by Alex Wells
A surprisingly large number of people in the art world don’t know that Shepard Fairey—likely most famous for probably helping to get Barack Obama elected with his Hope poster—founded a gallery.
Just across from Dodger Stadium, Subliminal Projects’ self-described mission is to champion “…emerging and marginalized artists, built out of cultural importance to serve as a center for the community to openly express and spark dialogue about art, music and activism.” I don’t know what “built out of cultural importance” means but if its current Punk Lives exhibit is anything to go by, it doesn’t mean much.
Many of the works on display are Fairey’s own black-and-white mixed-media works—while the prices are democratically low, at the same time they show off the fact that drawing was never his strong suit. While his pieces clearly reference the high-contrast Xeroxed aesthetic that Fairey eventually involved into his influential Andre the Giant and Obama images, stripped of his graphic design genius and street-art context the only thing left is one more kid who, given a few hours, can kind of copy a photograph.
Other artist-punks contributing—including Jello Biafra of The Dead Kennedys and Operation Ivy’s Jesse Michaels both here prove unable to create images that match the intensity of their vocal delivery—one could fairly ask Who could? But their bands’ own album covers and flyers managed to feel far more original and striking than the paint-by-numbers sketchbook-kid techniques (collage of weird images, scratchy Picasso rip-off) on display here.
Indeed, Ric Clayton—the man behind Suicidal Tendencies’ graphics since day one—serves up the only true classic of the show with a painted skateboard featuring a stack of his signature blocky robotic skulls. The glory of punk was always something very simply done with a totalizing fury, and nothing here pierces the eye with the immediacy these manic grinning heads possess.
Subliminal’s mission may be its own worst enemy here—punk’s heyday happened so long ago that most artists who lived through it have been working long and hard enough to land, as Fairey did, smack in the middle of the creative mainstream that Subliminal claims to eschew. Those who haven’t gone on to bigger and better things—and the younger artists on display who fit the unreconstructed early-‘80s aesthetic—just seem to be going through the motions.