January 5 to February 4, 2018
327 Broome Street, between Bowery & Chrystie Street
New York City, nicellebeauchene.com

Is painting in monochrome in 2018 retrograde? Jim Lee’s solo exhibition Half Off at Nicelle Beauchene seems to suggest as much as it fixates on the absurdity of this investigation. Lee explicates the perverse nature of painting monochromes (or painting itself) through tongue-in-cheek illustration of them. The paintings become physical manifestations of his casual approach and slapstick process and efforts to undermine the stoicism historically found in painting.

Uneven in texture, saturation, and hue, Lee’s paintings boast their apparent ineptitude: He unabashedly folds, staples, and tears lopsided seams, which feels irreverent given their nod to color-field abstraction and notions of purity. This is made meaningful by Lee’s use of different historically class-laden materials, such as oil paint and linen, intermixed with crass interlopers—Flashe, zone marking paint, visible staples, glitter, acrylic: lowbrow materials that feel deliberately applied to expensive supports that have been previously agitated and aggressively handled. The lowbrow materials occasionally impersonate highbrow ones or gesture over them, denouncing any aura of opulence implied by high quality. Lee’s works are biting their thumb at the elitism and purity bound to the stuffy history of the monochrome.

Highlighting the texture of the raw canvas or the slick plastic sheen of acrylic, mimicry and illusionism in Lee’s gestures double as surface depictions. Registered quickly for their tactile surface, their substance draws from deeper-rooted content, heavily contingent upon a viewer’s diligence. That they ask for a patient and persistent viewer can be seen in the paintings’ multifaceted intersections – these arise as time is spent with the works—whether between the digital and physical, humor and solemnity, elitism and the egalitarian. Lee’s surface quality, materials, gestures, and handling juggle anecdotes of the heavy baggage paintings can carry.

Intentionally or otherwise, Lee’s work often imitates the behavior or interaction a user has with an interface, such as manipulated screens that press against the picture plane and simultaneously recede into a deep space. A Cream Divide, split in half by conjoined canvas and linen, recalls a Photoshop preview dialogue box, de-saturating an image on the right half of its surface. The bright red panel on the left has a soft, blotchy red coating, unevenly mirrored by a seemingly darker red shaded by the underlying linen on the right panel. Similarly, in Safety and Senegal, Lee connects two distinct yellow surfaces of different prismatic intensity, sheen, and texture. Comprised of Flashe and zone marking paint, the lighter yellow intensified by its dark linen support, and conversely its light beige canvas, amplifies the deeper yellow. The physical and conceptual subtleties in Lee’s work invite the viewer to spend time with them, contradicting our expedited relationships to the information available via the screens alluded to in some of his works. Other paintings, such as Rutting Moon and Mr. Pleasant, inch closer to a “truer” monochrome with only a single color applied scrappily to a cobbled surface, appearing simple but still jabbing at traditional color-field painting.

Lee has provided his own bench from which viewers can fully absorb his faux monochromes. The same size as the paintings, the bench has printed on its seat a story from the artist’s hometown about a peeping tom and inevitable chaos that ensued. There is humor in peering around seated visitors in an attempt to read the text, mimicking a peeping tom’s mannerisms oneself. Looking back up at the paintings after reading the story feels like a violation of the paintings’ and artist’s privacy, and removes the deified objecthood to which works of art aspire. Paintings as an extension of oneself splayed out in a sterile gallery space is now re-imagined as unwelcome trespassing, but also realized as a necessary evil of continuing a sustainable art practice within a capitalist society. In this vein, the artist has provided a take home tee shirt emblazoned with the text “FCKER” for visitors to purchase. Who is the real fucker here?

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The facts are more or less clear. Invited by the architect Philip Johnson to propose a public artwork for the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair, Andy Warhol chose as his subject a set of mug shots from a New York police department bulletin of 13 Most Wanted Men. Silkscreened on a 20-by-20-foot grid, the resulting work was installed high above the fairgrounds on the oval Circarama building—an oversized rogues gallery canonized by its reverential placement. Once the pre-fair media buzz had reported the public’s objections over what was essentially a series of massive wanted posters in a setting meant to celebrate civic achievement, Warhol, seemingly immune to the controversy he’d set in motion, wrote a letter to the Fair’s organizers suggesting that the work be painted over in a color “of the architect’s choice.”

After the silkscreened panels were covered over with silver paint, the large monochromatic grid remained for the entirety of the fair, an enigmatic blank in a place that had been designated to glorify New York’s vibrant cultural life. In an interview 10 years later, Johnson confessed that it was not Warhol’s displeasure with the work that inspired its erasure (as Johnson stated publicly at the time) but a bow to pressure applied by Governor Nelson Rockefeller who was concerned that the work would alienate his large Italian-American constituency (the ethnicity of the majority of the mug shot subjects) during the initial stages of his campaign for the presidency.

In a small but carefully organized show of paintings, films, and archival material, the Queens Museum, in association with the Warhol Museum, has reconstructed not only the details of the above incident, but the social and political context within which it took place. Addressing the homoerotic subtext of the “most wanted men” subjects (Warhol’s 1964 The 13 Most Beautiful Boys screen tests are shown in an adjoining room), the exhibition also includes archival support material that documents mainstream media’s reportage on a changing cultural landscape. Revealing an atmosphere of repressive “cleansing” in New York City leading up to the opening of the World’s Fair, along with concern about protests from civil rights groups, news articles describe police raids on “underground” film screenings of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963), as well as a fear of a planned “stall-in” (a group of protestors in cars that planned to collectively “run out of gas” to block the main highway to the fairgrounds) by the Congress for Racial Equality.

With pavilions sponsored by big business offering branded optimism accompanied by ethnic caricatures at the national pavilions, the fair merged a corporate futurism with Disney’s “It’s a Small World” motto, shrinking difference and locality into a cartoonish internationalism that spoke to America’s post-war ambitions of empire while dissent and “difference” were being bottled up at home. While outwardly fun and carnivalesque, the 1964 World’s Fair was a massive propagandistic effort and financial risk, with a great deal at stake for organizer Robert Moses (whose 1939-40 fair at the same site had gone bankrupt) and Governor and presidential aspirant Nelson Rockefeller. Any controversy that might compromise the fair’s success had to be dealt with quickly and decisively. With public pressure mounting, the 13 most wanted men were visible for a mere 48 hours before being covered over with silver paint (and, briefly, a black shroud for good measure).

There’s a beautiful irony in the idea that a set of (mug shot) portraits commissioned by the state, presumably with the public’s welfare in mind, are appropriated by an artist to fulfill a public art commission which is then censored by the state over concerns of alienating the public. While it’s true that the subject of criminals is clearly out of step with the laudatory atmosphere of a World’s Fair, Warhol’s coy literalism (he said he was asked to do a piece that had “something to do with New York”) threatened to distract from the orgiastic mingling of a rising corporatism with national and regional pride so prominently featured at the Fair. On the floor of the Johnson-designed New York State Pavilion, adjacent to where the mug shots-turned-monochromes remained on display, was an enormous terrazzo road map of New York sponsored by Texaco, indicating all the locations of their gas stations across the state. In keeping with the Fair’s agenda, which collapsed distinctions between business and everyday life, the “walkable” map realized a new scale of corporate paternalism within the public realm. With Warhol’s (brief) elevation of the marginalized and feared now safely muted under the all-purpose glimmer of silver paint, visitors below wandered across a map of the “new world,” a place where, the Fair seemed to promise, all their needs would be taken care of, as far into the future as they could imagine.

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