraints, while
he continues to paint with the same stunningly bizarre imagination evident in
all his work, this act of invention is now rather a kind of solution. How do
you deface a Van Gogh without defaming its genius, or perpetrate a perversity
upon the quaint Americana of a Norman Rockwell while preserving its innocence?
For that matter, what can be done to make a bad painting better, or a cheap
sentiment valuable, in such a way that the forgery doesn't forfeit any of the
original idiosyncrasy? Anthony does it by holding the compositional integrity
of any picture as paramount, and honoring the past with the same intensity that
he haunts it. In terms of technical skill and artistic vision alike, these hybrid
conflation's of antiquated ideals and contemporary iconoclasm's are like lessons
on the problems and poetics of painting itself.
Perfecting
the prank, Ausgang's altered artifacts follow through on Duchamp's mustached
Mona Lisa with the same abiding affection for the inherent beauty of the found
object as motivated R. Mutt's urinal. And if the collection and exhibition of
thrift store paintings by fellow Los Angeles artist Jim Shaw belongs to the
purer forms of l'objet trouve tradition, Ausgang's vulgarized vandalism's are
far more overt in the ambition and Duchampian conceit of their co-option and
conquest. Ausgang himself will describe it as a kind of pictorial colonialism.
Here, like a visual equivalent for our adaptable and continuously morphing relationship
to the environment and authority of history, Ausgang hits the landscape with
the vigor and fearlessness of a graffiti writer or a skateboarder's reappropriation
of urban architecture. With humor to deflect the sheer force and audacity of
his genre-tweaking mayhem, Ausgang brings an explicit and graphic vernacular
to the polite converse of the sublime, divine,
exotic, idyllic and pastoral in painting. And as landscapes are the easiest
and most common subject matter for the hobby artist, Ausgang takes particular
pleasure in pissing on the pastoral, riffing on these sedate settings with pornographic
flourishes, toxic pollutants and a populace of oblivious vacationers, fornicating
felines, automotive atrocities, and beer guzzling hunters. Sincerity and irony
flip, inversions strung between picture planes, as the original painting is
made background to Ausgang's deranged dramas.
Ausgang's
signature cat is the most frequent star to bum rush the bucolic, crashing scenery
in center stage antics of public indecency, drunken stupor and slothful leisure.
Brunt of the litter spawned by all those Krazy cats from Felix to Fritz, Ausgang's
animal is a florescent stewpot of our basest desires unleashed, exaggerated
with the radical distortions of Tex Avery cartoons and animated by his surrealist
disjunction against the placid picturesque. Whether projectile vomiting across
scenic vistas or using the lay of the land to commit suicide, this carnal cat
is mere metaphor for our greater disease before nature. Mountains, woods, streams,
meadows, ocean fronts and villages, where-ever Ausgang finds them all, we too
will see the desperate dramas, the marching soldiers, lurking assassins, missiles,
airplanes, jet skis, hot rods and myriad other pleasure craft. And as long as
humanity continues to paint its gardens, Anthony Ausgang will retrieve and revamp
them- not to return to Eden or any other arcadia, but to recycle them through
the forgotten composts and abandoned outposts of our perpetual recreation.
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