ART CITIES:N.York-Jim Shaw
The practice of Jim Shaw spans a wide range of artistic media and visual imagery. Since the 1970s, Shaw has mined the detritus of American culture, finding inspiration for his artworks in comic books, pulp novels, rock albums, protest posters, thrift store paintings and advertisements. At the same time, Shaw has consistently turned to his own life and, in particular, his unconscious, as a source of artistic creativity.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Metro Pictures Archive
Providing a blend of the personal, the commonplace and the uncanny, Shaw’s works frequently place in dialogue images of friends and family members with world events, pop culture and alternate realities. Often unfolding in long-term, narrative cycles, the works contains systems of cross-references and repetitions, which rework similar symbols and motifs, allowing a story-like thread to be perceived. Jim Shaw in his solo exhibition “The Family Romance”, presents five new paintings. Blending personal, political, and surreal narratives, Shaw explores the realm of behavioral psychology and themes surrounding the family unit–– which he describes as “the beloved core of the American dream”. The title of the exhibition refers to a psychological complex identified by Sigmund Freud in 1908, whereby a young child or adolescent fantasizes that they are really the children of parents of higher social standing than their actual parents. Shaw recalls doing this himself as a child, although, in his words, he “claimed to have been switched at birth and was really a Martian”. Many of the works on view draw inspiration from vintage advertisements and publications, such as Alfred Barr’s famous graph from the cover of the Museum of Modern Art catalogue for Cubism and Abstract Art. One painting is based on the cover of a 1950s-era Christian magazine featuring a wholesome-looking middle-class family window shopping. In Shaw’s recreation of the scenario, the human family is replaced by one made out of potatoes sourced from an ad for instant mashed potato mix. In another painting, a family of six, in matching pajamas, are gathered around a patriarchal figure reading from a storybook. The pattern on their pajamas uncannily resembles the pattern of the background, which is from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory test—a psychological test that assesses personality traits and psychopathology. The painting titled “Macy Conference” (2019) evokes a straightforward Rockwellesque Thanksgiving scene, but each of the people pictured is actually a balloon floating in a parade like the annual one on Thanksgiving Day in New York sponsored by the Macy’s department store. For this work, Shaw was inspired by the Macy conferences. Between 1946 and 1953, the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation sponsored a series of meetings bringing together a diverse, interdisciplinary community of scholars and researchers who would lay the groundwork for cybernetics—the new science of automatic control and communication systems for both machines and living things. Many of the people represented in Shaw’s painting as balloons were direct participants in the conference, such as its chair, neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch, but others, such as Henry Murray and Frank Olson, were included for their historical involvement with personality testing and LSD mind control experiments.
Info: Metro Pictures, 519 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 26/2-13/4/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.metropictures.com
