Gustonenteritis

Look Out

Yesterday was the last school day for some Texas students and teachers. They were gunned down by a kid who bought a couple of automatic rifles on his 18th birthday and decided to blow up their school.

Last night, I was looking for an image to send my brother, as a message to a father of a kid still in school, to express my feelings of the killings, America, etc. etc. I settled on a giff of a muppet holding a pair of six shooters, one in each hand, alternately firing deliriously, absentmindedly, gleefully, left, then right, then left, then right - forever- into the air.

Yesterday, I also read an article in artnet news about the long postponed Phillip Guston show now on view at the MFA Boston.

The story was mostly just dumb, but was also typically infuriatingly pretentious and lame. How many 1970s ArtForums do you have to read to write like the this? “Now, an expanded curatorial team in Boston is presenting an exhibition loosely organized chronologically and stylistically over seven galleries (including a processing room and “off-ramp” that allows viewers to avoid the Klansmen works altogether). In essence, the curators present Guston’s studio as a site of privileged resistance”. What the fuck? This is why people hate art, art museums, and anything that a writer from Frasier could conjure as a privileged pomposity.

That this show was ever postponed, can be dismissed as a simple concession to corporate cowardice, but an off-ramp and a processing room… I mean, really?  I doubt that the families of yesterday’s school slaughtering got such consideration. Wait, I don’t have to doubt, they didn’t. They got pushed around by the police, handcuffed even…

Making sure we know the “takeaways” of this retrospective, the writer draws a bead on the raison d’être of the show - the lamentations of the hooded figures. “The narrative focus shifted to draw more curatorial attention to the Klansmen paintings, and Guston’s evolution in stylistic and social consciousness towards them.” Finally conceding, “Guston’s images of Klansmen implicates us all.”  Me too, Brute?!!

Pure drivel: at best nonsensical gobbledygook, and more perniciously, a deflection from what is at the heart of Phillip Gaston’s profound paintings. Which is, like the six shooting muppet - a terrible absurdity. Or how the great art critic (a late supporter of Guston), Robert Hughes, described his appreciation for the late paintings as, Commedia dell’arte.

That’s it. Phillip Guston’s paintings are depictions of the American Carnival. The masks, the consumerism, the waste, the indolence, the violence, the anonymity. Their constructions are as scary as a DeChirico courtyard, the ladder and leg entwinings, as haunting as a Dali clock. His was a pact with the darkest forms of America. His unapologetic leaching of American artifacts, light bulbs, toast, automobiles, cigarettes, shoes, ladders from their commonplace ubiquity and forcing them into some kind of weird pink/black gelled cohesion, was the deal he made to be great. Their hideousness was simultaneously increased and diminished by the cartoon rendering. Not many could do it. Few.

“People, you know, complain that it’s horrifying. As if it’s a picnic for me, who has to come here everyday and see them first thing. But what’s the alternative? I’m trying to see how much I can stand.”

Phillip Guston

Guston spent his life, just as his great friend the other Phillip, Phillip Roth did, facing the worst of America. His pictures are a horror show. His paintings of this peculiar, curiosity of a country are brutal, indomitable, towering, bleak, funny and irreducible.

The off ramp, the signs, the disclaimers, the prissification of these paintings, the reduction of his work wedged into the most current cultural idee fixe, is exactly the opposite of what Phillip Guston practiced. Where he sought to expose, this show seeks to hide.

It’s almost certain, as they watch this side-show from behind some green shade, that the Phillips are getting a hearty laugh at the American spectacle doing what it does - advocating for the greatness of these paintings while denying the reason for their greatness: Reflected, paradoxically, on the brilliant terrible canvasses.