Darkly Humorous Images by Guston
By Cathy Rose A. Garcia
Staff Reporter
There is nothing funny about white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan, but in one of Phillip Guston's untitled paintings, a Klansman looks like a cartoon figure. Instead of making the Klansmen look threatening, Guston has made their pointed white hoods look cute and floppy.
This ``Untitled'' work is part of an exhibition of Guston's works at the Seomi Gallery, Gahoe-dong, Seoul. Most of the works are from Guston's later period, after he shifted from Abstract Expressionism to Neo-expressionism.
Guston was born Phillip Goldstein to Russian-Jewish parents in 1913 in Montreal, Canada. As a child, his family moved to Los Angeles. His childhood was marred by his father's suicide, and Guston was the first one to find the body.
Guston was known as a noted figure in Abstract Expressionism, along with Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning. Around the late 1960s, he discarded pure abstraction for figuration because he ``got sick and tired of that purity and wanted to tell stories.'' However, his first exhibition of ``pop'' figurative paintings in 1970 was not well received by critics.
His paintings depicted various objects such as shoes and cigarettes, and figures such as the Klansmen, in cartoon-like images. These works, mostly done in pink, red, gray and black, are darkly humorous.
``Using a remarkable economy of line, he could turn a boot into a chair, or a hand into an entire figure. Collapsing the conventional divide between abstraction and representation, these drawings reveal Guston's mastery of self-contained narrative and his unique gift for capturing the pathetic enormity of something as simple as an unlaced shoe,'' the gallery said.
One of the most interesting works is Guston's self-portrait, showing the artist with big black eyes and a fistful of cigarettes.
The Ku Klux Klan is a recurring theme in his works. Growing up, Guston was always aware of KKK activities against Jews, blacks and other minorities. Yet he once said the Klansmen paintings were self-portraits. He was trying to create a caricature of the evil inside himself.
Guston's constant use of pink and red in his paintings seems to lend a certain softness, in contrast to the images depicted. There are also several untitled ink drawings from the 1960s, which pre-date his shift to caricature images in the 1970s.
His works are mostly untitled, perhaps to allow viewers to come up with their own interpretation. Viewers can draw from their own experiences to try and interpret his paintings.
``Populated by hooded figures who meet in conspiratorial huddles in low-rent rooms or roam deserted city streets in rattletrap cars, crammed full of prostrate, truncated bodies of scraps of urban detritus scattered along the horizon or piled in ominous mounds, this work describes a fantastic, but far from remote vision of a world threatened by motiveless violence and littered with the symbols of a no less disconcerting entropy,'' the gallery said.
The works of Guston, who died in 1980, are on display at the Seomi Gallery, through Nov. 29. The gallery is located in Gahoe-dong, near the To Go coffee shop. Call (02) 3675-8232.