by Anne Gabriel
I strongly considered not writing this review because this person needs no extra press for such a terrible show. I feel that I am in the minority with this opinion as many of LA’s intellectuals—or at least the ones who I know write about art for a living—cannot get enough of the imbecilic Jason Fox paintings at David Kordansky.
His show Why Are You Sitting In The Dark is a collection of drawn and painted faces combined into one–on canvas. A person’s face combined with a cow face…or a skull…or a cartoon monster…or another different cartoon monster. They are painted in what one might charitably call a style, but which really just looks like what you get when someone with no talent paints one picture atop another however they can while feeling no particular urgency about the situation. It keeps going and going—making me literally wish I was sitting in the dark—but alas I’m not—instead I’m at this exhibition wondering what my fellow critics see in this work.
The press release for the show says that Fox’s paintings “are first and foremost, about painting but inevitably end up being about everything else.” In his biography on the Kordansky site it mentions that Fox’s paintings are “suffused with Dadaist humor.”
Are Fox’s works really about painting? No. There is no technical mastery here or surprising painting techniques. In fact, the painting is flat with images created out of semi-abstract shapes without depth or any indication of drawing acumen. I literally remember paintings like this from my freshman year of high school art.
Are the paintings about everything else? No. They read as canvas after canvas after canvas of self-portraits. So Fox feels like he has a skull or has a spirit animal that is a cow or dog or monster? How moody and brooding of him in technicolor. IF only we all could have such rich inner lives.
Are his works full of Dadaist humor? Nobody in the show is laughing. Nobody even chuckling to themselves. No-one is racing to share them on Instagram stories with “I lold.” Only canvas upon canvas of a certain kind of plea to have his emotional experiences of being kind of a green guy being taken seriously.
Does Fox really contain so much emotional complexity and depth and interest that an entire two large rooms of a gallery should be devoted to it? Kordansky seems to think so—but all I see are technical processes repeated like mantras, like two mantras, tops.
The theme(s) (I’m challenged to say there is more than one) are cliché. “Your emotions make you a monster” was a Dead Kennedys lyric in 1980. Is there such an absence of good art that this show rises to the top?
I am going home now to slit my wrists.
Image: Staff