Friese Undine: Perdition in Chickentown
Though neither Friese Undine nor Bradford Johnson claims Gerhard Richter as an influence, both make paintings based on photo-graphs and both step back from the role of artist as icon maker, as author of a compelling and complete universe. Indeed, questioning artistic and political authority, denying grand meanings, is part of their theme, as it is for the seminal artist whose work is now on view in a retrospective at the Art Institute.
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Undine writes in his statement that his work is “based on the power structures in various human relationships,” some of them “between the government and the governed.” And many of his 65 paintings at Aron Packer undercut the usual power dynamic, some quite explicitly. A woman seated at a table in An Authority Crisis looks ready to devour the chicken on a plate before her–except that the chicken’s head is upright and facing her. Has it come back to life? Though the pose is copied from a serving suggestion in an Asian cookbook, Undine told me, the consumer is still being confronted by the consumed. The title of Nestled in the Warm Bosom of Fellow Elites is similarly ironic: the lumpy-faced couple standing in front of an old shack cradling chickens in their arms don’t reveal much more intelligence than their charges. And something about the orderly lines of bottles behind a man at a bar in All the Dire Overemphasis Casts Doubt on the Text suggests that they are the scene’s real “text,” which may be “doubtful” because the man seems to be in a drunken stupor.
Undine’s cleverest title, Chronic Euphemisma, is painted over a man standing in front of an aerial view of Chicago. Though he looks like a bored laborer, it seems he’s about to applaud something. Wisps of smoke around his head suggest a pun on emphysema, but it’s the combination of clapping, “euphemism,” and his blunt, almost blank face that makes the work’s point: that many of us go through life like automatons, thoughtlessly praising things we don’t care about.
A. Lincoln, one of Johnson’s nine paintings at Gwenda Jay/Addington (six more can be seen on request), addresses the anti-iconic theme. A very wide but short canvas, it shows only Lincoln’s nose and eyes, which are partly closed. His relatively blank expression undercuts the piercing effect one might expect from the composition. And of course Johnson’s multilevel brush strokes call attention to the surface, which subverts the picture’s illusion: from up close the viewer sees the image breaking down into strokes that go every which way, verging on abstraction.
