Jean Tinguely’s centenary, celebrating one hundred years since May 22, 1925, was a week ago. The creator of “Métamatic” kinetic sculptures that did nothing but destroy themselves, typified by “Homage to New York” (1960) and “Study for an End of the World No. 2 “(1962), satirized postwar mechanization and consumerism, both current concerns as AI technology and climate change denial threaten world economies, and, indeed, the human world. Modern-day callbacks to Tinguley’s Dadaist absurdity can been found in the 110-pound faceless robot dogs recently exhibited by China’s military, puppers armed with rifles, and able to run, squat, and leap under the direction of a controller or autonomously. (No doubt Pentagon chiefs find the robot-dog gap concerning and will use it to alarm the masses in upcoming elections.)
The paintings and sculptures of O.G. McRibb, exhibited under the curious title No Face No Case at Heron Arts (runs through June 18), indict with panache and dark humor our technological death wish. McRibb is an immortal trickster, a comically garbed avatar of well-known Cakeland artist Scott Hove, who is formerly of Oakland and Los Angeles and now living in New Mexico. Hove has granted permission to blow his cover despite his belief that art-worlders will not accept that he, the impresario of bizarre baroque plaster confections, and McRibb, the maker of huge ferociously mordant depictions of capitalist apocalypse, could be one and the same person.
Per his artist’s statement:
My plastic persona reflects my desire to be unremarkable as an individual. See the art, not the person. I am set free from judgement and expectation by not having an identity… My content derives from what scares me; industry destroying what is ancient, and the ancient coming back to destroy industry, hope vs. the absence of hope, interconnectedness vs. the gravitational singularity… I am McRibb.
First name: McDonald’s pork rib sandwich. Last name: original gamer or gangster, meaning veteran. Is it too late for the clownish trickster, O.G. McRibb, and the social critic, Scott Hove, to exchange identities? His Cakeland installations are ornate architectural environments fabricated from plaster extruded from icing decorating guns. They have the outsider/mad-artist obsessiveness of Kurt Schwitters’ legendary Merzbau (1923-’37; destroyed in ’43) and the meticulous craftsmanship normally seen on toothsome confections.
But the paintings at Heron Arts, for most part, are done in somber black, white, gray and red-pink—Phillip Guston’s frequent palette. Their forms multiply almost to infinity in vast landscapes, with exaggerated wide-angle perspectives with repeated stamped or extruded forms. Pyramids double as teeth or saw blades, and arches and windows as eyes and mouths. The creations subsume their creator, the archaic and the futuristic combined. Their moral is that of Romantic painters past and present, of ruin and fallen empires, e.g., Piranesi, Hubert Robert, Turner, Thomas Cole, and Anselm Kiefer: nothing lasts forever.
Ars longa, vita brevis: art is long, life is short. The show, includes about half of the prolific self-taught artist’s work from the past decade. It is comprised of 14 paintings and three assemblage sculptures, the latter stylistically related to the Cakeland sculptures, but made from found objects, and reminiscent of the totemic ‘primitive’ and ‘naive’ art admired by the Surrealists during their heyday.
The paintings, large and immersive, are aggressive and funny. “#6 (Machine Dog)” and “#10 (Hollywood Dog)” feature intimidating armored creatures—with more than a hint of the Mexican muralists’ fire and fury— that merge the canine, the robotic, and the demonic. The “Machine Dog,” all spikes and gears, albeit furnished with human hands, stands amid tongues of fire, its head elevated as if in surprise at its metamorphosis into Robo-Dog. “Hollywood Dog” looms over a fiery Hollywood Boulevard intersection; the gigantic animal, with its reptilian eye and knife-bladed flanks, extends a flaming tongue, as if lapping the air as snakes do, smelling for prey, while tiny pedestrians—denizens of “the mothership of alternate identities,” even with a diminished entertainment industry—cluster far below.
“Architecture” and “Triumphal Arch” depict Piranesian panoramas composed of classical buildings, as if villages had been carved from colossal blocks of marble, with hallucinatory eyes, mouths, and even teeth erupting from the arcades, cornices, columns, and pilasters. Ornamental volutes suggesting both larval hatchlings and reliquaries and tombs. “#12” portrays a robotic death’s head pieced together from gears and tank or tractor treads. Hove is such a master of perspective, despite his improvisatory process, that we are both attracted to and repelled by this semitransparent crystal-skull demon of “creative destruction.”
“The Destroyer” similarly compels our attention with its colossal war machine, replete with tractor treads borrowed from Caterpillar bulldozers as seen by Hove as a boy, with their defensive spikes and smoke-belching chimneys, and crowned by another of Hove’s grimacing dog/snake heads. The unstoppable juggernaut resembles the temple car chariots of the Indian Hindu god Jugganath, which British imperialists interpreted—perhaps with unconscious projection—as juggernauts, irresistible engines of destruction. Here, Hove’s blue palette differs from the artist’s usual ocher reds and yellows, but the comic menace remains.
Many artists—our canaries in the coal mine— are making work about ecological apocalypse in the obscene Anthropocene, and it is all welcome, and important. But few have presented our dilemma with such seductive fury, such “terrible beauty” (in Yeats’ memorable evergreen trope) and such clear-eyed, unblinking humor as Messrs. Hove and McRibb. McRibb will attend the closing reception on June 18. Hove: “If you have a fake persona, you’re timeless.”
NO FACE NO CASE runs through June 18. Heron Arts, SF. More info here.
