guest post: notes from the underground art world

Guest Poster Kelcey Wells is a poetry and fiction writer.  He blogs at Night Thief Confessional and is @KelceyW on Twitter.  

It's a recurring narrative throughout the history of western art and culture: the vanguard of a particular school or movement become complacent and their art becomes indulgent, self- referential, and it's relevance to the broader culture dissipates. The pool of creative talent and their ideas become increasingly shallow until the number of shunned young artists becomes large and hungry--hungry enough to become a cultural force of its own. 

Though often referred to by the term "Lo-brow", the current form of art insurgency is a fluid, organic conglomeration of illustration, hot-rod & tattoo culture, pop-surrealism, comics, anime, and street art. This new underground tends to have an eye for figurative painting, an acute interest in the lost art of drawing, and a dark sense of humor. Unique to this movement, however, is that there has been no breakthrough moment signaling its emergence in to the establishment. Instead, using the affordable printing and DIY-marketing tools of the internet age, this loose confederation of like-minded individuals has created its own network of promotion, distribution, and finance allowing it to exist alongside--but separate from--the traditional art world. 

Ironically, this success has seen several galleries originally founded in cities less well-served by the established art world migrate to Chelsea, mainstream art's traditional home. One of the strongest of these New York transplants is Joshua Liner Gallery. The gallery began life in Burlington, VT and by way of Philadelphia, opened its doors on 28th street in Manhattan a year and half ago. The gallery's current summer group show is a showcase for the quality and diversity of the contemporary underground scene. Filled with fresh techniques, imagery, and ideas, from the dia de los muertos influenced portraiture of Sylvia Ji to the psychedelic abstraction of Robert Hardgrave, there is an amazing breadth of talent on display.

One of the really eye-catching pieces of the show is "Label Me" by Gregg Simpkins. It is almost a literal exemplar of the pop-surrealist tag. Here are the iconic, cartoon-mouse legs supporting a Warhol soup can, re-labeled with Simpkins graffiti tag "Craola". These over-ripe images are entangled in a hyper-detailed, surrealist mechanism of dangerous orchids, clockwork insects, and decorative flourishes. The result is an unsettling glimpse into the internet-age subconscious where the mundane interacts with the impossible and cultural resonance escapes linear history, generating anachronistic mutations. Simpkins adds yet another referential layer when he chooses to include a dark, unlit background and marble table top, the hallmarks of classic Dutch and Flemish still lifes.  However, here the "still life" is a paradox of frantic motion and rapid progress.   

This is one of the things I find most interesting about underground art of the moment. While most contemporary conceptual art has as much connection to the old masters as a Hannah Montana pop hit has to Beethoven, many of the young artists in the underground draw inspiration from the history of western figurative painting not simply in content but with the fine attention to detail and composition the arts establishment has typically rejected over the last few decades. In the work of someone like Simkins, the entire history of visual art, both high and low,  is up for grabs; not simply as a tool at his disposal but as an essential component in the destabilization of the image as it floats within a hyper-saturated, wiki-enabled, media culture. 

James Roper is another featured artist making peculiar historical connections. Roper is interested in what he calls a visual "peak shift," a neurological reaction that arises from extreme visual depictions. His inspiration for creating these extreme visual experiences is the over the top religious iconography of Baroque painting with it's voluminous fabrics, lofting cathedrals, and super-intense rays of light beaming through billowing clouds. What makes Roper's work really wild is that he is pairing the audaciously exultant detail of the Baroque with the hyper-stylized dynamism of modern Japanese anime. In the two works on display, "Ataxic Reversal" and the captivating "Bound Before The Source," there is a synergy between Baroque and Anime styles. In the work of both styles, the heavy outlines, the insane, hyper-real detail, even the lush colors bombard the viewer with stimuli. The fact that Roper is abstracting the image beyond certain recognition takes the experience over the top.  Roper's paintings draw you in with roiling energy and lush supple textures but once you've given over to the experience you feel woozy. Your brain struggles to matrix a narrative from the chaos but nothing settles, nothing clarifies.   

Chloe Early's "Brink" is yet another standout piece in the show. To me Early is the most Ballardian painter since the surrealists who inspired J.G. himself.  Her choice to juxtapose a dreamy leisure center setting with images of military menace, echoes the horrifying potential of the mundane found in much of Ballard's modernist, fantastic fiction. Here, again, there is something classical at work. It may be a bit of a stretch, but to me these paintings are analogs to pastoral landscapes, albeit atypically crowded and frantic. As surreal as they appear, the image's power comes from a nostalgia for a simpler, more innocent time similar to the work of classical painters like Poussin. However, in Early's work the idyllic images are flattened to two-dimensional, near-silhouettes, degraded and painted with a primal, yet unnatural pallet that heightens the sense of the plastic. The swathes of primary color and thick drips of paint connect the canvas to the stencil and spray can of the street artist while the classic composition and painterly details reflects the breadth of European painting's history.  

I had fears heading in to the summer season that the underground was on the verge of complacency.  I feared that this dynamic movement re-igniting my interest in visual art was in the process of making the same errors the establishment made in casting them aside. But recent shows like this one have been shining examples of artists  hitting their strides and straining for new ideas. These artists are not only discovering fresh veins of creativity; they are simultaneously opening marvelous reservoirs of art's vast history to be re-purposed and re-imagined.

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