Carla Gannis: The Garden of Emoji Delights at Kasia Kay Art Projects
October 17 to November 15, 2014
215 N Aberdeen St
Chicago, 312 944 0408

In 2010, the Library of Congress admitted a new translation of Moby-Dick to share shelf space with the Russian, German, and Chinese versions already archived. Titled Emoji Dick, the project took Melville’s great novel and re-composed it line by line with the mobile-based iconography system called emoji. “A boggy, soggy squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted,” for instance, translates thus:That the book is considered a translation indicates that emoji constitute their own visual language. Concocted in Japan in the mid-1990s and comprised of a good number of Japan-specific cultural signifiers, emoji crept into American SMS and social media communication primarily by way of Apple’s inclusion of an emoji keyboard in 2009. In the years that followed, the graphic symbols became so ubiquitous that such a thing as Emoji Dick could come into existence.

The large scale digital print by Carla Gannis, Garden of Emoji Delights, can now be added to the ranks of canon-referencing emoji artwork. On exhibition at Kasia Kay Art Projects in Chicago’s West Loop, the triptych print is the same dimensions as the Garden of Earthly Delight by Hieronymus Bosch, dominating its wall at seven feet tall by 13 feet wide. The work is a figure-for-figure remake of Bosch’s fever-dream painting, using thousands of the Apple iOS version emoji at all different scales and arrangements. Gannis uses a few different strategies for her translating, sometimes capitalizing on direct swaps of emoji for image, other times opting for creative substitution to get the passage across. A good deal of original design went into many of the forms as well, with Gannis imagining and composing profile views of some of the faces, emoji-yellow bodies to attach below the chins, and a number of the animals and architectures of Bosch’s world.

The Garden of Earthly Delight, art historically speaking, is famously confounding. Of the many divergent interpretations of the painting — none of which has ever gained ground as a dominant model for understanding the work — Erwin Panofsky probably sums it up best, closing his monograph on Early Netherlandish painting with what amounts to the German art historian version of –  ¯\_(?)_/¯ – the shrug emoticon:

“In spite of all the ingenious, erudite and in part extremely useful research devoted to the task of ‘decoding Jerome Bosch,’ I cannot help feeling that the real secret of his magnificent nightmares and daydreams has still to be disclosed. We have bored a few holes through the door of the locked room; but somehow we do not seem to have discovered the key…”

By selecting this painting as the reference for her own work, Gannis suggests a parallel between the openness of the referent and the openness of emoji as a signifying medium.

Gannis’s creation is undeniably enjoyable to wade into, though perhaps only if you have a version of Bosch’s original on hand for immediate comparison and assuming that you are already fluent in emoji usage. The threat of simple reference-pleasure implicit in the “new media one-liner” or nmol hangs over the work and is exacerbated by an exhibition text by Sabin Bors that drops strained, overreaching commentary such as “the Emoji promiscuity of happy sinners translates our growing inability to relate to one another.” Bors finds in the Emoji Garden a critique of “our society” and its trappings of social isolation and consumerism. Evoking the Superflat theory of Takashi Murakami, Bors reads the Emoji Garden’s orgiastic visuals as a condemnation of surface, excess, and “emotional obscurity.”

Yet Superflat, as laid out in Murakami’s Superflat Manifesto and related writings, is a full-throated embrace of both consumerism and surface. For Murakami, the relations of surfaces that characterize Japanese visual culture illuminate fundamentally Japanese forms of art and subjectivity historically rooted in the commercial visuality of the Edo period. Given the Japanese origin of the emoji glyph set, it feels important to underscore this misreading of Superflat as a theory that is expressly critical of global consumerism. It’s critical, but critical of a homogenized Western-driven conception of art, visual culture, and subject position.

What Gannis shows us, of course, is that whatever culturally specific origin these glyphs hold, their capacity as emotive and communicative signs comes from their cultural flexibility. Rather than pointing out that Americans have become techno-emotional mutes, Gannis’s Garden shows how emoji circulate as agreed-upon signifiers beyond one-to-one meanings. The humor in Emoji Garden derives from our shared ability to read, for instance, the peach emoji as a nude figure’s backside or the bull’s eye emoji as a weird kind of barbed fruit. Emoji usage is predicated on an agreement to interpret the pictographs loosely, to construct meaning on the level of peer groups who use and agree upon shared meanings over time.

Ultimately, the dependence on canonical works of art and literature to scaffold emoji-as-art may be a hindrance to the impact works like Garden of Emoji Delight and Emoji Dick can have. The sculpture that accompanies the Emoji Garden at Kasia Kay — a gray 3D-printed Sphinx-ish creature drawn from the emoji version of Bosch’s painting — comes off as a side note, but its obliqueness to both Bosch and emoji make its weird hybridity all the more compelling. Compared to The Garden of Emoji Delights, which for all of its playful detail reveals itself fairly immediately, the sculpture carries more mystery and potential, channeling and innovating within the disgusting and ecstatic spirit of Bosch’s painting without being chained to it.

Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting. Harper & Row, New York, 1972 (1953), 357-358]

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Just a few feet from Terzo Piano, the chic new museum restaurant where you can sup on grilled Nettesheim Farms beef strip loin with crispy Anson Mills polenta, mushroom fonduta and grilled ramps for 26 bucks, Roger Hiorns’s placement, through September 19, of two massive Pratt and Whitney TF33 P9 jet engines on a exterior roof terrace of the Art Institute of Chicago seems another eerie reminder of the temporal mechanics of power and authority.  The two clearly spent and non-functional engines lay parallel to one another as if now prepped for cultural autopsy, their previous function (described in a wall label nearby) as the preferred jet engines for long-range surveillance planes, as the literal support and facilitator of ceaseless governmental geopolitical observation, is now reversed into something to be looked at, the stealthy observer now the recipient of the museum-goers gaze.  In a kind of abject post-Futurist manner, London-based Hiorns allows the sheer rhythmic grace of the sweep of these engines, their almost lurid beauty of full-throated design, to be both celebrated and tempered by their current functional impotence.  In their curious passage from embodiment of global power to inert sculptural and museological remnant they are somewhat, but not completely, defanged.  Gilding the lily a bit was Hiorns’s almost secretive embedding  of anti-depressant drugs such as Effexor and citalopram into the body of these two engines, something that was impossible to discern visually if not for information provided in the wall label, metaphorically positing that if surveillance is a manifestation of an age of anxiety, then these engines go about their business in a chemically induced calm, as do many of us. Hiorns’s action reminded me most of that scene in William Wyler’s 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives, where Dana Andrews encounters a field filled with remnants of discarded bombers, just like those he recently flew in during WW II.  He climbs into one and for a spell fully relives the physical and psychological presence and intensity of war until recalled to the present by a yard boss to whom these planes are now just so much scrap metal.  Hiorns, in a similarly neo-masculinist kind of way, seems to evoke a similar sense of the evocative history of these machines—weapons, really—of mass observation and to brood on their current employ.

Surveillance of another sort underpins Tony Tasset’s 30-foot tall EYE, which will be placed in Chicago’s Pritzker Park across the street from the Harold Washington Library on State Street on July 7, and remain on view there until the end of October.  Based on a 12 x 12  x 12 foot (it’s an eyeball, after all) fiberglass, resin, oil paint, and steel piece Tasset did for the Laumeier Sculpture Garden in St. Louis in 2007, the three-story highly realistic eyeball (to the extent that, at 30 foot, an eyeball can be realistic!) has a blue iris and slight indications of red veining across this expansive orb.  It’s the latest in a seemingly unending series of witty and insidiously insurrective populist sculptures by this Chicago-based artist.  In the grand tradition of clever and scrupulously crafted Chicago sculpture—H. C. Westermann, Karl Wirsum, Claes Oldenberg and Tom Friedman all come to mind.  The latter two both trained in Chicago, Friedman under Tasset at the University of Illinois – Chicago. Tasset’s recent work has included Paul, a monumental sculpture of an exhausted and seemingly depressed Paul Bunyan, done in 2007 for the Manilow Sculpture Park at Governors State University in University Park in Illinois and his 2010 Blob Monster, which debuted at the ArtChicago art fair this April.   Tasset’s EYE will be accompanied by CARDINAL, a series of 156 vertical street banners along State Street that function as a kind of flip book showing a cardinal—the state bird of Illinois—in flight.  While EYE is probably not intended as a punning reference to where Tasset teaches—the school is referred to as UIC—and only possibly alludes to the staring heads of Illinoisans that comprise Jaume Plensa’s Crown Fountain in nearby Millennium Park, it would be like this artist to be thinking about the hundreds of cameras aimed at people walking through Chicago’s Loop every day.  While overwhelmingly inviting that omnipresent sense of unrelieved and unblinking observation, of the urban dweller’s rapid scan being replaced by the rapid scan of the urban dweller, in Tasset’s case, however, the damned thing is blind.

By the time you read this John Parot is either continuing to make his way through his colleagues on Bravo’s rather disappointing “The Next Great Artist,” or has heard that dulcet phrase “Your work of art didn’t work for us,” and is free to return to Los Angeles, where he now lives and works.   That’s for us, anyway, as the entire series has already been filmed Parot certainly knows his fate, which undoubtedly will have little impact on an already interesting career.  Parot studied at UIC, and while there are even several images of stylized eyes in his recent exhibition at Western Exhibitions, it would mischaracterize his work to carry the above surveillance leitmotif further.  His work does have a sort of pseudo-Ptolemeic quality, a kind of commingling of ancient Egyptian motifs throughout touched by a Hellenistic eroticism—the pyramid/triangle, hieratic staring eyes, and unabashedly pretty boys—that has an indolent and fey charm to it, all realized in the kind of pink/purple/black tones that have a lurid self conscious hipster Las Vegas feel.  Parot is a clever artist, and this work is marked by the sort of pictorial cunning now much in vogue, particularly in LA, high in abstract but playful design motifs, lots of bright stripes and chevrons, etc., but refusing to be too intense or belabored, but with just enough intimations of sensuality to make it all upbeat and cheery.  No narrative, no burden of subject matter, really, just a succession of amiable images that every once in a while playfully alludes to something kind of important, such as sex, intimacy, vulnerability, etc.  Unlike, for example, Hiorns or Tasset, Parot is loathe to imbue too much weight to any single work, preferring capriciousness and variety over decidedness and concentration.  All things considered, I think Parot would probably prefer to be the next cool artist than the next great one, and he may be well on his way to achieving his wish.

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February 12th to August 1, 2010
1852 West 19th Street
Chicago, 312-738-1503

Modernism was so underdeveloped in the United States in the early 1930s that the impact that the Mexican Muralists – Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera – was all the more decisive.  The employment of artists to paint WPA-funded murals in public spaces created a burst of activity that lead to the emergence of art communities and groups, including amongst them many future Abstract Expressionists.  Translating Revolution gives ample opportunity to review the course of this progression, and to see how it flowed from the Mexicans’ emphasis on themes of the common man engaged in political and social struggle.  It is not hard to see how the expressionist fury and Futurist intensity in the murals of Orozco and Siqueiros were suggestive to American artists during the Great Depression – a time of considerable social and political upheaval.  Diego Rivera’s tamer version of Social Realism also had significant impact.  He absorbed important lessons from Cubism which became part of his rhythmic compositions using flattened planar figures in densely populated mural scenes, a style that proved to be a very popular with WPA artists.

Edward Millman’s Detail Fresco, St Louis, MO Post Office (1942) observes many aspects of Orozco’s work.  Three counterpoised men stand and kneel in a wasteland of ruptured planks, a design clearly inspired by Orozco’s Zapata 1930 (not in the exhibition). Millman’s men have large knuckled hands that convey both supplication and anger.  This same symbolic device is apparent in the lithograph by Leopoldo Mendez, Murdered Teacher (1938), which presents a bound teacher being burned along with his books.   His struggling hands and the flames of fire surrounding him directly and simply convey the emotional impact of the scene.

One highpoint of the exhibition is a boldly sketched charcoal head study from Orozco’s  Man on Fire mural 1938 – 39 (in Guadalajara, Mexico) in which the brusquely rendered bald head of a furious prophet stares intently with piercing eyes.  His painting The Martyrdom of Saint Steven I (1943) shows the violent stoning of the saint by a bloodthirsty crowd: muscular sinews in the limbs and backs of his figures heighten the tension in the mob and add to the tone of existential violence and death so common in his art. In contrast to this particular work, much WPA art is infused with a populist sympathy for suffering.  The painting A Man to Remember (1939) by Charles Wilbert White presents a seated ragged amputee begging for alms.  The creased folds in his worn out face and clothes magnify the sense of pathos.  His approach seems inspired by Siquerios’ energetic use of abstract space around his figures, resembling a vortex of fire that is used to highlight the presence of intense feeling.

Two important early examples of Jackson Pollock’s work show his direct connection to the Mexicans. In Untitled (Bald Woman with Skeleton) (1938-41) a nightmare scene presents a faceless bald female nude bending over a disjointed animal skeleton.  She is surrounded by an hallucinatory mob with starving faces claustrophobically crammed on either side of her.  The intense gestures in Pollock’s brushstrokes and the bilious mix of yellow, green, blue and red makes this one of his darkest Orozco- inspired works.  In another equally turbulent painting, Untitled (Composition with Ritual Scene) (1938 – 41), the primitive theme of animal sacrifice is repeated.  By outlining his figures in heavy black angles and curves he abstractly suggests figures marching or intertwining in a tangle of movement. Pollock had participated in a political art workshop lead by Siqueiros in 1936, and though he never met Orozco he was deeply moved by his 1930 mural, Prometheus, which he had seen at Pomona College in Claremont, California.

Futurist-based circular and geometric divisions of space are visible in Philip Stein’s Battered (1983) where almost the entire vertical surface is filled with the curved torso of a nude woman rendered in heavy outline.   Her hands and arms are protectively raised as if to fend off an attack while her foreshortened face, pressed into the upper right corner, is reduced to an expressive oval.  Her pained and contorted expression rhythmically repeats in a series of curved brushstrokes. In a smaller work of Stein’s, The Cursed (1951), the metallic sheen of a phalanx of Conquistador helmets defensively glow with the cold hostility of machines used in warfare – a prevalent theme in Mexican Muralist art.

There are noteworthy works in the exhibition by Ben Shahn, Tina Modotti, Pablo O’Higgens, Elizabeth Catlett, and Eleanor Cohen and others.  The last room, however, has many contemporary, more conceptual works that are distant from the compositional and expressionist urgencies of the Mexican Muralists. Gone is the vitality with which “Los Tres Grandes” challenged American painters to connect with the social realities, emotions and conflicts of their time.

Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who lives in Evanston, Illinois. The recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2002, she will be exhibiting at the Kouros Gallery in New York City in 2011 and is represented by the Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, the Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City, and the Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago.

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