PRESENTATION: Jim Shaw-Thinking the Unthinkable

Over the past three decades, Jim Shaw has responded to American cultural history through painting, drawing, and sculpture. He has found inspiration in comic books, pulp novels, rock albums, protest posters, and amateur paintings. Often unfolding in extended narrative cycles marked by repetition and cross-reference, Shaw’s works juxtapose images of friends and family with those depicting world events, pop-cultural phenomena, and alternative realities, blending the personal, the commonplace, and the visionary.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo Gagosian Archive

In the works of his solo exhibition “Thinking the Unthinkable”, Jim Shaw reanimates mythological themes through incidents from political history and popular entertainment, outwardly disparate fields that collide here in a dreamlike mélange. The exhibition’s title, which suggests both a psychedelic context and the impossibility of examining our own consciousness, is adapted from Herman Kahn’s 1962 book about nuclear war, “Thinking About the Unthinkable”.  The exhibition explores the figure of the goddess, which for Shaw intersects with the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s thesis that the development of the phonetic alphabet had a divisive societal impact, and with Leonard Shlain’s argument that the laws of written language curtailed the status of women and blunted the potential of matriarchal religion. In “Cadmus Sowing the Teeth of the Slain Serpent” (2022), Shaw depicts the Greek hero planting the seeds of the alphabet and begetting the warrior fathers of Thebes, while in “Going for the One” (2022) he casts Raquel Welch as Shiva/Kali god/dess of destruction and rebirth, demolishing the headquarters of 20th Century Fox. The latter scenario intersects with the exhibition’s other key motif: the gleeful deconstruction of Hollywood legend. “I had been researching the history of psychedelics and power,” recalls Shaw, “which led me to Cary Grant (who was, before Timothy Leary, the most vocal proponent of acid), which led me to Esther Williams and her acid trip, which reminded me of her version of the romance with Jeff Chandler. These circuitous chains of thought led Shaw to produce three paintings in which scenes from various movies are superimposed on the faces of their stars. A portrait of a grinning Grant is melded with his LSD-induced hallucination of fleeing a world of baby legs and menstrual blood; the face of Broken Arrow star Chandler is interrupted by a hermaphroditic figure (from an acid vision that Williams had of herself divided evenly between male and female) in a pose that echoes Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” (c. 1485); and Williams meets her beau clad in a pink evening gown. Another painting, “No Bikini Atoll” (2022), also alludes to Botticelli, focusing on “the dark sides of the goddess, her birth through the castration of her father, her revenge against those who fail to honor her, and the sorry hold that desire has on humans, all combined with the US atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll.”

Jim Shaw was born in 1952 in Midland, Michigan, and lives and works in Los Angeles. In 1971, he enrolled at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he met artist Mike Kelley. The pair would sometimes advertise fake lectures, treating attendees to “guerilla style” performances instead. In 1974, Shaw graduated from UM with a BFA and cofounded proto-punk band Destroy All Monsters (DAM) with filmmaker Cary Loren and artist Niagara. At the time, Shaw lived with Kelley in a house they named “God’s Oasis,” which served as the band’s rehearsal space. He later contributed to an eponymous zine, “Destroy All Monsters Magazine”, published by Loren between 1976 and 1979, that explored the mythology of DAM still further. In 1978, Shaw earned an MFA from California Institute of the Arts; he then worked in the film industry before gaining recognition as a visual artist in the mid-1980s. In the late 1970s, Shaw drew inspiration from William Burroughs (who would become an ongoing influence) and his “cut-up” technique of textual collage to begin “Distorted Faces”, a series of portrait paintings and drawings in which the features of celebrities and politicians, friends and strangers are twisted into their monstrous doubles. His first major project, “My Mirage” (1986–91), was a more complex undertaking. A series of 170 images rendered in a variety of styles, it traces the adventures of a middle-class white boy named Billy as he experiences sex, drugs, rock and roll, and religion in 1960s and ’70s America. Another series, “Dream Drawings” (1992–99), presents uncanny scenes, derived from the artist’s own dream life, in a comic-strip format, while “Dream Objects” (1994–) manifests selected items from these nocturnal visions as unsettling, cartoonlike sculptures. Shaw’s ongoing project “Oism”, which he initiated in the late 1990s, is an artistic attempt to create and promote a functioning religion, complete with its own history and symbolism, rituals and traditions. The enterprise reflects Shaw’s extensive research into the messianic cults active in the Bible Belt and has fueled a kaleidoscopic array of artworks-cum-artifacts. Having grown to include paintings, photographs, sculptures, collages, posters, films, and musical instruments, the accumulation has become even more sophisticated than was originally envisioned, incorporating historical context to arrive at a near-encyclopedic review of abolitionist, evangelical, spiritualist, and utopian currents in American culture.

Photo: Jim Shaw, No Bikini Atoll, 2022, Oil and acrylic on muslin, 48 × 80 inches (121.9 × 203.2 cm, Artwork © Jim Shaw. Photo: Jeff McLane, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, CA, USA, Duration: 12/1-25/2/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-17:30, https://gagosian.com/