BUMMER GENERATION: LAURA CASTELLANOS’ CAST OF CHARACTERS By Peter Frank
It begins with a rabbit’s head of sorts: round, white, the ears sticking up above, a black circle around one black bead of an eye. But instead of an inverted-V harelip, this hapless lagomorph’s mouth is a tremulous horizontal rictus, black-tinged red, at best a downcast moue, at worst the beginnings of a wail. This is one sad rabbit – not hungry, lost, wet, or caught in a trap, but existentially adrift, the head afloat in a dark sea. The comic-strip simplifications only heighten the pathos. Bugs hasn’t been bagged, he’s been bummed. In 2006 Laura Castellanos transited from her glistery, effulgent abstractions into anti-portraits like bummerbunny described above, conjurations of creatures and characters whose exaggerated features and myriad scarifications in and around the heads themselves evince a graffiti aesthetic – a pan-graffiti aesthetic, going from tagger writing and Bay Area “Mission School” mega-doodles back to the “Kilroy Was Here” meme of World War II GIs. But the grit and glow of the paint itself, its luminous palette and its vigorous gesturality, betray Castellanos’ skill and accomplishment as a painter. She could have drawn these sad sacks and bug-eyed monsters, as most cartoonists do, but she painted them – and painted them in a way that makes these paintings as much about painting as about their portrayed subjects, no matter how small the paintings may be. From one angle these googly grotesques seem like escapees from a particularly nasty children’s book – the kind children themselves might make were there a few less restraints than usual. From another angle, Castellanos’ cast of caricatures constitutes a cockeyed Carnaval procession. (This is your Mummer’s parade…. This is your Mummer’s parade on acid…) The silly fuses with the frightening, but what we feel as the crowd of farcical faces roils by is neither hilarity nor terror, but tenderness and gloom, wistful hope and quiet despair, the winking wit of a circus clown and the avalanche of emotions triggered by the sight of a chained, trained elephant, from fear to pity to a low-grade, enervated anger. Who are these people? Are these people? Are we to understand them as individuals, as archetypes, as bogeymen, as gods? Are they above us or beneath us or are they us? Some are clearly humanoid, some mammalian, some outer-spacy. Do we slot them into our funny papers, our science fiction, our modern art, our houses of worship, our subconscious? How much of Miro’s blood, and Dubuffet’s and Klee’s, run through them – and how much of the “artists” who inspired these modernists, the mad, the young, the innocent? Castellanos is no outsider artist, but she embraces in these post-abstract works the possibilities and limitations of the outsider aesthetic in all its multivalence, not least where it intersects with the, er, insider aesthetic. She inheres the work of urban wall-scratchers as readily as she takes in Guston’s Kluxers and Fautrier’s hostages. The grinning, grimacing figures who dance their way through paranoid schizophrenics’ art slow to a more measured, self-reflective pace in Castellanos’ painting, but lose none of their edge. This is kid stuff and crazy stuff, and it’s also luscious painting and weirdly affecting animation. Castellanos’ visages fill their paintings, but there is always space around them. Unlike the outsider artists she obliquely emulates, she is comfortable with a visual vacuum, indeed, relies on such to give these critters their psychological resonance. Some of them seem to be saying something into the negative space, or perhaps emitting a sound, their mouths agape or pursed. (Ol’ bummerbunny’s downturned lips could only be giving out with a heart-rending groan.) Others have no mouth at all, staring mutely out at us or into the void, their wide eyes telling everything their throats can’t. (If only Hello Kitty had peepers like these.) You gotta feel for these guys. You gotta feel for them because there, but for the grace of God, go you. These masks of pensiveness, anxiety, curiosity, contemplation, surprise, fear and skepticism are masks you often wear. In its own way, Castellanos’ series of visages is as psychologically incisive as Franz Xaver Messerschmitt’s sculptures of grimacing heads. The bummerbunny bunch doesn’t exactly reach the depth of a Rembrandt portrait, but its protagonists could play prominent extras in Ensor’s immense crowd scenes. So could we all. And that’s the point.
Peter Frank is an art historian and art critic who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in art history at Columbia University. He was art critic of New York’s Soho Weekly News and later served as chief art critic of The Village Voice. In 1981, he was curator of the Exxon Biennial exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, and he has been a curator for Dokumenta in Kassel, Germany. In 1988, he moved to Los Angeles, where he is now senior curator at the Riverside Art Museum and is an art critic for Angeleno Magazine and LA Weekly. |
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