Social Networking

Julie Mehretu and Elliott Hundley

For someone who works on such an ambitious scale, Julie Mehretu is charmingly self-effacing. But then any number of people could hide behind work like this. She merges abstraction and representation into a dense weave. One could call it painting as social networking, and she is hardly alone.

Elliott Hundley, for one, throws in Greek myths and personal hubris. Mehretu suggests that history can get along pretty well after all without mythmaking.

Note: A review here of her most recent paintings at the Guggenheim and Goldman Sachs is embargoed for now, pending appearance in Artillery magazine.

What's Hecuba to him?

If Euripides were alive today, he could have written the screenplay for Animal House. He already imagined the ultimate toga party, in The Bacchae, with a rather different set of Greeks. This time Dionysius, the god of wine, would bring beer—and a mass-market brand at that. Instead of women tearing a boy-king to pieces, guys would be in pursuit of a good lay. Instead of a horrifying madness, they could have a little rest and relaxation, at the cost of maybe puking on the dean.

Chelsea already looks like one long frat party, between its weekend crowds, bad girls on display, and way too many male artists with trashy installations. True, cheap white wine still pours at openings, but one can snag a PBR most Thursdays with a little patience. Heck, Jasper Johns himself has sculpted beer cans, and just this year El Anatsui has used caps from liquor bottles for his ritual curtain. Elliott Hundley plays to exactly that action. Ambitious in scale, his work combines paint, photography, ragged sculpture, and some serious myth-making—with the artist at its center. Come to think of it, the paint even looks a little like puke.

Oh, but c'mon and have another. Hundley has drawn before on Euripides, for the theme of a sacrifice in Hecuba—or make that Hekube. (Collectors in LA are serious about their Greeks.) With Agave of the Bacchae, he again takes mania in stride. If he presents a coherent narrative, I sure could not find one. Still, he manages a greater modesty, a greater exuberance, and a greater unity.

From his past work I like to remember not the shredded overkill, like a messy dorm room, but a face much like his own, behind a hazy curtain of off-white paint. He again starts with a portrait, but with the clumsy features of Socrates, a satyr, or an older and more experienced version of the artist. He bears flowers as a greeting, to defer at last to women, or to appease an angry god. It almost works at that. If you want a serious exploration of all-encompassing madness in an age of global banking, there is always Mehretu. Hundley is at his most frenzied in meditation and his most idyllic when he parties.

The meditation comes in one of two harsh yellow-red canvases, one a desolate plain (the tragedy's setting) and one with tortured images of Euripides himself, looking oddly like the Dalai Lama. It shows Hundley's interest in paint, but also the strains of narrative. This work tries really, really hard. I imagine his wondering at the limits of holiness and harmony, but the expressionism would mean little without the facing works. Neither, for that matter, would the spare but decrepit sculptures of metal and drinking straws, like a token gesture toward the artist's reputation. They need the other murals, in true mixed media, with crisper outlines and the coolness of a forest scene.

Photographs give them their painterly precision, dozens of them, each affixed to canvas by a long pin. I mistook them for appropriation, like the ads pasted here and there, but Hundley has photographed friends, men and women, and cropped them to their bodies. Wildly active paintings are all over the place these days, with the showy networks of video games and computer models. Besides Mehretu, Ackermann, or Winters on a grander scale, the style has recently extended to Sarah Sze, Lisa Corinne Davis, Sean Hope, Dawn Clements, and plenty more. All, though, embrace pleasure more than madness. This is not Agave in The Bacchae, killing her son with her bare hands, mistaking him in her madness for a lion. At heart, Hundley prefers a summer weekend and a gentle dance, and so, for better or worse, does contemporary art.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Julie Mehretu's "Grey Area" ran at the Guggenheim through October 6, 2010, Elliott Hundley at Andrea Rosen through May 1. The Goldman Sachs headquarters opened in January. Portions of this review first appeared in Artillery magazine.