Jim Shaw: The Rinse Wheel
BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art
9 Nov 2012 - 17 February 2013
Review by Catherine Spencer

The kaleidoscopic creativity and engagement with popular culture that characterises Jim Shaw's work might be viewed as quintessentially mail-modern, conveying a fractured view of the earth in which engaging but artificial products vie for mass consumption. Withal the Los Angeles-based artists' oeuvre is also criss-crossed by an obsession with random coincidence, and with the capacity of dreams, comics and the movies - interrelated realms where physic desires can be played out - to weave myriad connections, in a way that suggests a Romantic (or at least symbolist) engagement with the surrounding environment and a thirst for transcendent pregnant in a sea of seeming dross. His work is the visual equivalent of reading Thomas Pynchon and William Blake in parallel, with a glossary provided by the Surrealists.

Appositely for a mid-career retrospective, 'The Rinse Bicycle' opens with a selection of images from 'My Mirage' (1986-1991), Shaw's first large-calibration projection composed from collages, paintings, sculptures and videos. These loosely tell the story of 'Billy', a character who is in office an change ego for Shaw, only who too draws on a range of American everymen from Charlie Brown to Clark Kent. Over the grade of 'My Mirage', Billy undergoes a transformation from child to adult via teenage drop-out (represented here by the hallucinogenic video 'Billy Goes to a Party No. 4'), and ultimately to built-in-over again Christian. 'My Delusion' weaves a counter-narrative to the stereotypes of American success, yet the story of failure it tells is as ingrained in the American vernacular, and the overall tone is ultimately ambivalent about whether either route is free from self-deception.

The queasily layered effect of 'My Mirage', in which Shaw combines a range of references to cartoons and films with chakra charts and religious tracts, is continued in the myriad allusions made past the 'Dream Objects' Shaw has produced over the concluding decade. The 'Dream Objects' initially originated from Shaw's 'Dream Drawings', longer narrative strips that reverberate Shaw'southward previous work as a story-boarder for Idiot box commercials, too equally his proximity to the Hollywood dream-manufactory, nonetheless tiredly churning out its ready-made aspirations and idealised lifestyles. 'The Dream Objects', extrapolated from these longer stories, are past turns mysterious, serendipitous, kitsch and creepy. They range from the feverish 'Dream Object (A Room with Waves of Meat Frozen Crashed in a Corner)' (2006), a structure of thick, fleshy racks of meat frothing with creamy fat-like foam, to the elegiac 'Dream Object (Firm Spiral)' (2006), a mountain of miniature models including a tiny 7-xi store and Victorian gothic mansion, evoking the nostalgic twee-ness of Christmas dioramas, just undercutting the vision of eye-grade stability they sell with a sense of loss and dusty abandonment.

A further, more referentially complex just less immediately engaging category of 'Dream Objects' consists of iii-dimensional, irregular white shapes that explicitly display Shaw's indebtedness to Richard Hamilton and Max Ernst, quoting images of consumer products (vacuum cleaners and foodstuffs) that these artists cannibalised for their works. As the interconnected nature of 'My Delusion', the 'Dream Objects' and 'Dream Drawings' indicate, Shaw allows ideas and references to travel between works. This is particularly and then of the pieces referencing Oism, a religion Shaw devised himself in a move that highlights the seductiveness of cults, while finding something salvageable in the condolement provided by rituals and icons. While Oism constitutes a (more cuddly) art-globe retort to L. Ron Hubbard, the resulting videos, sculptures and paintings tend to experience superficial and empty: information technology is unclear whether to take these pieces as a celebration of the human ability to weave significant through narrative, or a one-line mockery of the want for transcendence.

The Rinse Bicycle culminates with the 'Left Backside Banners', made from gigantic used theatrical backdrops that Shaw found in Hollywood surplus stores. Shaw has partly painted them over, just sometimes left the original imagery showing through - hanging these relics, with their two-dimensional illusions and tenderly patched versos, does much of Shaw's work for him (a little similar his drove of 'Thrift Store Paintings', non featured in the Baltic show), providing a powerful embodiment of mass culture'southward power to simultaneously feed off and abound people'due south fantasies. 1 imprint, featuring a maleficent pinkish octopus blotting out the lord's day to a higher place a scene of priapic pink trees and a snaking railroad, is wonderfully apocalyptic and strange: another, depicting the Bush administration as a pack of zombies, is a little more heavy-handed.

It is from one of these banners that the show'southward title is taken, featuring a group of wigs hovering in a desert landscape dominated by the interior view of a mid-cycle washing machine. This imprint relates to Shaw'due south larger plans for a prog-stone musical, harking back to the 1970s when, together with Mike Kelley, Shaw was one of the founding members of the band 'Destroy All Monsters' before the two moved to Los Angeles and embarked on the programme at CalArts. Withal fifty-fifty without the knowledge that Shaw's musical is currently on ice due to lack of funding, there is a paradoxically purposeful sense of failure here, one that correlates with a distinct lack of surety almost what the convergences, coincidences and conflations brought about by his works might signify. My feeling equally I left 'The Rinse Cycle' was of having begun a huge, complex jigsaw, in which I had managed to fit some pieces together, but mislaid others under the sofa.

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