All artists are, by necessity, filthy fucking thieves. To me, the conspicuous absence of those two names, in the otherwise frank & entertaining interview with Pan, suggests that both Shaw & Ford are far too much of an influence for him to consciously acknowledge. Yes, I'm a fan of both, so maybe I'm just seeing their particular brands of totem symbolism everywhere. with the exception of the critical fellatio of 'Art Forum', 'Art International', et cetera. Mu Pan's charmingly genocidal wargy-porn is boiling with the flora & fauna of Natural History masters like Audubon or Nicolas Robert, sometimes structured according to the kaleidoscopic symmetry of the mandala, & at other times - as mentioned earlier - filtered via the pictographic languages of Raqib Shaw & Walton Ford. I'll take Mu Pan over 99.999% of the Modernist douchebags celebrated in textbooks promulgating the Marxist-revisionism of Art History, confidently betting on the spry 'Gen-X'-er over the mouldering 'Gen-P' Euro-skeletons, according to whatever variables you care to apply to this ridiculous hypothetical contest of artistical awesomeness. in which there is a Communist Berserker-Toad, armed with the serrated forelimb of a Praying Mantis, astride the shell of his War Tortoise, preparing to slaughter a company of The Croaking Leopard Frog Resistance? Of course you have. Haven't you ever gazed in anxious silence at one of the many Yves Klein canvases featuring a solid field of his trademarked 'Klein International Blue', desperately wishing it was a very-blue pond. And if you said 'Yes', you're lying to yourself, and you're going to hell or an Atheist Oblivion. Has anyone ever felt anything looking at Piet Mondrian's multi-colored squares inside black & white grids? Besides boredom? No? FUCK No. and far, FAR better than most of the Modernist & Postmodernist con-artists bilking hollowed-out 1%ers as they try to impress whoever-the-fuck with their manufactured tastes. There are quite a few more artists in the High-Low ghetto, meanwhile, who can capture the attention, engage the intellect, & challenge the viewer themselves - the abyss gazing back - almost as well as the artists just mentioned. I don't think I could conscientiously use the word 'entertaining' to describe more than a handful of 'mainstream' contemporary artists - Ford, Shaw, Akira Yamaguchi, Wolfe Von Lenkiewicz, Ali Banisadr, Glenn Brown, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Jonas Burgert, Daniel Pitin, Mark Tansey, Manabu Ikeda, Vincent Desiderio, Aida Makoto, Neo Rauch, and Ruprecht Von Kaufmann - all of whom represent the best & the brightest. No true artist or artist-illustrator should ever focus on producing 'entertaining' work, unless it's done purely for their OWN entertainment, and that's exactly the engine that drives Mu Pan. Historical context & hidden symbolism & all the exciting intellectual crap that gets the art-hags scribbling. AND SO: like Bosch's 'The Temptation of St.Anthony' or 'The Garden of Earthly Delights' (of which Pan, like Shaw, provides his own wonderfully grotesque reinterpretation) there's micro & macroscopic stories crawling across every square inch of Mu Pan's wood & paper, a riot of jokes & mysteries & blasphemies that are both endlessly compelling & - *GASP* - entertaining! There's depth in those details, too. But perspective, realism, telling stories! Clement Greenberg, undead Pope of Marxist Modernism, will need a brand new Circle in Artist Hell for that shit. Figurative art alone is enough to automatically condemn the artist's soul to a quiet spot on the 7th Circle, where they're tattooed with sulfuric acid for all eternity. There's plenty of art school technique, & a complete lack of art school pretense, as Pan apparently gives zero fucks, repeatedly & blissfully committing the cardinal Modernist sin of Narrative. every page exploding with violence & vibrance & visionary brilliance. The Taiwanese-born art-movement-on-legs known as Mu Pan brings us Brueghelian battlescapes via Raqib Shaw, Walton Ford, Ukiyo-e, Henry Darger, Hasbro, et cetera ad infinitum. "'Every monster I draw is actually a self-portrait.'" - Mu Pan, p.100 'American Fried Rice: The Art of Mu Pan') Unnatural History - Dinocidal Murder-Monkeys & the Great Frog Wars of Goatfucker Pond (A.K.A.
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