EXHIBITION REVIEWS ART IN AMERICA 139
Jim Shaw:Oist
Movie Stills (Kill Your
Darlings),2003-06,
10 color photographs,
each 10 by 8 inches;
at the New Museum.he baby boomers’ obsession with the mid-20th-century Ameri-
cana of their childhoods—that anxious nuclear-age mix of reli-
gion and sexuality immortalized in comic books and B-movies—
can seem like a yearning for the overly familiar, a desire for the
comfort of clichés. hroughout his four-decade career, Jim Shaw
(b. 1952) has journeyed deep into the dark heart of this obsession,
exploring and celebrating the weird objects of collectiveixation,
but never indulging in nostalgia. As much as he is an artist, Shaw
is a careful connoisseur. His retrospective—packed in nearly
equal measure with selections from his own expansive and highly
varied body of work and the vast collections of artifacts he has
assembled from what’s often called “vernacular culture”—felt like
a joyfully raucous tumble into white, low-church America.
Shaw’s heterogeneous work ranges from faux-paperback
covers, comic strips, drawings and paintings to giant stage lats,
sculptures and videos—all of it channeling the visual abundance of
postwar popular culture. he earliest works in the exhibition date to
Shaw’s undergrad years at the University of Michigan in the early
1970s, when he was part of the band-cum-art collective Destroy
All Monsters along with several classmates, including artist Mike
Kelley. Shaw’s photocopied lyers for the band, whose performances
were often impromptu, combine imagery gleaned from an eclectic
array of sources: ’50s tire ads, pinup spreads, medical books. hese
lyers contain elements of the basic visual vocabulary that Shaw
has returned to repeatedly. In addition, they have an ambiguous
status—as works of disposable graphic art that also exist within an
avant-garde tradition—shared by Shaw’s later works.
Shaw attended the California Institute of the Arts in the
late 1970s and absorbed the school’s post-studio curriculum while
developing his virtuoso skills as a draftsman. (He had a parallel
career designing specialefects for movies.) he son and grandson
of commercial artists and designers, he is adept at wielding air-
brush, pencil and pen. InDistorted Face(1979), an acid-yellow glow
appears to backlight a woman’s stretched-out face, casting it into
deep purple shadows. he efect is of a celluloid still that appears to
be on the verge of melting. Four large untitled drawings from 2015
(about 6 by 4 feet each) feature meticulously rendered fragments of
heads, which dissolve into airbrushed squiggles around their edges.
Untitled (Large Face with Famous Monster Logo), 2003, depicts an
ordinary middle-aged woman’s face under the banner title of the
horror fan magazineFamous Monsters of Filmland.
he delicate photorealism in the portraits gives way to
descriptively rendered drawings and paintings based on Shaw’s
dreams. he artist’s embrace of Surrealism’s dream logic becomes
an extended exploration of the back-and-forthinluence between
vanguard art movements and styles associated with contemporary
religious illustrations, lowbrow movies, countercultural music,
comics and pornography. Nowhere is that more evident than in
the 89 panels and three videos comprising the series “My Mirage”
(1985-91). Here, Shaw adopts many popular illustrative styles andJIM SHAW
NEW YORK — New Museum