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Theory #12345: On Dirty, Pretty Things
By Carrie E.A. Scott
So much art these days consists of a happily balanced combination of clean fantasy and dirty realism, the cute measured in equally with the grit.
It isn't the newest of trends. Artists of all kinds — songwriters, painters, and filmmakers — have been combining sweet, childlike things with truly bizarre and awfully adult subject matter for quite some time (think Bjork and Yoshitomo Nara).
But taking in the Seattle art scene this past June, the trend was truly unavoidable. Canvases everywhere sported endearing figures stuck in disturbing situations, drawings and paintings caught between illustrations you might find in a children's story and some sort of surrealist comic.
Between Patte Loper's show at Platform and Claire Cowie's installation at James Harris Gallery, not to mention most of the work up at The Hideout (especially that of Crystal Barbre), the situation begs the question: Why are so many artists using typically soft, cuddly, cute imagery and then twisting it into disturbing, even disgusting contortions?
"Untitled"
© Crystal Barbre
Image Courtesy of the Artist
Thus I posit Theory #12345: Artists are visualizing and then resolving the shattering of innocence.
Both world events and the media's fear-inducing coverage of them over the last five years — what with New York's 9/11 crisis and the ensuing "war on terror" — have crushed any shred of naiveté we might have been clinging to.
In other words, Westerners have recently been faced with an even harsher reality than was embodied by grunge music and its associated disillusioned counter-culture in the 90s, so it's not surprising so many artists are tapping into the new face of disruption and destruction.
What's most seductive about the new breed of dirty, pretty artful things is not that they mimic our experience of the world, but that they somehow feel resolved and balanced. Despite the fact that all the pain and reality and veracity of modern life are packed into these works, they manage to retain a conspicuously beautiful outlook in the face of such disorder.
The clandestine fantasies we see on canvas, in songs, and through projectors of sugary sweet pussycats and triumphant bunnies are a wonderful retreat, a crutch to help us work out the world as it is, not as we wish it were.
From The Science of Sleep, Michel Gondry's latest film fantasy which closed the Seattle Film Festival, to Psapp, a British band with a penchant for cats who played at Neumos days later, Seattle's been rich with an artistic culture full of charming and childlike fantasy with undertones of neurosis.
Seeing Psapp's act is in fact like walking into a musical memory of your own childhood with all the wisdom of an adult. The two leads, Galia Durant and Carim Clasmann, play a bevy of arcane musical instruments — children's xylophones, noisemakers, and even squeaky rubber chickens — mixing giddy sounds with sobering lyrics. It's a dazzling pairing.
And with Loper and Cowie painting dead animals in intricate fantasy-scapes while Barbre exposes the stunning wreckage of a hybrid nude, everything 'round seems to scream of a cataclysmic reality while retaining a sense of calm.
Here's hoping I can do the same.
