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9/5/2007

Chris Wilder

E31 Gallery, Athens

Confessions of a Crap Artist, Part II (Holy Smoke)

In an exhibition of collage paintings, photographs, stickers and sculptural installation, artist Chris Wilder once again mines the rich vein of absurdities undercutting that preposterous Sodom known as Southern California through the lens of it most conspicuous citizen “the crap artist”.

The exhibition titled “Confessions of A Crap Artist,” borrows its name from a Phillip K. Dick novel published in 1975 though written and set in 1959 (two years after Wider’s birth.) Dick’s book focuses on a character named Jack Isidore who like Wilder himself is obsessed with amateur and ill-fated branches of scientific inquiry. Also like the artist, Isidore collects old scientific books and magazines, countless worthless specimens, and is enthralled with disproved theories, such as the notion that the Earth is hollow and that sunlight has weight.

Isidore (who is very likely named after the medieval Spanish saint) brings all of those enthusiasms with him when he goes to live on a farm with his power-hungry sister who is causing marital turmoil with her ill advised love affair with a graduate student while her husband is recovering from cardiac arrest. Throughout the story, it is Isidore who is treated by his family and peers as though he were “unstable” and in need of supervision, but reasonable minds would most certainly differ. That peculiar juxtaposition of human behavior at its most tawdry with charming, if crackpot science is a Wilder theme par excellence. It is pure California, where “healthy” is a relative term and, at the juncture of quasi-science and squalid scandal, someone gets the idea to write a book.

Wilder’s clear identification with Isidore as meticulous observer of all that is unworthy of notice, is present everywhere in the work. The book photographs speak to many of the theories: Critical, philosophical, and conspiracy, which thread their way through the lives and minds of both men. The collage paintings seem like bright aquariums where weird unnamable ocean life, 17th century etchings, and the lurid bits of ordinary pornography float past each other without any particular destination or regard for our presence. In one work, the smiling head of disgraced US Congressman Tom DeLay blithely sinks as a shameless (but innocuous) porno crotch shot bubbles up to the surface. Everywhere the desperate, the erotic, the beautiful and the just plain dumb glide past each other in a Technicolor ether. The surfaces seem to be in constant motion with the shifting energies of the high chroma hues that Wilder has always preferred.

Twisted sexuality couched in the language of the California Dream takes another form in the seemingly innocent stickers of fruits, vegetables, flowers and anatomical drawings, which are languidly punctuated with vintage erotica. Again, the profusion of imagery, seeming to float on the walls, raises more questions than it answers, implies more than it reveals.

The overall effect of the two rooms of images is that of intense unflinching artifice – part TV screen, part luxury seed catalogue, and part fish tank. It may be worth noting that Wilder has spent all of life surfing urban beaches like Malibu where one might find a dolphin, the prettiest girl on earth, and all manner of industrial and agricultural debris rolling together in one of the world’s most perfect waves.

Wilder’s sculptural installation makes the duality portrayed in the book – and in life itself – physical, raising the stakes with references to death and immortality, in a piece titled “over, under, sideways, down (holy smoke),” a variation on the original sculptural installation (Berlin, 2006), which featured full-sized palm trees sprouting through a false floor. Unlike the Palms, Cypress trees are tolerant of harsh conditions and are a tree of mixed messages. In ancient Egypt, Cypress wood was used for coffins, which began its association as a tree of death, but because it can live up to 1,000 years, Cypress has also been associated with immortality. This tree is also associated with the Death card in Tarot, while Plato referred to the Cypress as a symbol of immortality. Aside from this contradiction, the Cypress is also considered a tree of magical powers (magic wands derive from its branches, and its incense is said to have healing powers), and was a central feature of the centers of learning which were vital in the development of mathematics, geometry, philosophy and democracy, as well as cosmology and religious awareness. They were, in fact, the seedlings of all that make our present civilization what it is.

In way that’s typical of Wilder’s work, he seamlessly overlays one story with another. Phillip Dick’s socially awkward but sympathetic amateur scientist Isidore becomes an idiotic, overconfident teenage cosmologist in a Yardbird’s song.

(Hey) Over under sideways down,
(Hey) Backwards forwards square and round.
(Hey) Over under sideways down,
(Hey) Backwards forwards square and round.
When will it end, when will it end,
When will it end, when will it end?

In Wilder’s view the answer is never. The world is 24-hour cable T.V. -- an endless stream of half truths, cockeyed theories, news of slaughter and atrocities, and tabloid scandals painted in the brightest of colors. A world where violent wars are waged for personal gain, and where Cypress Trees can signify both death and immortality, be antennae to the Zorastrian gods, magic wands to the Ethiopians, and at the same time weeping, funereal icons of Hades. With Wilder’s inversion of these trees, they refuse their roles as magic wands healing the grieving; and rather than become antennae to the stellar gods, they are aiming for Hades, god of the Underworld and of Earthly Riches, in order to reflect the tragic state of war, genocide, torture, greed and corruption which seems to keep spinning and repeating, backwards and forwards, no matter how many lessons our “civilization” claims to have learned.

E31 Gallery
Evripidou 31-33 - Athens
Admission free

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