Jason Kroenenwald
Gum Blondes
le gallery

Jason Kronenwald’s portraits of blondes made from chewing gum on plywood are gimmicky, novelty obsessed, cheap, and disposable. He has appeared in soft cord lad rags, and fashion magazines, Ripley’s Believe it or Not, and fashion television. They are in an art gallery, but does that mean that we should use art-talk to talk about them, or are they just another backyard project, like ships in bottles or world monuments made from Popsicle sticks.

I would argue that his use of materials, his art historicism, his formal skills, and the sheer material, fetish pleasure of these panels make them so exciting, wonderfully, conceptually strong. They are not only art, but some of the best art I have seen this year. The panels are plywood, and he makes detailed, loving portraits of blondes current and historical on them, he then varnishes them, for reasons of capital mostly.

Look at that list of material. Varnish, the most practical, it prevents the gum from drying and curdling. Its presence means the things are no longer ephemeral. He can’t sell anything that isn’t shellacked. But, there is metaphorical power in the varnish. We see these blondes through a glass lightly. They are mythic responders to the gaze, of men, women, children, cyborgs, and other living things. Every time we see them though, it is through televisions, or photographs, or advertisements, or magazine covers. Even in real life, they are varnished. As a culture, we are desperately preventing the brittleness that makes these women shatter.

The plywood backing is equally challenging, in formal and conceptual terms. The light wood, almost blonde itself, makes a perfect counterpoint, to the almost lurid colours of bubblegum. The material is also the colour of tanned caucasian skin, and in one lurid, suprising and deeply erotic example, the colour of Lil’ Kim, an African American as well. Conceptually, plywood is cheap and easy, it is the one that is used mostly by hobbyists, and it is the wood that good carpenters avoid using to finish projects. Aside from providing that delightful sheen, there is a conceptually oppositional working out of trashy vs. beautiful, fully formed vs. waiting to be molded, slick vs. raw, that denies clichés and processes our cultures omnipresent misogynist binaries.

This working out, comes fully formed, in his use of bubble gum. It doesn’t matter if this is a gimmick, all new art in one way or another is about whether the gimmick chosen works. Kroenenwald’s use of bubble gum works, so deeply, in its casualness, that the media talking about it has refused to treat it as art. Will Kucey, the director of the gallery, appear boggled by the amount of press he is receiving, and disappointed that the art journals aren’t picking up on it.

The bubblegum works perfectly while discussing these icons. Just the material asks questions of ubiquity, the nature of fame, and how things change so rapidly. Even a material so tied into ephermability, the cult of youth, novelty, commercially manufactured artificial sweetness, and other things that aren’t very good for you. Maybe because the process is so labourous, and maybe because the culture changes so rapidly, he has a stable of icons that are on the bleeding edge of being dated. For example: his Britney is still nubile and not trashed down; his Avril has yet to be glammed out and vogued up (he uses a licorice german gum for her, which turns almost black); his Jessica Simpson is still the boring church singer, and not the present day black widow/victim/slut/tabloid harridan. Having them work slightly backwards, when they were the most likeable, makes iconic women who never were.

The one icon he does show, is the best work, and transcends fame. It is such a deep, lovely, and complicated work, that any museum should be proud to collect it. The word masterpiece is over-used, and indelicate. It is clumsy to describe this kind of work. But his large canvas of Jane Mansfield, resting on a split field of red and white, is revelatory. The red has pulp in mind, the flesh of fruit, beef, humans, and the ink on those nasty magazines. The white has a purity of intention which Mansfield never touched. She was a blonde, who’s back story included Satanism, stag films, decapitation, and crossing racial lines. Her pneumatic tits were less motherly then Marylin’s, she lacked the crypticism of Hitchcok’s icebergs, and the amusing edge of Mamie Van Doren. She is the lesser Monroe, that has never been assimilated.

Kronenwald almost does it, and does it in ways that are more interesting then his predecessors. I kept thinking of Barnett Newmann when looking at the field, behind Jane—and it looks amazingly like one of his Zim Zums, Zips or Stations, with out all of that logophillic, obsessive search for the mystic non verbal center of something or other.Newman is still the philosopher king of too much information and not enough visual clues. Mansfield destabilizes this obsession, and recenters the mid-century fights as now completely irrealvent. Few critics have noticed that De Kooning and Warhol painted the same women, for similar means, in the same time period. Their work grinds with sibling rivalry. The watermelon and mint here shrugs, says isn’t this neat, and moves onto other referents. It’s jaw dropping, because he upends art historical precedents, with a studied non chalnce.

There are other things in that Jane Mansfield painting: it looks like Serrano’s milk and blood series, though Serrano connects Levitcal laws about food and language, in one place, while still engaging deeply in taboo. Kronenwald refuses taboo. There is a seductive corperality, a pagan pleasure center, and a fleshy perfection, that slides away from metaphorical readings.

Jane Mansfield posed for life magazine, in a swimming pool, with dozens of piggy banks, in her shape, floating like a halo, surrounding her. It was a pink to her commercial success, and to the artist in the age of mechincla reproduction, and a belief in her own pleasure, and a hope towards omnipresence. Hiding in the shadows like someone from Chandler’s Los Angeles, she never got it. Even Lana Turner, who had similar choices, and similar scandals, was given the gift of a poem by an American master (ironically, an expert in Pollock, connecting the Ab-Ex and Pop again and again). It seems like the rest of these portraits are fantastic, and grandly clever—but because of its clusterfuck of sexual, social, (art)historical, and tabloid signs, this is the only painting in the show that is important, vital even.

That said, there are other ideas here that are important. Our culture has become more and more obsessed with its own orality. From obsessions with obesity, to President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, to Liz Phair singing about wanting “to be your blow job queen” and penning odes to “hot white cum”, continuing on to rumours of Rainbow Parties, and an oral sex panic in Canadian/American middle schools, we are now in the age of the oral fixiation. This show ties our celebrity culture, our general neuratice seeking of patterns, and an obsessive compulsive eroticism, and then gives it to other people—the viewer, of course, but other participants. There were packs of grape hubba-bubba at the gallery, and he is quoted as saying “the mixing of the colour takes place inside the mouth during chewing using an endless variety of companies” and that he has “a dedicated team of chewers” He has become an evangelical for oral obsessions, too tired to do it himself, involving polite removal, not consuming any calories, and being almost bulimic about it, there is a distinct criticism of the celebrity culture.
The show is never really deep, but depth is over rated. Think of it like laquer, an endless number of endlessly thin layers eventually making something solid and ever-lasting. It doesn’t hate culture, it doesn’t love culture, but it is the first show that I have seen in years that has understood culture straight from the id.