For all her intense focus on the ever-fluctuating topography of popular culture, Julia Wachtel’s practice has remained remarkably consistent for decades, juxtaposing various types of high- and low-brow found images and mixing the hand-painted with the silkscreened. A selection of Wachtel’s work from the ’90s on view at Bergen Kunsthall in Norway and a retrospective survey, at the Cleveland Museum of Art through January 15, 2015, makes that point concisely. The latter includes works like “Punched Up,” 1986, which mixes a serial image of Janis Joplin with three doofy cartoons of “hippie” stereotypes, and a series of “Landscape” works, which combine archival images —government meetings, protests in Tiananmen Square — with irreverent figures, often appropriated from greeting cards, many of whom are picking their noses, crying, or just staring cock-eyed into space. (It’s an aesthetic that has been borrowed, somewhat liberally, by Jordan Wolfson.) Recently, Wachtel has spliced more contemporary disposable-icons into the paintings, from Kim Kardashian and Kanye West to a barely dressed Miley Cyrus. A massive, multi-panel work-in-progress, destined for a May solo show at Elizabeth Dee in New York, has Wachtel “thinking a lot about memes,” pairing a political leader with a viral video sensation (Wachtel asked to keep the specific details veiled until the opening). Another, which will be shown at Miami Basel this December, mixes appropriated stills from the singing-contest reality show “The Voice” with classic Uncle Sam poster imagery. Wachtel definitely isn’t always a fan of the material she appropriates — she “can’t stand” Kim and Kanye, for instance, and as such they appear upside down in the painting of hers in which they have a cameo — but “The Voice” she genuinely appreciates. “As critical as I am as a viewer and observer of media — I watch it, and actually think it’s a good show,” she said.Wachtel has an endearing way of discussing her work and parsing the decision-making process involved in the selection of various images. She’ll follow a loose trail of association — news reports about Ebola got her thinking about some vintage images of hazmat suits on NASA’s website, etc. — before shruggingly admitting that it’s all a bit instinctual. “Why that with that?” she pondered, discussing a painting that places images of a video-game militia soldier next to a cartoon of an inebriated hot dog slumped against a lamp post. “I can’t tell you.” Sometimes the association is more clear-cut, as in another painting-in-progress mixing a found photograph of a wildfire with a hand-painted “crazy, kooky cigarette that’s lighting itself.” Often, she said, the cartoon protagonists within the paintings are a type of stand-in for herself, or for the viewer. So in this case, I wondered, is Wachtel the cigarette? “I am the cigarette,” she concurred. “But you’re the cigarette, too.”The Internet has been a major boon for Wachtel’s wandering curiosity. “The variations, and the time people spend creating content on there, generated from found stuff, is absolutely mind-boggling,” she said, “and the production value on a lot of it is really high. Anything you can conjure up in your brain, there’s going to be some representation of that. If you want a Polish, brown-eyed basketball player with a pink hat — you’ll find it.” One half-complete work hanging in her Brooklyn studio borrows an enigmatic giraffe cartoon found on the web with a sliced-and-diced photo of Jamaican rapper Cartel. Another jams two hand-painted renditions of a 20,000 BC fertility sculpture with a silkscreened photo of Hillary Clinton. A necessarily impartial list of other references and imagery in the new work would include Brazil soccer player Neymar’s back being broken in the World Cup; Jeff Koons; Ranger Smith from the Yogi Bear cartoon franchise; and the plush-animal dress-up festishists known as Furries. Wachtel wants to place the viewer in “the landscape, in the political environment, the packaging environment, or the Internet environment — it’s all about being mixed up in this irrational, swirling universe of imagery and information.”Despite the emphasis on recognizable figurative elements, abstraction is a paramount issue for the artist. When she first began sourcing cartoon figures from greeting cards more than 20 years ago, she said, her initial interest was piqued by the cards’ abstract backgrounds. “They were painterly,” she said, “evocative of a Jasper Johns, or Clyfford Still, or Jackson Pollack.” Wachtel injects her own work with abstract elements, from colored boxes of paint that occlude or censor parts of the images, to long horizontal stripes that run across multiple panels. “If you take away the layer of representation you have an abstract painting behind it,” she said. “I realized that that’s what my work boiled down to: I’m trying to turn representation into abstraction, to turn the representational image inside out.” In a way, all those familiar faces — from Sponge Bob Square Pants to a foam-finger-wearing Miley Cyrus — might just be means to that surprisingly traditional end.
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