Crazy Summer

Back at the Hammer, guest curator Terry R. Myers has assembled a show that is a culmination of the growing interest, over the last decade, in the fine-art output of the late graphic designer Robert Overby (inventor of the frequently altered Toyota logo). In light of more recent architectural castings by British sculptor Rachel Whiteread and Angeleno jack-of-all-trades Tim Hawkinson, various gallerists began revisiting the rarely exhibited latex surface-peels made by Overby in the early 1970s. Owing much to the work of Bruce Nauman, Overby took his casting work in an unfashionably impure direction, adding pigments to the medium, and sometimes painting on the surface, in order to reinforce the resemblance of, for example, the sagging rubber curtains to the flaking, decrepit, occasionally scorched surfaces from which they were cloned. The work recalls not Carl Andre or Robert Smithson but that of English contemporary Mark Boyle, who continues to make actual-size rectangular painted fiberglass casts of the surface of the Earth, the locations determined 30 years ago at a party where guests threw darts at a map of the world. Such theatrical aberration, harmless enough in these hybridized times, was nevertheless heretical enough in 1971 to get Overby blackballed by the other artists at John Weber’s gallery in New York.

Rather than presenting his work as literalist documentation of the physical encounter between materials, Overby fell into the cardinal quagmire of illusionistic representation. As such, the work is tremendously sensual, curiously retaining the conceptual content of his protectionist brethren while steering clear of their preachiness -- although he does, at times, seem to be wallowing in his own brand of preachiness. Overby‘s ostracism by the art world, and the financial independence afforded by his design work, allowed him the freedom to pursue his own idiosyncratic version of art history. In addition to the architectural castings in latex (and concrete and resin), Parallel 1978--1969 contains a wide variety of explorations ranging from content-driven paintings of pornographic imagery to exquisite formal exercises in dry pigments and stretched polyurethane. There’s a refreshing crankiness to this analogue viewpoint that raises important questions about the canonization of artists and art movements during this supposedly anti-hierarchical art-historical moment.

From early-20th-century Outsiders telegraphing alien world-views from inside the bughouse, through a late-20th-century artist straddling categories of inside and outside in both the content and the reception of his work, we come to James Gobel, a young artist who has emerged by the accepted channels into sudden attention for a body of work depicting big fat gay men. The ”bear“ subculture of generously apportioned men sporting beards and work clothes exists in pointed contrast to the mainstream bulimic androgyny of the fashion world, and as such has been rendered relatively invisible. Constructing his spatially complex images from yarn, felt and fun-fur with airbrushed highlights and other subtle traces of traditional painting, Gobel has brought his considerable formal talents to bear on this exclusion. The resulting works are some of the most interesting figurative paintings to appear in Los Angeles in a while, and, as such, manage to sneak these bulky personas non gratas into the mainstream cultural dialogue through the back door of fine art. Welcome in.