Los Angeles / Colin Gardner
Like Athene bursting forth from Zeus’s head armed with ghetto blaster and Betamax, James Croak has suddenly exploded from the realms of postmodernism with New Myths and Heroic Allegories, his latest series of sculptures at Otis/Parsons Exhibition Center. The classical reference is an apt one, for Croak’s new works spotlight various creatures from mythology – Pegasus, a centaur, the Sphinx – juxtaposed with the myths and icons of popular culture. This marks a radical departure for this idiosyncratic artist who is best known for his large-scale, abstract aluminum work; but the new works are nevertheless a stunning success – beautifully realized, absurdly funny and mockingly self-referential.
Thrusting ancient myth and allegory into a modern context is hardly a new endeavor. Picasso made a career of it for a while with his Minotaur series, which culminated in Guernica; but Croak gives it fresh meaning simply through the scale of his works. Using life-size taxidermic animals, constructed with the help of taxidermist Ernesto Urcid Croak is able to fashion fantastical beasts with such realism that he produces a dreamlike ambience, one which is both surreal and, literally, tangible. Because they exploit the collected baggage associated with the original myths, Croak’s creations are able to dig deeply into the nature of myth itself and the manifestation of the heroic outlaw who struggles against the confines of conformism and contemporary banality.
The assemblage Pegasus: Some Loves Hurt More Than Others is a perfect example, as the winged horse bursts through the roof of a 1963 Chevy low-rider. Pegasus, born from the womb of the dying Medusa, is best known as the flying steed used by Bellerophon in his battle to conquer the monstrous Chimaera and the Amazons. More important, Pegasus became the symbol of immortality in Roman times. Although both Chevy and beast could be seen as symbols of independence and freedom, Croak seems to be juxtaposing them as positive and negative forces.
As Athene burst from Zeus’s head, Pegasus bursts out of the car as a potent, irresistible force – perhaps the artistic muse escaping. In contrast, with its garish red "flames" licking over the bright blue hood, the Chevy is simply a gaudy status symbol. Its interior manifests the worst excesses of conspicuous consumption – leopard-skin trim, chrome-chain steering wheel, fur-lined floor and white pom-poms dangling from the roof. The car represents man’s hubris, his decadence in manic pursuit of the pleasure principle, his materialist fetishism. Objects have been raised to the status of icons and myths, above and beyond their practical value. Here, the consumer trappings are manacles to be shaken off, and Pegasus becomes a heroic, immortal manifestation of free spirit.
The artist as mythic icon is explicit in the remarkable Truth, Justice, Mercy, in which Croak represents himself as the human half of a centaur, clutching a snake in one hand and a pennant proclaiming the work’s title in the other. The centaur in Greek myth epitomized wild life, animal desires, barbarism and lust, with implications of Dionysian revelry – attributes often associated with the animating spirit of the artist. But here, Croak is a benevolent being, restraining the animal instincts to advance the higher virtues of mankind – justice and mercy. Underlining this is an adjacent assemblage depicting the chain of being as a brutal survival of the fittest: a coyote eating a bobcat eating a snake eating a lizard eating a grasshopper eating a fly. The "artist" is not only a being superior to the crass materialist; he is also a finely tuned mixture of instinctual drive and innate morality.
Sphinx appears to be an amalgam of all these elements and something more sinister. With her scaly white tail, wings, feathered hair, boa-skin legs and webbed feet, she incorporates several elements of animal life; yet her face is unmistakably that of a woman. It also is white, but of such translucence as to be almost mystical. For Croak, this mixture of the ethereal, the animal and the anima, the complex muse that is at once esthetic and also strangely menacing; it’s as if the balance could tilt either way, between positive creation or negative destruction.
That all of the works on display are open to such multiple interpretations elevates Croak’s use of myth and allegory beyond the obviously didactic. If you can imagine crossing Robert Rauschenberg with Robert Graves, you’d probably discover postmodernist Croak. This is no lesson in mythology or contemporary social critique, or even a fusion of the two. It is, rather, a hybrid – an examination of symbol, archetype and the artist-as-hero, in a surreal and provocative setting.