Glenn Barr’s new collection Haunted Paradise is a look into his most recent artwork and casts a sharpened gaze on the landscape and atmosphere of his hometown Detroit. His palate is the rusted earthy patina of the city itself. A selection of Detroit area photographs enhances the book. Building facades and googie-style abandoned business signage of the 50s and 60s stretch across the page and into Barr’s artwork. Photographs of the urban landscape add a wonderful segway into the paintings.
This is one of the first of the neo-Pop artbooks that puts meaning and context beside the artwork on display. Barr is an artist working deep into subterranean pop culture territory. There is evidence of car culture, bar culture, afro-chic, heroin-chic, sexual terminus, lounge aesthetics, drug abuse, and television kitsch. Hanna-Barbara cartoons and Jackson Pollock collide head-on in neon-colored bliss. Barr’s boomer memories and ghost images are mined to perfection. Between the large sea of popular detritus, Detroit is the main subject here, a lost paradisical wasteland, praised and sacrificed in painted hymns and rhythms. Barr has simply uncovered the treasures, desires and experiences of his youth and laid them out on canvas stained with the dim glow and pulse of rust-belt post-industrialism.
The paintings shine with a futuristic retro sheen similar to Syd Mead and show homage to other major modernist graphic designers such as Saul Bass (The Man With the Golden Arm) . His work is commonly placed in the lowbrow, “Juxtapose” artbin, an association he is at ease with and promotes. Tim Biskup, Gary Baseman, Shag, Coop, and Liz McGrath are some of his contemporaries and artists he has shown with. Like them, he has also designed comics, cartoons, plastic toys, ipod cases, liquor bottles, postcards and other commercial items fior teh mass marketplace. This is nothing to be in conflict with. The first generation pop artists grew to love the martketplace as resource and income source. Even anti-art has pushed capitalist goods to amusing effect.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Barr’s work deal’s with meaning on many levels; it pits commercialism against fine art, uncovering psychological and sexual symbolism, lifting veils beneath the flat screen veneer of TV cartoons, and cultural icons. The work plays off the meaning of colors and visual puns. It appears to be commercial art attacking commercialism. It parodies ET celebrity culture yet celebrates pin-ups, hotrods, and street cred. A subversion of standard pop tropes that’s not uncommon today, but unique in its understated ideas and humorous hipster attitude that helps gather in a dark gothic cohesion. It is a blissful attitude evident in 60s French pop and the darker corners of psychedelia.
Visual harmony is an overriding concern in Barr’s work. His finely tuned brushwork has the precisionism of automotive designers or Walt Disney animators off the wagon, subverting their assembly-line production to an underground oasis of loose sex, alcoholic delusions and bachelor pad ethos. There is also much in common with regional masters such as George Bellows, Charles Burchfield, Charles Sheeler and Ralston Crawford, a few of Barr’s modernist forefathers. Barr’s work echoes his love of place and time. His regional countryside is the deserted urban forest and exotic suburbia where thriftshops, flea markets and bowling lanes superimpose their lost treasures in a ghost town habitat.
Barr attended CCS in the 1980s and has since established himself as an emerging artist of first rank. The many divisions of style between the large number of artists in the neo-Pop camp have never been exploited to their benefit. This avoidance of definition has been a disservice to the group, helping to make them seem homogenous and a blander hip alternative to the “straight†art world. There is an overall magnetic push and pull between the beautiful and grotesque that’s present throughout the lowbrow movement. Juxtapose magazine and most group shows have done little to help stop the confusion. The rise of garage rock, graffiti, manga, hot-rod & body modification, Japan’s flat art, growing retroism, and a nostalgia for high modernism has much to do with this style’s popularity. A resurgence in small collectable plastic toys (unseen since the early 60s) , lunchboxes and tintoys has also helped to sell neo-Pop as a millenial movement.
There is a multitude of meaning and approach to many of these artists. Knowing and defining these differences has never been a top priority. It has always been a volatile in-your-face, eye-candy movement, more interested in shock value and visual stimulation then underlying ideas. Rarely is there any analysis of this imagery. Haunted Paradise is part of the first evidence of this separation, a defining moment in the short history of a movement rooted in the 60s, that came alive in the 90s, (boosted mainly by Japanese currents) and is now close to redefining its original nature.
Artists in the lowbrow movement need to assess their capacity for understanding context and coalescence within a global artworld. Without moving forward, artist and viewer will be victims of the same old cartoon gags and redundant soundtracks spinning in endless loops. Visionary and forward thinking is often not encouraged when degenerate fashion modes and taboo-breaking sex and violence are still at the frontend of the lowbrow cosmos.
Lowbrow is inching closer to highbrow, embraced now by galleries once reserved for MFA pikers armed with a hot scam and glossy adverts in Artforum. Illustration art has now found acceptance in the marketplace. The mass assent of lowbrow art has affirmed commercial success on many of its more talented illustrators. Nowhere is this more noticable than in Los Angeles where the merger of high and low is on a dead heat collision course. As Juxtapose publisher and godfather of lowbrow Robert Williams noted in LA Weekly, “There isn’t anymore outlaw art. All this tiki and big-eye crap is just a bunch of illustrators looking for a new place for their stuff because they lost their jobs to computers.”* Convergence seems likely as the artmarket lurches forward and wagers its pocketbook on Generation Ebay and the hungry eye.
Signed copies of Glenn Barr’s Haunted Paradise can be found at: Haunted Paradise
Visit Barr’s website and online studio at: Glenn Barr.com
*Read more on the lowbrow movement and its ascendancy in the LA Weekly report: Pictures From the Unibrow Revolution