Lari Pittman’s Hysterical Seduction

Lari Pittman's Untitled, 2010

If a case can be made for a CalArts-style of painting, it would—at least superficially—include an amalgam of text and iconography from the historical past to the capitalist propaganda of Madison Avenue. More substantially, what separates this work from the modern past is a realization that the clever tropes of painting’s practice—novelties of form, representation and presentation—have played out their endgame. If there is to be a life for painting after modernism, I will only come through the re-presentation of our visual, verbal, and cultural bits and pieces, combining them in ways that articulate new meanings. Call it the triumph of substance over style. An exemplar of this methodology can be seen in Lari Pittman’s current show in West Hollywood.

It’s easy to be seduced by the meticulous skill of the artist’s technique, on display in a clutch of new work at Regen Projects. There are greater rewards for the viewer willing to look beyond the surface to the roiling stew of the artist’s iconography.  In Regen Projects second space we’re presented with a three-decade survey of Pittman’s works on paper. Like the Orangerie that protects tender citrus in harsh climates, this salon-style exhibition allows us entry into the artist’s formative process, as tender ideas come to fruition and eventually make their way to canvas.

In the main gallery, familiar Pittman tropes—from the phallus to the picket fence—are shattered and recombined in ways that make the strange reminiscent of something familiar.  André Breton was speaking of automatic writing, but the same can be said of Pittman’s canvases:

“Plunged each day into the fog of received ideas, man is led to conceive of all things and to conceive of himself through a dizzy series of quickly hidden stumblings, of false steps rectified as best as possible.”

Pittman’s method of working ideas directly onto canvas—without intervening filters of representation (photographs, preliminary drawings, and the like)—allows us access to the artist’s view of our collective unconscious, and in the process, make elements of Surrealism relevant for contemporary viewers

Before Surrealism, Breton studied under Charcot at Salpêtrière Hospital. On the 50^th anniversary of hysteria, Breton proposed this new definition,

“Hysteria is a more or less irreducible mental condition, marked by the subversion, quite apart from any delirium-system, of the relations established between the subject and the moral world under whose authority he believes himself practically to be. This mental condition is based on the need of a reciprocal seduction, which explains the hastily accepted miracles of medical suggestion (or counter-suggestion). Hysteria is not a pathological symptom and may in all respects be considered a supreme means of expression.”

Under Pittman’s authority we can witness his subversion of the moral world and vicariously engage in some reciprocal seduction.

LARI PITTMAN: New Paintings and Orangerie
September 11 – October 23, 2010
Gallery Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 10:00 am – 6:00
Regen Projects
633 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90069

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