An informative and enlightening, though visually barren, exploration of a vibrant contemporary art scene.
These biographical sketches celebrate underground artists who brought popular cartoon imagery into the avant-garde.
In this first volume of his survey, Costa interviews and profiles five painters in the second wave of the California-centered lowbrow art movement. They moved in the 1990s and 2000s beyond the “classic” first-wave subjects of hot rods and pin-up girls to tackle subtler themes using mid-20th-century graphic styles, South Pacific idols, and other Tiki motifs. His subjects include grand old man Josh “Shag” Agle, whose brightly colored paintings have the feel of a Jetsons’ soirée from 1961, with chic girls listening to cool jazz at swizzling cocktail parties amid hypermodernist décor, and Tim Biskup, whose more abstract bent features his trademark technique of decomposing figures into assemblages of polygons. The others are Miles Thompson, whose images are inspired by the Ren and Stimpy cartoon series and also incorporate firefighting icons Smokey the Bear and Woodsy Owl into environmentalist-themed pieces; Atlanta artist Derek Yaniger, whose style recalls old-school Mad Magazine, with seedy men leering at buxom burlesque girls; and Brandi Milne, who paints greeting-card depictions of adorable kids and cute critters but complicates and deepens them with dark hints of distortion and distress. It’s a varied set of artists, but commonalities emerge in their life stories: precocious fascination with drawing, encouraged by parents and teachers; punk-rock phases that often led to the formation of garage bands at art school; starter careers in commercial art and graphic design, where they soaked up styles while drawing album covers or working as Hollywood animators; the leap to the fine art side, nurtured by La Luz de Jesus gallery in Los Angeles and Outré in Melbourne, Australia; and a continuing commercial focus with online stores, sales of reproductions and merchandise, and animation projects.
Costa’s knowledgeable examination of lowbrow gives a cogent, unifying account of a diversity of styles. These motifs are rooted in an impulse to elevate cartoons and other demotic visuals into fine art; in a reaction against the overintellectualization of modern art, one grounded in skilled drawing rather than airy concepts; and in an avid engagement with art’s tradition of representational paintings that tell stories. His commentary on individual works is evocative, insightful, and very readable. (“The female Hamlet is meant to juxtapose the certainty of death and the vanity of life with the former court jester’s skull, and Biskup hoped that the viewer might contemplate how giants in history such as Alexander the Great and the lowly Yorick have returned to mere dust. But unfortunately, the symbolism was lost on most viewers, who just saw a sexy cartoon girl.”) The biographical material, it must be said, is not very gripping because artists just don’t live as colorfully as they used to. Agle recalls drinking and pitching bloodily through a glass window, but otherwise there is little indecorous behavior and no dueling or cutting off of ears. The most dramatic moments usually involve the selling out of a show. Frustratingly, the book has no illustrations of the paintings discussed (but they are easily Googled). Still, cognoscenti will be interested in Costa’s probing insider’s story of lowbrow’s evolution while casual art lovers will be pointed toward a trove of captivating paintings.
An informative and enlightening, though visually barren, exploration of a vibrant contemporary art scene.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-578-59582-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Lowbrow Literati Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A lyrical, provocative take on pop music’s power.
A tale of a brief encounter and long obsession with the late musical icon Prince.
Prince (1958-2016) contained multitudes, and every book about him seems to explore his aura through a different filter—musical, sexual, sartorial, religious, and so on. In this slim book, first published as an essay under a different title in Harper’s in 2012, Pulitzer Prize–winning cultural critic Als emphasizes Prince’s role as a queer Black icon, somebody who challenged the notion that “for sex to be sex it needs to be shaming.” Prince’s 1988 album Lovesexy wasn’t his most successful, but for Als, it represents the high point of Prince’s sexual fluidity, his "DJ-like mixing of homosexualist and heterosexualist impulses.” The author reads Prince’s defiance toward the mainstream record industry in the 1990s as symbolic of his effort to challenge the supremacy of heteronormative, White behavior. But Prince is still a slippery persona for Als: He writes about interviewing him backstage before a 2004 concert and being simultaneously charmed by him (his face “had the exact shape, and large eyes, of a beautiful turtle”) and put off, as when he evangelized on his faith as a Jehovah’s Witness. Prince at once lamented male journalists who feared their femininity while projecting a "new, heterosexualized, Jesus-loving self.” At fewer than 50 pages, this book is too short to address Prince’s protean nature in depth. But as an appreciation of the liberating power he had over Als as a gay Black man, it’s undeniably engrossing. (Straight men felt that power, too: The book opens with a Jamie Foxx stand-up routine about having his hetero identity rocked by Prince.) In that regard, it’s a story about love in general, delighting in seeing yourself in a star, and lamenting when that star flickers in a different way.
A lyrical, provocative take on pop music’s power.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8112-3449-8
Page Count: 48
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.
A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven.
Turn-of-the century New York did not lack either hotels or apartment buildings, writes Tippins (February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America, 2005). But the Chelsea Hotel, from its very inception, was different. Architect Philip Hubert intended the elegantly designed Chelsea Association Building to reflect the utopian ideals of Charles Fourier, offering every amenity conducive to cooperative living: public spaces and gardens, a dining room, artists’ studios, and 80 apartments suitable for an economically diverse population of single workers, young couples, small families and wealthy residents who otherwise might choose to live in a private brownstone. Hubert especially wanted to attract creative types and made sure the building’s walls were extra thick so that each apartment was quiet enough for concentration. William Dean Howells, Edgar Lee Masters and artist John Sloan were early residents. Their friends (Mark Twain, for one) greeted one another in eight-foot-wide hallways intended for conversations. In its early years, the Chelsea quickly became legendary. By the 1930s, though, financial straits resulted in a “down-at-heel, bohemian atmosphere.” Later, with hard-drinking residents like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, the ambience could be raucous. Arthur Miller scorned his free-wheeling, drug-taking, boozy neighbors, admitting, though, that the “great advantage” to living there “was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually.” No one passed judgment on creativity, either. But the art was not what made the Chelsea famous; its residents did. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Phil Ochs and Sid Vicious are only a few of the figures populating this entertaining book.
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-618-72634-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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