According to James Walton, who curates SLCC’s exhibit and gallery spaces, the only unifying characteristic of low brow art is that it privileges personal perception over the tenets of traditional taste.
Low brow art, he explains in the punchy, comixstyle flyer posted at the entrance to a new exhibit at South City Campus, is “an umbrella term that describes several styles and practices that have been historically rejected by formal art academia. At least, that’s the only signpost that one of the movement’s earliest champions, Robert Williams, planted to help artists and viewers alike make sense of the surrealist, Dada-esque movement.
The exhibit (officially titled “The Weird Cartoons, Kitsch & Culture of Low Brow Art”) presents a mashup of sardonic cultural references, exaggerated line work, and stylized grotesqueries in various media including paintings, drawings, comics, stickers, and sculptures. The only consistency is inconsistency; the only convention is lack of convention.
The exhibit confirms that, though low brow art may or may not be a definite genre, it does definitely exist. The eclectic array of work also suggests that low brow art may be difficult to define because it’s less a set of prescribed conventions than a moment of personal experience, something that exists as art only in the act of the viewer connecting with it.
Contributing artist Jann Haworth reinforced the exhibit’s thesis by framing the work on display as a type of artistic expression that is neither high art nor low art. It just is.
“I think it’s not, kind of, posing to be something that is either intellectual or otherwise,” Haworth elaborated, noting that instead of an experience mediated by formal artistic conceits, work like her mixed-media composition, “Mannequin Defector,” can create a more direct, more accessible connection with the viewer.
If artistic tradition defines the significance of art through exclusion of what doesn’t belong, then low brow art represents a leveling of the spaces inside and outside of those boundaries. For artist Shu Yamamoto, transgressing those boundaries while also preserving the definitions they create is central to his work – simultaneously accepting and rejecting low brow art’s outsider status. A contradiction of artistic proportions.
Yamamoto contributed two pieces to the exhibit, re-imagining a pair of well-known Renaissance paintings in the style of Basil Wolverton, whose cartoon drawings are defined by unsettling exaggerations; iconoclastic themes; and precise, uniform line work.
Yamamoto applied those techniques to his own bit of iconoclasm, recreating Sandro Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” and Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” in Wolverton’s low brow aesthetic. According to Yamamoto, his work preserves and celebrates the originals’ cultural significance while adding a note of personal playfulness. “I admire Wolverton’s work. I admire Da Vinci’s classical work, and Botticelli in this case,” he explained, indicating the two ink-on-paper drawings. “So I combined those two.”
Yamamoto’s approach seems to confirm the idea of low brow art as an expression of personal taste, eschewing convention and decorum. That idea was further reinforced by Autumn Mabey, a high school student and aspiring artist with an affinity for low brow’s neon kitsch, and Beto Conejo, a street artist who also contributed to the exhibit.
“I think there’s a lot of subconscious in it,” mused Mabey. “It’s very raw. Everything in your art has its own story behind it. I think that’s my favorite thing about art; it’s a piece of the person that’s, you know, being shared.”
When asked about his own piece – a pair of empty spray-paint cans with their nozzles removed and painted with stylized figures – Conejo confirmed the significance of the personal in low brow art.
“This speaks to where I’m from, you know?” he said while considering the cans. “It's kind of a map or a history of your development. This is like an imprint of you personally.”
Conejo also pushed back against the idea of his work being something that can be removed from context and taxidermized in the well-lit, glass-walled sterility of an exhibit space.
“I think the way I want people to perceive this is almost like having someone’s paint brush behind a glass case,” he insisted. “‘Cause those are my paintbrushes. The actual art that I make that is, like, for the world – it can’t be contained behind glass. You can’t even put it in a gallery. It’s in the street. It’s murals, you know? Street art.
“I think that in itself speaks a message,” Conejo concluded, implying that maybe low brow art is what it is precisely because it doesn’t require any additional explanation – not from him, not from Walton, and not even from foundational artists like Robert Williams.
Yamamoto might agree. When asked if his own work speaks for itself without any need for explanation, he replied, simply, “I hope so. I hope so.”
The Weird Cartoons, Kitsch & Culture of Low Brow Art opened on January 22 and runs through February 21 at The George S. & Dolores Doré Eccles Gallery, part of the Center for Arts & Media at SLCC’s South City Campus.
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