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Gary Indiana Dear Decade This isn't entirely to do with the recent paintings of James Nares but with an array of things suggested by them. If I hesitate to deal with the paintings directly it's because their relation to his films has never been entirely clear. The best I can do here is speculate freely and hope for the best. Nares did a lot of performance work in the '70s. He was a member of an artist's collective called Colab, and one of the collaborators on X Magazine. He played guitar in the Contortions and did the camerawork on nemerous Super-8 films, including John Lurie's Men in Orbit. With Eric Mitchell and Becky Johnston he founded the New Cinema on St Mark's Place. He made a Super-8 film, Rome 78, in 1979. In 1980 he made an hour-long videotape, No Japs at my Funeral, and shot Johnston's Sleepless Nights. In 1981 he made a 10-minute Super-8 film called Waiting for the Wind. In the same year he played percussion with the Del Byzantines. Since then he has mainly been painting. This is a dense compression. Things don't really move according to decades, but the change from the '70s to the '80s was in fact dramatic and rather nauseating. In the '70s one suspected the future was going to be unpleasant but entertained some hope it would not be utterly predictable. At the end of the '70s certain shifts became palpable. A kind of negative idealism segued into a series of affectedly brainless optimism. The difference between the Mudd Club and Club 57 reflects this clearly. The Mudd Club was about exhibiting the dark underside of high culture; Club 57 was about wanting to be on television. Downtown culture - if we need to rope it off that way - ecuded a politically informed, enlightened absurdism in the '70s. In the early '80s the culture began to project an earnest, uncritical embrace of the absurdities. Many artists working in several media "went back" to painting with disconcerting abruptness. Nares was one, or so it seemed. He had in fact been making paintings all along, but not showing them. Nares's paintings are astute, intelligent works, expedient, and if I am puzzled by them it's probably because I experience them as displacements. Nares's vision of the wrold has been quite clear. In Men in Orbit two ridiculous astronauts knock around in a space capsule, their disorientation simulated by a fast-rotating camera. These media heroes are depicted as beer-guzzling slobs who have lost the power of coherent speech. In Rome '78, Nares recasts a platoon of then-underground celebrities as power-hungry contestants in Imperial Rome, clanking around in armor and adoring themselves uninhibitedly. No Japs at my Funeral is an interview with an IRA "terrorist" intercut with British television footage of the war in Northern Ireland. In the course of an hour we are forced to understand that the interview subject is a likeable young man cornered by historical chance into doing what he must do: a person who eats and sleeps and makes love like anyone else and does not have the moral option of living quietly. Waiting for the Wind has the camera knocking wildly back and forth as it speeds up endless, overlit stairways. It cuts to a stationary shot of a man lying in bed who wakes up repeatedly in a fit of terror, throwing off the sheet and flailing around helplessly on the mattress. Next the furniture and fixtures in a stark loft space are whipped up by a violent, invisible force, smash into ceiling and walls. The destruction is relentless, hypnotic, beautiful. Finally the camera zooms again and again from a long-to-close shot of the moon. From the above, it's easy to assume that Nares sees the human being trapped by structures larger than him/herself, inadequate to history, torn apart by received circumstances. There is a painted plaster head in Nares's current show that's sliced up like a loaf of bread. A painting called Rope-A-Dope shows a vaguely human figure with the coil of a heart shaped "rope" encircling its long neck. Headspin features a disembodied face gripped by the forehead and chin by two hands preparing to wrench it around. In Nemosapiens, three demonic presences perch on a thick bough from which two humanoid shapes have been hanged. In Nares's paintings, there are numerous allusions to implacable forces at work. Drawings and small paintings Nares did after a trip to Egypt carry a heavy presence of death - these are simply wrought things, blunt pyramids and palms in sienna - a a gravity peculiar to Nares's painting since Waiting for the Wind. In the latter, the re-iterated zoom-to-the-moon was startling because it seemed to link the distressed figure on the bed and the cyclone to the empty loft, not to traumatic history or weather conditions, but to occult, inescapable powers. Relatedly, the painting Spirit of St Louis has a propeller form painted against a light background in the upper third of the canvas: whirring pointlessly because it's detached from any aircraft, a picture of gratuitous propulsion. But lower down, where the background color becomes dark, what looks like raised forms hover just behind the paintings surface. They strongly suggest Mayan or Aztec symbols carved in the face of some temple of sacrifice. Many of Nares's recent paintings are done on skin-thin layers of silk, stretched over metal panels. The way the silk absorbs paint, superimposed on whatever paint finds its way onto the metal, creates an illusion of build-up. The ground texture gives a smearing and streaking quality to huge brushstrokes of thin paint, making a subnetwork of realistic volumes by shading in discrete parts of each stroke. Nares's work has an internal dynamism, often an exploded quality, typical of thickly worked oil paintingg. This tension between apparent and real volumes echo one another: Nares's figures sometimes suggest an almost monumentalized pain, as in the massive, twisting shape astride some uncontrollable machine in The Passenger. Yet these figures are generic, undifferentiated Everypersons and therefore allegorical. The haplessness of Nares's creatures isn't uninformed by whimsy. But this is the painter's humor, not the subject's self-conscious irony. The subject is mute, possibly no longer conscious. The egocentric birdbrains and gibbering poseurs in Rome '78 may have been tools and plumbers of Imperialism, but they also had vivid lives and smart mouths. The presences in Nares's paintings are thrown to an unchosen, ravening destiny like lumps of bewildered meat. With a perfect artistry that looks like poise and is actually sardonic wit, Nares elucidates the difference between the 1970s and the 1980s. |