Richard Jackson: Ain’t Painting a Pain, the first retrospective devoted to one of the most radical artists of the last 40 years is on view at the Orange County Museum of Art starting Sunday, February 17. Jackson (b. 1939 in Sacramento, CA) has expanded the possibilities of painting more than any other contemporary figure and his wildly inventive, exuberant, and irreverent take on "action" painting has dramatically extended its performative and spatial dimensions, merged it with sculpture, and repositioned it as an art of everyday experience rather than one of heroic myth.
The exhibition is conceived as a series of eleven room-scale installations from 1970 to 2011, most never before shown in the United States, accompanied by over 150 of Jackson’s related preparatory drawings, works on paper, and models. To mark the occasion of this retrospective, Jackson has produced a major new outdoor piece, Bad Dog (2013), a 28 foot-high puppy establishing his territory on the side of the museum.
Jackson’s Early Years (1969-1988)
Much of Jackson's work during the 1970s and 1980s introduced a series of inventive inversions and concealments aimed at upending the technical and stylistic conventions of painting, while still reveling in the material qualities of paint. Jackson’s interest in the uncontrolled application of paint may be linked to Kienholz’s “broom paintings” of the 1950s, and his delight in thick, gloppy surfaces is related to Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings, especially the glossy serial images of deserts, cakes, and cookies.
With Untitled (Maze for Eugenia Butler Gallery),1970—a 20’ x 20’ enclosure with 9’ high walls made from stretched canvas that are “painted” by sliding another wet canvas through the corridor of the maze—a “painting” is transformed from illusionistic space into architectural space and may be viewed only in parts (rather than as whole). Recreated for the OCMA exhibition, the work set the stage for an astonishing series of painting projects unprecedented in the history of American art.
Ain’t Painting a Pain also includes new site-specific Wall Paintings at OCMA, created by sliding wet canvases across gallery walls to create abstract murals of impressive graphic power and formal variety (past works have reached 13' high by 79' long). Stacked Paintings, began in 1980, are also represented in the exhibition with 5050 Stacked Paintings, a work conceived in 1980 that was built for the first time for this exhibition. The installation is made of 5,050 painted canvases, measures 30’ long x 15’ wide x 10’ high, and will be by far the largest stacked work ever produced by Jackson.
Jackson’s New Directions (1989–present)
By the early 1990s, Jackson began to build all manner of elaborate “painting machines,” which he activates prior to an exhibition opening, and which viewers experience as evidence of a performance rather than as a performance itself. A startling break from the conceptual abstraction that had defined the first half of his career, Jackson began moving toward a conceptual realism that employed the figure to investigate the problems of picture making.
These mechanized works employ pumps, motors, fans, propellers, air compressors, and spray hoses to deploy paint in increasingly inventive and outlandish ways. Ain’t Painting a Pain includes seven of these room-scale works created over a twenty-year period, six of them Jacksonian reinterpretations of canonical works by Jacques-Louis David, Edgar Degas, Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Seurat.
With La Grande Jatte (after Georges Seurat), for example, the artist recreates the 1886–86 pointillist masterpiece by dipping pellets into paint and firing them from a pellet gun at the canvas. Jackson began the project in 1992 and after approximately 90,000 shots the work is barely 10% completed. No matter how much labor Jackson applies to its production, the painting will never be completed. Jackson's Painting with Two Balls (1997) co-opts Johns’ famous 1960 critique of abstract expressionism to make a massive “action” painting by using a Ford Pinto to power two large spinning balls that throw paint in all directions into a large room. The Laundry Room (Death of Marat), 2009, transforms David’s 1793 pieta of the French Revolution into a three-dimensional, life-size mis-en-scene that viewers may enter. Like The Laundry Room, Jackson’s The Blue Room (2011) also turns a painting into a sculpture that makes a painting; in this case using Picasso’s 1901 The Blue Room (The Tub) for inspiration.
During this period Jackson also produced several autobiographical works and Ain’t Painting a Pain includes two major room-scale examples: Deer Beer (1998), which combines Jackson’s passion for hunting, art history, and painting; and 1000 Clocks (1987–1992), which was made to mark the artist’s 50th birthday and has not been shown in the United States since its premier in Helter Skelter at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1992.
In the United States, Jackson is the heir to Pollock, Rauschenberg, and Johns.
Their breakthroughs, however, took successive generations of American artists away from the further expansion of painting and toward the new genres that their work anticipated, which left Jackson outside of the prevailing narratives of post-1960s American art. Ain’t Painting a Pain offers a full-scale reassessment and continues the museum’s longstanding commitment to championing essential yet under-recognized late career artists.
|
|
Richard Jackson, "The Laundry Room (Death of Marat)," 2009, acrylic paint, metal, wood, linoleum, aqua resin, plastic, fabric, computer, washing machine, 47 x 224 3/8 x 224 3/8".
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Stephan Altenberger Photography, Zürich
Richard Jackson, "Bad Dog," 2013, fiber reinforced composite skin and steel, Approx. 336 x 384".
Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: © Grant Mudford
Richard Jackson, "Painting with Two Balls," 1997, Ford Pinto, metal, wood, canvas, acrylic paint, 240 1/8 x 43 1/4 x 240 1/8".
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Stephan Altenberger Photography, Zürich
|
