Artwork: Awol Erizku, “Same Ol’ Mistakes” – Rihanna, house and spray paint on OSB, 2016
What a thrill to see Awol Erizku and Olivia Locher chosen for Forbes “30 Under 30” list – as well as all the amazing talents that prove the future is now.
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In the past year I’ve had the great pleasure of interview Erizku for Crave Online and Locher for Dazed. Cheers to a bright future already playing out on the world stage
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Photo: In Ohio it’s illegal to disrobe in front of a man’s portrait. Photography Olivia Locher, published by Chronicle Books 2017
Photo: Road to Nowhere, Las Vegas, 2001 Edition 10 (72 x 42). Photography Albert Watson
Back in 1973, Scottish photographer Albert Watson got the call: Harper’s Bazaar wanted him to photograph the “Master of Suspense” for their holiday issue. The story was titled “Alfred Hitchcock cooks his own goose” and the assignment called for Watson to photograph the portly Brit presenting roast fowl on a serving dish. But Watson demurred and brought his own vision to bear – directing the legendary filmmaker in a series of photos depicting Hitchcock clasping an uncooked goose by the neck and throttling it with morbid elegance.
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The photographs were pitch perfect and the world took note, launching Watson into the stratosphere of contemporary photography across every genre: portraiture, fashion, music, celebrity, still life, landscape, architecture, advertising, and fine art. Whether shooting Michael Jackson, Naomi Campbell, or Prince, King Tut’s artefacts, a Las Vegas dominatrix, or inmates at Angola State Prison – Watson deftly combines innovative thinking with a mastery of technique, making his work a visual symphony of rhythm, compositional harmony, and tonal melodies.
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In celebration of his illustrious career, Taschen presents KAOS, an XXL collector’s edition of 1,200 signed and numbered copies that come in a clamshell box covered in faux chimpanzee fur – because, why not? Selections from the book are currently on view in an eponymous exhibition at Taschen Gallery, Los Angeles.
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Watson’s ingenious approach, which includes a double exposure of Mick Jagger and a cheetah, and Michael Jackson dancing broken down into single frames, has set him apart from his contemporaries. With nearly 100 Vogue covers to his credit, Watson is still going strong at 75. What’s more, he prints all his photographs himself in his Tribeca studio. It is rare to see the hand of the artist in the photograph, but Watson understands that the process continues long after the shutter clicks. He speaks about how to master the art of photography.
The United States is built on myth, dating back to the earliest days of the republic, when Thomas Jefferson wrote, “All men are created equal,” without any self-awareness. A slaveholder claiming equality — what kind of world could spawn such profoundly pathological cognitive dissonance?
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It is “self-evident” as Jefferson would say: one that considered itself “enlightened” enough to use reason and logic to uphold irrational beliefs; to craft holidays like “Thanksgiving” that celebrated the wholesale slaughter of Native Americans and whitewash history; to name cities, towns, and counties after Christopher Columbus, the architect of the Transatlantic Slave Trade — to do all these things and play innocent.
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The myth of “America” has appealed for hundreds of years. “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore” wrote poet Emma Lazarus, whose words were placed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in 1903. “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me.”
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Maybe they’ll make the cut, maybe not. Maybe boats filled with fleeing Jewish refugees will be turned around and set back to Nazi Germany; maybe their rafts filled with Haitian boat people fleeing Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier were deported upon arrival throughout the 1980s. How sonnets written in their name have school children memorized?
In the late 1970s, Gail Thacker studied painting at Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts, alongside Mark Morrisroe, Pat Hearn, George Condo, Jack Pierson, and Tabboo! The golden haze of the hippie movement had faded away and in its place punk became the call of the day. The DIY ethos enabled artists to create life and work on their own terms, forgoing the established trends in search of freedom and truth.
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After graduating in 1981, Thacker headed south, living in the suburbs so that she could easily commute into New York. Though the art world was experiencing a vital renaissance as the downtown scene brought fresh life to the art world, the dark specter of Aids devastated a new generation of youth coming of age.
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Morrisroe’s illness became a turning point in her life. When he became gravely ill, he gave Thacker a box with hundreds of sheets of Polaroid 665 film and asked her to use it. She incorporated the Polaroids into her practice, using them as a means to record the world in which she lived – but her photograph was not meant to merely document the world as it was. It became a means to reveal the alchemical properties of life itself.
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Through the great fortune of a mistake, Thacker discovered that the negatives could be manipulated through the unintended but inevitable experience of decay. She adapted her process to explore the balance between creation (life) and destruction (death) in art, transforming her work into a metaphor for existence itself: the risk and reward cycle of possibility – loss or win.
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Using herself and friends as subjects, Thacker has created works that evoke the unconventional spirit of Old New York – where life itself could become a work of art. Each work Thacker creates is a singular moment that embodies the ephemeral and the eternal in equal part. The photograph, as object, is as fragile and resilient as life itself: marked, torn, taped, collaged, and altered by the passage of time.
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Thacker’s work has been gathered for Between the Sun & the Moon, opening today at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York, and running through December 22. A book of the same name will be published by QCC Art Gallery Press. Thacker speaks with us about how to navigate the porous boundaries between life and art.
Jay Electronica, Pyramids of Giza, Cairo, Egypt. August 2011 / Nas, Los Angeles, California, US. November 2010. Photography Brian “B+” Cross
From left to right, Beni B, Chief Xcel, and Lyrics Born at Records, downtown Sacramento, California, US. May 1995. This is the cover of “Endtroducing” by DJ Shadow. Photography Brian “B+” Cross.
French Quarter, New Orleans, Louisiana, US. August 1998 / Grand Wizard Theodore, Manhattan, New York, US. February 1996. Theodore is the first person to ever scratch a record. His hands started a revolution in music. Photography Brian “B+” Cross.
Life moves in circles, though we may not notice until the revolution is complete. In 1996, DJ Shadow released Endtroducing…, his debut studio album on Mo’ Wax Recordings, with curious photo on the cover. It showed two guys inside a record store: one in profile, the other’s face blurred – neither were DJ Shadow.
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It was a scene from everyday life, the very thing you’d recognize as a fellow hip hop head. It stood out for it unpretentiousness, it’s lack of glamour and glitz. Just as hip hop was going pop, Endtroducing… was taking it back to the earliest days of the art form when the DJ was king and crate digging was everything.
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Five years later, an editor at C Photography in Spain reached out to Brian “B+” Cross, the photographer who created this seminal image. They wanted to feature it in their annual. Cross agreed – then sent along more images turning their request into a 15-page spread. When it was published, David Hamrick put a Post-It note on the page. Then, in 2015, when he was the director of the University of Texas Press, he reached out to Cross to see if he had more work, thinking it could make an excellent book.
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The inevitable does not need a plan; it simply arrives. Cross had been working on Ghostnotes, a collection of photographs made throughout his career, for nearly two decades. The book was conceived as a mixtape, a visual corollary to the sounds of the African diaspora that flow through hip hop, uniting generations of people from all walks of life in the rhythms of the drums, the heartbeat of the art form.
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Weaving together threads the combine documentary and portrait photography, Cross guides us through a musical landscape, crafting a composition as brilliantly conceived as a work by Miles Davis. Conceptualized with “A” and “B” sides, Ghostnotes takes us on a journey around the world, brilliantly synthesizing hip hop, Jamaican dub, Brazilian samba, Ethiopian jazz, Cuban timba, and Colombian cumbia. The book features portraits of everyone from The Notorious B.I.G., Eazy-E, and Kendrick Lamar to George Clinton, Brian Wilson, and the Watts Prophets, among so many more. Cross speaks with us about his journey bringing Ghostnotes to life.
The Notorious B.I.G., Beverly Hills, California, US. April 1995. Biggie was murdered outside this building three weeks later, and there is still no plaque or monument to commemorate his death. Photography Brian “B+” Cross
Forest Lawn, Glendale, California, US. February 14th, 2006. J Dilla’s funeral. Photography Brian “B+” Cross.
James Rieck. One: Number 31, 2017. Oil on canvas, 24 x 72 in / 61 x 183 cm.
A disembodied voice floats through the room, a soft falsetto that sweetly croons, Step into a world / where there’s no one left / but the very best / No MC can test.
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And then the beat drops. One, two. One, two. You snap out of the reverie, back to the here and now, as your heart throbs, your blood flows, the bass pounds. You’re flush, radiating heat, feeling alive, overcome by the moment. Rapture.
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It is everywhere you want to be, this sensuous feeling of release. Of being and becoming, of presence so compete it feels like a disembodied experience. It is that moment when body, mind, and soul are one, the ephemeral made eternal. It is so intense it only last a moment but it feels as though time has stopped. It is being high in its greatest sense, released from the mortal realm.
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It is here that we are free from the banality of daily life, connecting the sacred and the profane through the experience of art. As American artist James Rieckobserves, “It’s easy to lose yourself in a painting, or any form of art, as a means to escape from the world or the self. There is no limit to where it can take you, if you let it.”
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James Rieck. Le Bonheur de Vivre, 2017. Oil on canvas, 24 x 72 in / 61 x 183 cm
In his Rapture, his newest series of work currently on view at Lyons Wier Gallery, New York, through November 4, Rieck evokes the feeling of bliss that exists in the intersection between art and archetype. Rieck’s subjects are models extrapolated from mid-twentieth century magazines that evoke bourgeois ideals, and sets them inside museums and galleries alongside classic masterpieces of Western art that use sex as their subject.
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By juxtaposing these figures of pristine Puritanical splendor beside works like Matisse’s Le Bonheur de Vivre, Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Bather Drying Herself, and Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe, we step into a world where art’s power and influence in both demystified and amplified at the same time.
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This is in large part due to Rieck’s framing of the work, tight crops that leave everything above the nose out. The eyes, being the windows to the soul, are invisible, and in doing this, not only is the subject rendered anonymous but makes space for us to participate. The model is not a person but a vessel into which we can slip, breathing in the rarefied air of the work of art.
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James Rieck. Jeune Garçon au Cheval, 2017. Oil on canvas, 24 x 72 in / 61 x 183 cm.
But perhaps more than the framing it is Rieck’s color palette that renders us in a state of limpid titillation. Each work is a symphony of hues and tones that create an intense feeling of synesthesia. Does anyone else want a cupcake or an ice cream cone, a lemon tart or a slice of strawberry shortcake?
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The high is so sumptuous you can literally taste it, smell, it, breathe it in. It is like a bouquet of violets and a tall glass of lemonade. It is a spell the whisks you away, like the loveliest lust. It is the safest sex, non me tangere, yet you still can’t help but feel like something has transpired.
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Rieck explains, “Museums and art galleries are designed for you to let yourself ‘go’ in public. They are vehicles for the art experience of private passions in shared settings…. We can all want to feel the real pleasures that come from art and the places that hold it.”
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Amen.
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James Rieck. Baigneuse S’Eessuyant, 2017. Oil on canvas, 24 x 36 in / 61 x 91 cm.
The Death of Graffiti by LADY PINK, 1982, acrylic on masonite, 19×22.” Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.
DUMP KOCH painted by Spin, photograph by Martha Cooper, 1982.
It began in the stacks. Sean Corcoran, Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, came across a collection of black books Martin Wong had donated to the Museum in 1994, just five years before he would die from AIDS in San Francisco. The black books were the site of sketches and drawings, works on paper that were passed from head to head, giving writers a look at what their contemporaries were doing with marker in hand and giving them a space to contribute to the conversation.
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In total, Martin Wong (1946-1999) donated 55 black books and more than 300 mixed media paintings on canvas, cardboard, paper, and plywood. The work Wong collected includes early permutations of designs that would later appear on trains and buildings throughout New York City. And though those paintings are long gone, their legacy lives on.
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Opening February 4 at the Museum of the City of New York, City as Canvas: Graffiti Art from the Martin Wong Collection presents 105 works by legendary writers DAZE. DONDI, FUTURA 200, Keith Haring, LADY PINK, LEE, and SHARP among others, alongside historical photographs by Charlie Ahearn, Henry Chalfant, Martha Cooper, Jon Naar, and Jack Stewart. Paired together, the paintings, drawings, and photographs take us back to a time and a place that, though not far away at all, no longer exists in our daily lives.
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It is the photographs that create the context, a context that may be difficult to imagine for those who did not live it. Trains were bombed with spray paint and marker both inside and out, as masterpieces ran the entire length of whole cars and tags decorating the interiors. This was the era of an artistic impulse made manifest as by any means necessary, of going down to the yards after dark or walking through live and dead tunnels to paint. This period in New York City history marks the creation of a style and a culture that has swept the world with anti-authoritarian delight. It was here in these black books and paintings that a new world was born, and it is here in these photographs that this world remains forever more.
Corcoran observes, “We decided to show the Martin Wong Collection because we thought it had real cultural significance to New York’s story over the last thirty, forty years. Graffiti was such an omnipresent part of life in New York. It was loved and hated, there was no in between. Whatever you thought of it, theirs is not doubt it had an affect on the culture in general. Style writing as it is known today was born in New York and became a worldwide phenomenon.”
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Accompanying the exhibition is a catalogue of the same name, published by Skira Rizzoli with the Museum of the City of New York, featuring essays by Charle Ahearn, Carlo McCormick, Sacha Jenkins, Lee Quiñones, Chris “Daze” Ellis, Aaron “Sharp” Goodstone, and Sean Corcoran. The essays create a context for Wong’s obsession for the art, an obsession that adds intimacy and understanding to his need to collect, to document, to preserve. Twenty years ago, Wong knew, intuitively, that neither he nor the graffiti of the era would be with us today. And it is in this way that “City as Canvas” is more than an exhibition of art, but it stands as a monument to an era that has come and has gone. And era that is preserved forevermore in the photographs that show what had come of these preparations for masterpieces that once dotted the subway lines and crowned Kings.
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For those who once witnessed the world that lives in these photographs, City as Canvas is like a teleportation device into the past. The raw, live energy of the letterform set against a backdrop of freedom at an cost beings us back to that old school D.I.Y. vibe of the 1970s and 80s New York. And for those who missed it, the Museum exists, as a place of honor and veneration to the legacy we as New Yorkers carry forth.
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First Published in L’Oeil de la Photographie
March 20, 2014
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Howard the Duck Handball Court photograph by Charlie Ahearn. Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.
Lion’s Den Handball Court photograph by Charlie Ahearn. Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.
Invariably a day will come where I put “How Soon Is Now” and get into my feelings. The highs, the lows, the fighting the air blows, I’m absolutely consumed with a maudlin mania that overcomes and nestles me in its clasp. One time is never enough. Play it again, Sam.
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And – I’m not even a Smith’s fan. Coming up, I found them morose. But as time goes by, I can’t front. Where so many other bands faded away, The Smiths and Morrissey live on. In celebration, These Days, Los Angeles, presents, I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish: The Smiths & Morrissey Collection, now on view through October 22. The exhibition takes you back to the days when poster art was errythann.
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The exhibition features a selection of vintage, 40 x 60 inch duotone posters made between 1985 and 1995 originally displayed in the UK and around Europe in train stations and record stores (Remember those? I’m sayinn). From the start, lead singer and co-songwriter Morrissey ran the show when it came to the band’s artwork, working alongside Rough Trade art coordinator Jo Slee.
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At a time when everything was neon colors and punch pop graphics, Morrissey opted out and when vintage. Coming of age during the Pictures Generation, appropriation was de rigeur. Rather than take use of the band Morrissey chose images like Cecil Beaton’s famed photo of Truman Capote mid-jump, just as his career was taking off and the world was his oyster. It was evocative, if not provocative in part, a comment on popular culture and the spaces between high and low art. Stephen Zeigler of These Days shares his reflections on the power of the band here with us.
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What was the inspiration for the show?
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Stephen Zeigler: To be honest it was quite unplanned and came about very happenstance.
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Do go on…
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Stephen Zeigler: A good friend of ours is a huge fan of both The Smiths and Morrissey. He is a compulsive collector of all sorts of band merchandise (not just Smiths/Moz) and came to a point where he needed to downsize some of his collections. When he told us he would be selling off the Smiths and Morrissey posters, we thought it would be a great opportunity for the rabid Los Angeles Smiths/Moz community to be able to view the collection in it’s entirety before it was pieced out.
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Everything is for sale and been selling quite well. We have had buyers from across the country purchase pieces. We even had an awesome couple drive over 400 miles from Oakland to see the exhibition and purchase a piece.
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The Smiths are the perfect definition of a cult band. How would you describe their appeal?
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Stephen Zeigler: Wow, that’s such a tough question and something I have been thinking about a lot during the shows run. I don’t think it can really be stated definitively but I think that Morrissey’s lyrics are intensely personal and yet the melancholy, anger, and emotions are universal and can mean something different to everyone.
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I think for the average listener who grew up in the 1980s their music was always present and brings people back to certain points in their lives, and for the devoted super fans it’s deeply personal. I have spoken to visitors who tell me that Morrissey and The Smiths saved their lives, showed them another life besides gangbanging, or they were going through a rough time in their lives (even to the point of suicide) when they heard a song or lyric that showed them they weren’t alone in their emotions.
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I love how music has the power to reach people who are on the brink. I’m very intrigued by the fact they continue to be so popular now, as so few groups from that era have such a prominent presence in the culture today. Why is it about their work that makes their appeal transcend time?
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Stephen Zeigler: I think The Smiths are one of those unique bands, like The Clash, The Jam, The Specials, or Public Enemy who come from a specific era and time but are able to speak to an audience who may not have even been born yet when the band was together.
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Specifically to The Smiths it was really a perfect storm of Morrissey’s voice and lyrics and Johnny Marr’s innovative guitar playing.
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Morrissey said, the artwork needed to “take images that were the opposite of glamour and to pump enough heart and desire into them to show ordinariness as an instrument of power—or, possibly, glamour.” Could you expand on how these images do just this?
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Stephen Zeigler: The Smiths have always been sort of down played in their appearance. Coming from working class Manchester where pretentiousness can get you an ass beating, the band embraced the common, hence the name “The Smiths.” With the artwork, they took images from many common looking British elements and personalities and the act of repurposing them as record covers or blowing them up as huge stage backdrops, in itself gives the images an importance never before imagined.
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I’ve always loved the visuals they used for their campaigns. Could you speak of what the works have in common and how it defines their aesthetic?
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Stephen Zeigler: Morrissey selected still images from little known or remembered mid-century films and photos of authors and artists that influenced him. The images were then stripped down and taken out of their original context to become a visual poetry of their own.
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All photos courtesy of Stephen Zeigler, These Days.
Artwork: Eye Body, Transformative Actions For The Camera, 1963. Courtesy of Carolee Schneemann
You may remember Lady Gaga’s meat dress as something of a scene – but it doesn’t hold a candle to Meat Joy, the Carolee Schneemann happening from 1964 that inspired it. Where Gaga took an existing idea and transformed it into a publicity stunt, Schneemann invented something that had never been seen or done – and it nearly cost her life.
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Picture a group of young men and women clad in their undergarments experiencing the pleasures of the flesh: of the carcasses of fish and chicken, along with sausages, touching their bare skin. Imagine being in the same room as they gathered on the floor to engage in an experience of sensuality the likes of which had never been realised before. Envision a man in the audience becoming so enraged he leaped from his seat, dragging Schneemann off to the side, and beginning to strangle her.
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This happened during the Paris edition and went on until two bourgeois women jumped from their seats and fought off the attacker until he stopped. Then Schneemann got back into the happening and continued on with the knowledge that her explorations could unleash a cataclysmic storm. But Schneemann is an unstoppable force – she is freedom incarnate. Uninhibited and unafraid, she has been challenging the patriarchy by virtue of being true to herself.
Born in 1939 to a country doctor and a farm wife, Schneemann grew up close to nature, embracing the life and death cycle of the earth. When her father refused to support her decision to go to college, she won a full scholarship to study painting at Bard College, in New York, which she attended until she was expelled on the grounds of “moral turpitude.” Where others might have given up, Schneemann persevered, creating a body of work so singular and so challenging that to this day she has no equal in the field.
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Her pioneering investigations into the female body, sexuality, and gender have tapped into archaic visual traditions and wrestled with social taboos, transforming Schneemann into a vessel of transgression and subversion in search of truth. In celebration, MoMA P.S. 1, New York, presents Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting (October 22, 2017- March 11, 2018), the first comprehensive retrospective spanning her prolific six-decade career.
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In conjunction with the exhibition, Prestel has released a catalogue of the same name, while the Artists Institute has published Carolee’s Issue 02, which illustrates the ways in which other artists, advertisers, and pop culture figures have drawn heavily from her work. Schneemann speaks with us about Meat Joy as well as her career as “both image and image maker.”
Artwork: Meat Joy 1964, chromogenic color print. Photo by Al Giese. From performance at Judson Church, November 16-18, 1964 New York. Courtesy of C. Schneemann and P.P.O.W, New York
Artwork: Nude on Tracks,1962-1977. Courtesy of Carolee Schneemann.
At the tender age of 13, Samuel Fosso set up Studio Photo Nationale, and began his career as a photographer. The year was 1975, and Fosso was working in the city of Bangui, located just inside the border of Central African Republic.
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“With Studio National, you will be beautiful, stylish, dainty and easy to recognize,” Fosso promised. Here he works taking passport, portrait, and wedding photographs for the community—but it was his self-portraits that brought the artist global acclaim.
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“I started taking self-portraits simply to use up spare film; people wanted their photographs the next day, even if the roll wasn’t finished, and I didn’t like waste. The idea was to send some pictures to my mother in Nigeria, to show her I was all right.,” Fosso told The Guardian in 2011. “Then I saw the possibilities. I started trying different costumes, poses, backdrops. It began as a way of seeing myself grow up, and slowly it became a personal history – as well as art, I suppose.”
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And from this seed of genius, a life’s work arose, one that is rooted in the complexity of layering, meaning, and identity inherent to the self, and just how plastic these things are when we skate along the surface of life, mistaking appearances for the thing they claim to represent.
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Like a great actor, Fosso delves deep within himself and returns with an understanding of human nature and the way it manifests in the body, and on the face, through costume, gesture, and expression. For the past forty years, Fosso has honed his craft, creating a body of work that examines the experience of life as a West African man.
Robin Williams. Your Good Taste is Showing. Acrylic, airbrush, and oil on canvas 72 x 72 inches. Copyright Robin Williams, Courtesy P.P.O.W
We live at a time of extreme disconnects between the representations and reality, fueling a compulsive cycle of consumption in search of illusions and false ideals. Nowhere can this be seen better than in advertisements, which are designed to provoke a complex mixture of desire and dissatisfaction. What makes them eerily effective is the way they integrate into our lives, informing our attitudes, opinions, and aesthetics. As time passes they become something more: memories of the “good ol’ days,” which we can wax nostalgic upon while simultaneously rewriting our histories to flatter our self-images.
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The subject of gender is infinitely complex, with its ideals and archetypes that are far more constructions of fantasies and fears than they are upon the mundane reality that makes them infinitely more messy, revealing the inherent nature of paradox at the root of existence when we live in a state of conflict rather than harmony with our lives.
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Advertisements are false paradigms that are readily absorbed for their reductive thinking that enables people who like to avoid responsibility to readily allow someone else to dictate the terms. Naturally, they are far more seductive otherwise they wouldn’t work. By provoking us with pragmatic solutions (buy this! use that!) they cultivate dependency not only on their wares but also on the very medium itself. Perhaps there’s nothing so delicious as a reflection upon which we can project our ego’s demanding neediness. Invariably, short term gratification wears off, and we return to the well even thirstier than we were when we first took a sip.
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Robin Williams. It is Not a Pipe. Acrylic and oil on panel 30 x 30 inches. Copyright Robin Williams, Courtesy P.P.O.W
The construction of the female gender is American society has long been a losing paradigm, dating back to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s idealistic essay Woman (1885), which overwhelms with the weight of virtue and vulnerability. “They are victims of the finer temperament,” he writes, clearly enamored with the pedestal upon which he places them.
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Fast forward nearly a century to the 1970s, as liberation movements began to free women from these tiresome constraints. The pendulum, being what it is, swung in the other direction, where wanton grace became the idea. Advertisers understood the power of aping the zeitgeist, corralling the chaotic displays of self-exploration into neatly packaged archetypes.
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These aesthetics fascinated American artist Robin F. Williams and became an integral motif throughout her new body of work, which combined genre painting and portraiture to subversive effect in the new exhibition Your Good Taste Is Showing, now on view at P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York, through November 11, 2017.
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Williams’ work deftly mixes takes 1970s advertisements as its departure point, examining the ways in which they drew upon art historical tropes to sell everything from cigarettes to shampoo. Where the advertisements wanted to draw you in to their world, Williams’ forces you to back off, subverts expectations of propriety, giving her subjects the agency to figuratively flip the bird while still looking, soft, sensual, and glamorous. Here, sexy is a double-edged sword, for it both makes you look but places a clear boundary between the desire it stimulates and its ability to fulfill your dreams.
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No, the works says, not this time. I’m not yours.
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Robin Williams. Bather, 2017. Acrylic, airbrush, and oil on canvas, 38 x 23 inches. Copyright Robin Williams, Courtesy P.P.O.W.
