{"id":7915,"date":"2010-11-18T17:21:23","date_gmt":"2010-11-18T22:21:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=7915"},"modified":"2011-01-11T15:01:48","modified_gmt":"2011-01-11T20:01:48","slug":"pills-and-thrills-fred-tomasellis-transports","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2010\/11\/18\/pills-and-thrills-fred-tomasellis-transports\/","title":{"rendered":"Pills and Thrills: Fred Tomaselli\u2019s Transports"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Car Bomb, 2008. Photocollage, acrylic, resin on wood panel. 60″ x 60″. \u00a9 Fred Tomaselli. Image courtesy of the James Cohan Gallery, New York. <\/em><\/p>\n

When Motherless Brooklyn<\/em> author Jonathan Lethem announced in April that he would be relocating from Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, to the white-collar, academic enclave of Claremont, California (where he\u2019d take over David Foster-Wallace\u2019s teaching slot at Pomona College), the borough felt a twinge of old-time, Brooklyn Dodgers\u2013style rejection. Fortunately for dwellers of Kings County\u2014and others who hold resident New York bards dear\u2014Fred Tomaselli was simultaneously putting the finishing touches on the installation of his latest crackerjack show: his unabashedly gorgeous, conceptually expansive midcareer retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum.<\/p>\n

Tomaselli is a Brooklynite in the same way most New Yorkers come by their adoptive heritage\u2014as immigrants from ambition. Born in Santa Monica and raised in Orange County, within spitting distance of Disneyland\u2019s Matterhorn, he moved to Los Angeles in 1981, only to leave for New York, and rusty, desperate Brooklyn, in 1985\u2014\u201cone last crazy stupid thing before I got old and lost my nerve,\u201d he later recalled.<\/p>\n

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Metal Destroyer, 2004. Mixed media, resin on wood. 72″ x 72″. \u00a9 Fred Tomaselli. Image courtesy of the James Cohan Gallery, New York. <\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A fledgling installation artist in California, Tomaselli schooled himself in late twentieth-century America\u2019s far-out utopian and dystopian fireworks, ingesting influences from surfboard and car culture, finish-fetish art, Chris Burden and his conceptual noodlings, the light and space trickery of Robert Irwin and James Turrell, the California punk scene, Alice Cooper, The Stooges\u2014as well as loads of mind-scrambling hallucinogens. The low-rise, irony-free industrial stretches of 1980s Williamsburg was the unlikely location where these and other fanciful ideas came together beneath gallons of poured resin.<\/p>\n

Like the Grateful Dead, Fred Tomaselli is in \u201cthe transport business.\u201d Long interested in what he called \u201cthe premodernist ideal of a picture becoming a vehicle of transportation,\u201d Tomaselli is part of an essential generation of American artists that rescued hand-wrought, two-dimensional pictures from neo-expressionist hype, the market vapidities of commodity critique, and the Carrie Nation\u2013style prohibitions of academic conceptualism. In the early nineties, this group of once-rogue, now well-established midcareer firebrands\u2014the diverse circle includes also wicked Lisa Yuskavage and zealous James Siena\u2014hotwired the tired clunker of contemporary American painting with craft, beauty, and real-world content that sported, among other pleasurable offenses, sex, politics (mostly the cultural kind), history (usually of the arty variety), and a racy antitheoretical bias. A connoisseur of psilocybin and Tuinals, Tomaselli was the gang\u2019s Samuel Taylor Coleridge.<\/p>\n

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Remedy, 1989 (left). Aspirin, cotton, picture frame. 100\u00be” x 1\u00bd” x 1\u00bd”. <\/em>Shack, Commune, Compound, 1998 (right). Crushed hemp leaves, acrylic and resin on wood. 72″ x 54″. \u00a9 Fred Tomaselli. Images courtesy of the James Cohan Gallery, New York. <\/em><\/p>\n

Starting with his breakthrough \u201cpainting\u201d Remedy<\/em> (1989)\u2014a skinny, vertical picture frame that lined up a year\u2019s worth of aspirin into a black-and-white Barnett Newman zip\u2014Tomaselli reimagined materials like pills, pot, datura leaves, and other psychoactives, so that they might be processed by the eyeballs rather than through the bloodstream. As his practice has grown to include more conventional collage elements like clipped reproductions and painted acrylic buried beneath layers of poured resin\u2014birds, flowers, hands and lips are favorite motifs\u2014Tomaselli\u2019s pictures have managed to fuse decorative, Op Art\u2013inspired eye-candy with Turneresque end-of-the-world fantasies. The paintings evoke genealogies of failed New Jerusalems (Escape Hatch<\/em>, 1998; Shack, Commune, Compound<\/em>, 1998), J. Robert Oppenheimer\u2013style Vedic meditations on death (Metal Destroyer<\/em>, 2004), and recent historical disasters such as Hurricane Katrina (September 15, 2001<\/em>, 2009) and Iraqi IEDs (Car Bomb<\/em>, 2008). The Brooklyn Museum survey has organized these and other works into a kaleidoscopic theme park. But scratch beneath the escapist fantasy advanced by his tripped-out visions and Tomaselli\u2019s weighty themes will seriously harsh your mellow. <\/p>\n

An exercise of conscience distinguishes Tomaselli\u2019s use of drugs as a metaphor from the usual Dazed and Confused boilerplate; see figures like Hunter S. Thompson and Damien Hirst for counterexamples. Where Hirst\u2019s and Thompson\u2019s lotus-eater satires peddle goggle-eyed illumination, adolescent transgression, and out-and-out nihilism, Tomaselli\u2019s best work strikes a longing note that channels equal parts Iggy Pop and Frederic Edwin Church. Located at the juxtaposition of I Wanna Be Your Dog and the romantic sublime\u2014itself a mirror for the artist\u2019s Internet-fed, hybrid process\u2014Tomaselli\u2019s hallucinatory collage-cum-paintings provide entry points for a dreamy, skeptical contemporary form of transcendence. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Dead Eyed Bird Blast, 1997. Hemp leaves, pills, photo collage, acrylic, and resin on wood panel. 60″ x 60″. \u00a9 Fred Tomaselli. Image courtesy of the James Cohan Gallery, New York. <\/em><\/p>\n

Take one all-time favorite Tomaselli picture, Dead Eyed Bird Blast<\/em> (1997). A swooning, radial vortex made from hemp leaves, pills, and hundreds of bird cutouts, the canvas resembles the \u201cstar gate\u201d sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/em>: It represents a window onto another world, here made from detritus very much cobbled together. If that\u2019s not transcendent\u2014and critical of our endlessly corporatized, zombie entertainments\u2014then, well, nothing is.<\/p>\n

Christian Viveros-Faun\u00e9 is a New York-based writer and curator. He writes regularly for the Village Voice and ArtReview magazine and is a visiting professor at Yale University. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Car Bomb, 2008. Photocollage, acrylic, resin on wood panel. 60″ x 60″. \u00a9 Fred Tomaselli. Image courtesy of the James Cohan Gallery, New York. When Motherless Brooklyn author Jonathan Lethem announced in April that he would be relocating from Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, to the white-collar, academic enclave of Claremont, California (where he\u2019d take over David […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[1354,1649,958,446,154,1350,1357,1353,1351,1356,1352,1355],"class_list":["post-7915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-alice-cooper","tag-art-photography-portfolio","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-museum","tag-david-foster-wallace","tag-fred-tomaselli","tag-james-siena","tag-james-turrell","tag-jonathan-lethem","tag-lisa-yuskavage","tag-robert-irwin","tag-the-stooges"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPills and Thrills: Fred Tomaselli\u2019s Transports by Christian Viveros-Faun\u00e9<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"November 18, 2010 \u2013 Car Bomb, 2008. 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