New show not like anything seen before
By Christopher Knight - Herald art critic
There’s a bizarre, schizophrenic quality to James Croak’s recent sculpture. The work is wholly enamored of the romantic persona of the dangerously heroic outsider while disporting itself with all the poise and refinement of a well-bred gentleman of impeccable ancestry. It’s like Cary Grant in his debonair, international jewel-thief mode perversely trying to convince us that he’s really Emiliano Zapata.
"James Croak: New Myths and Heroic Allegories." on view at the exhibition center of the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design. 2401 Wilshire Blvd., through Dec. 3, is the first exhibition to have been organized by the gallery’s new director, Al Nodal. You are not likely to have seen anything quite like it before. Certainly the formal methodology of this work – assemblages and tableaux with a Surrealist inflection – is firmly imbedded in a long and well-known tradition. But its attempts to embody a primordial, almost pre-literate sense of the mythic structure underlying society gets hamstrung by its own self-conscious intelligence. Like the taxidermic animals that are a recurrent feature of all five works, the "new myths" are oddly embalmed, the "heroic allegories" strangely earthbound.
For anyone who has followed Croak’s work for the past several years, his excursion into the realm of assemblage and tableau might come as something of a shock. In most of the half-dozen group and solo shows in which his work has been seen since 1978, Croak has been involved with abstract, welded- and painted-aluminum forms that were occasionally embellished with quirky decals.
Most critical assessments of this abstract sculpture suffered from the misconception that it was vainly trying to invade the celebrated territory already firmly staked out by Frank Stella. Any resemblance between the two was, in fact, purely superficial. But it was Croak’s misfortune that his chosen medium (a natural outgrowth of the tradition of welded-metal sculpture so much in evidence in Chicago, where Croak had studied) was also being used by one of the most important and influential artists of the last generation. He was immediately cast as a derivative follower. Furthermore, if I have a firm grip on my chronology, insult was no doubt added to injury by the fact that he was actually involved with painted- and welded-aluminum sculpture even before Stella began his own wall-bound explorations into those materials.
Croak’s new work could hardly be misidentified as owing allegiance to any other brand-name artist I can think of. The centerpiece of the exhibition is "Pegasus: Some Loves Hurt More Than Others," and it consists of a customized, "63 Chevy low-rider whose roof has been exploded by an escaping winged-horse. (Come to think of it, someone is bound to claim erroneously that this work is a punk or Neo-Expressionist update of Ed Kienholz’s notorious assemblage from the 1960’s, "Back Seat Dodge"; like the invocation of Stella, however, any resemblance to that earlier work – in which a plaster and chicken-wire couple fornicate in the back seat of a collapsed automobile – is utterly superficial.) Indeed, it seems as if the artist has gone to great lengths to find a way of working that is as far away as possible from the long shadow cast by Stella.
In this respect he has certainly succeeded. The formal interest in monumental and heroically scaled sculpture that informed his abstract work has been retained, but it now takes the figurative guise of ancient, mythological gods, and heroes. In "Sphinx," the winged monster has the head of a woman, the tall of a lizard and the legs of a goose, In "Truth, Justice, Mercy," a tattooed centaur (his head is a self-portrait of the artist while his body is a stuffed appaloosa) grapples with a snake in a manner reminiscent of the famed Hellenistic sculpture. "Laocoon"; at the centaur/ artist’s feet, a coyote eats a bobcat who eats a snake who eats a lizard who eats a praying mantis, in a natural chain of survival. And in "Pegasus," the winged steed, of the gods is made the ancestral spirit of the automotive-chariot of a contemporary "outlaw."
Although the centaur is the only declarative and straightforward example, collectively these sculptures seem to articulate a very specific mythology: They are self-portraits of the artist and his place in our culture. According to this mythology, the artist is something of a monster, an abnormal beast that can be described as neither fish nor fowl. Like the sphinx, he is the silent and inscrutable possessor of the answers to divine riddles and thus the ultimate test of knowledge. Like Pegasus – who carried Bellerophon to a victory that ultimately resulted in the hero’s punishment for excessive pride and arrogance – the artist’s work is the vehicle for both his glory and his unavoidable ruin. Like Laocoon – the Trojan priest of Apollo who was killed for having warned his people against the falseness and deception of the Trojan horse (they didn’t listen) – he is flayed for daring to speak the truth with moral conviction: His life becomes the epitome of sublime tragedy.
What undermines Croak’s work is not whether one believes or disbelieves the mythology (although I don’t happen to); it’s that the mythology is already a permanent fixture of our culture. The artist as heroic outlaw doomed to misunderstanding and abuse _ regardless of worldly success – has become an outright folk-figure in our post-industrial society, as much as Paul Bunyan or Johnny Appleseed were in an agriculturally oriented world. Like many objects of folk art, Croak’s sculptures are meticulous tributes paid to the fundamental experience of the artist’s disaffection. However, unlike a folk artist, who unselfconsciously fabricates that tribute as the embodiment of a deeply felt belief, Croak knows too much. The self-conscious erudition of his work casts the aura of an artist playing "bad-boy" in the utterly tame and tasteful realm which art now occupies. As a result, his sculpture empties out into a grand rhetorical flourish.
It is this which fosters the sense of schizophrenia in his work. On the one hand, he seems intent on upholding the romantic tradition of artist as outsider; on the other, he wants that tradition to be embraced by the homogenizing nexus of the contemporary art world. What makes Croak’s work worth considering is that, unwittingly or not, it articulates a fundamental dilemma which artists currently face (indeed, it’s an enigma worthy of the sphinx). At the moment, however, his art reflects an attitude toward the dilemma that is wholly at cross-purposes with itself.