On the Road Again: Beat Culture, Bush Era looks at seven contemporary artists who are inspired by some aspect of Beat Culture—whether art, literature, the life style, or the practitioners themselves. Although the varied creative processes on display share some overlap with Beat ideologies and concerns the show is more about a spirit than a “look,” more about an attitude or sensibility than a defined aesthetic. In the same way that the artists who participated in what is now called the Beat movement were working on the fringes of society and against the grain of conformism prevalent in Eisenhower’s postwar America, the artists in this exhibition are creating their own form of protest art, and simultaneously engaging in a self-exploration that makes their personal concerns universal.
Devendra Banhart’s fine-grained ink sketches of imagined things or creatures focus on ways in which drawings can depict what is less easily articulated. Banhart uses pages torn from school books or scraps that are at hand, eschewing the preciousness of “art” paper, in the same way that the Beat artists used the materials most readily available to them.
Erik Frydenborg’s collaged drawings take their inspiration directly from popular culture and are rendered with a rhythmic dynamism that is almost musical, recalling the original Beat movement’s links with Jazz. Frydenborg’s work speaks to the absurd abundance of byproducts that clutter contemporary life, a parallel criticism of the excesses of capitalist society expressed by the Beats.
Oliver Halsman Rosenberg’s hexagonal mandalas explore sacred geometry and the interconnectedness and mutual dependency of the universe and reality. Echoing Wallace Berman’s fascination with the Kabbalah and other exotic and esoteric systems of belief, Halsman Rosenberg’s search for an alternative faith is an indirect commentary on the politicization of the church evident in the USA today.
The collaboration between poet Bill Berkson and artist Colter Jacobsen introduces the literary element so important to the Beat movement. Berkson’s original typescript from the early 80s, “Bill” is here illustrated by Jacobsen. A work in progress the seven completed pages will ultimately number 22. Jacobsen’s stunningly detailed illustrations are arrived at by a process of free association – a literary “jam” with the written word.
Ian McDonald’s hand thrown ceramic “breathers” are beautiful objects in their own right but double also as drug culture accessories containing heated political messages at odds with their cool appearances. McDonald also crafts the tables and display cases for the works, embodying the tension between the man-made and the handcrafted that characterized so much of the original Beat movement’s work, and is perhaps most evident in Wallace Berman’s Verifax collages.
Jay Nelson's drawings invoke the sublime in nature testifying to the artist’s intense communion with his surrounds. Mirroring the search for spiritual transcendence expressed by many of the artists of the original movement, Nelson’s quest extends to finding a meaning in defiance of the cultural alienation engendered by the media emphasis on celebrity and materialism.
Presenting a reenactment of a scene between Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep from the 1979 movie Kramer vs. Kramer, Geof Oppenheimer’s Versus is both an exercise in experimental film-making and cultural analysis. In excerpting and appropriating part of the film to his own ends, lovingly recreating the details of the original set down to the actor’s costumes Oppenheimer emphasizes the often highly personal nature of artistic interpretation, equally evidenced in much of the Beat movement’s work.
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