“Unexchangable” at Wiels

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Long discussed as ironic kitsch - literally: "These are some of the worst paintings you will ever see" Searle - Shaw's thrift store finds have been slowly encroached by contemporary painting circling it. See "“Pharmacy for Idiots” at Rob Tufnell. Paintings' last five years seems close, if more proficient, to these vernacular imagists. The surrealism of today's painting mirrors the fact that any of the medium, in quantities vast enough, begins plotting points of the cultural unconscious. If you amass enough hand made images you begin so see dreams emerge. Painting, a virtual box that you fill with what you desire, but the desire is, if not caged, steered around themes that can be inferred by the collection circling around them. You can't see the pier but you can see the fish circling around them: the nude, Jesus, the phallus, pink things, us. Shaw's collection is like Wade Guyton's ostensible promise of printing our dreams, the conveyer of painting collecting like flypaper a civilization's subconscious. These are better much better most.


See too: Wade Guyton at Friedrich Petzel, “Pharmacy for Idiots” at Rob Tufnell, Tala Madani at David Kordansky

Jim Shaw at Metro Pictures

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A friend once commented that, against Freud, there was nothing worse than having someone telling you their dreams, they could say literally anything, conjure or erase any detail, that the dream only mattered if you invested enough to interpret its event in the psyche of the dreamer, see the shark was actually the subconscious manifestation of the girlfriend. And trust the honesty of their manifestation enough to let slip some detail telling. A lot of work for occasional reward. The analysand preconceives the analysis coming, meaty burger lady mystery.


See too:  Jim Shaw at Metro Pictures

Jim Shaw at New Museum

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200 million images are uploaded to Facebook everyday, another 60 million to Instagram daily. Shaw's investment in good old artisanal, traditionally constructed images could seem asinine in comparison to the endlessly juxtapozing and surreal mass Instagram feed journaling the dreams of the slumbering. It has been argued before that both premade tubes of paint and photography's invention each radically shifted the ground of painting, and so the disposability of images now must too be having radical repercussions, and so it's hard to tell if Shaw is a relic or a seer, but it looks pretty good right now.


see too: Jana Euler at Kunsthalle Zürich

Jim Shaw at Metro Pictures



Like everyone’s surrealist hopes and dreams, there’s an implicit premise of speaking truth, reveal the latent subject, the myths of a culture embedded in the juxtaposition of subjects, making us each an interpreter of dreams. The political and religious narratives assembled are ostensibly satire, putting them at one end of the political spectrum but establishing any sense or evidence in the Fantasia-mire ends up reasoning the Farrah Fawcett wig atop a tank. Pop was always about Freudian dreams, now it’s literalized. Get out your talking cures.