Your Friends in the art world

By Danielle Kelly

How do you take an art intimately linked to a scene or subculture and place it in an entirely different context without losing something in the translation? In the ’70s and ’80s, the art world scavenged the work of early hip-hop graffiti visionaries with mixed success. By the ’90s, the image of street artist as gallery artist had become standardized. Many young image-makers were middle-class kids leading double lives: art students by day and street artists by night, taking art-world credentials to an urban canvas, blowing off institutional steam. With luck and talent, a few managed to maintain some measure of credibility both on the street and in the galleries. Jason Yates’ exhibit at Main Gallery, We Used To Be Friends, attempts a similar transition.

Instead of graffiti, Yates pulls from rock posters from the ’60s and ’70s, a terrifically successful visualization of a particular sound and its attendant culture. Yates taps this history, and his own. His show originates from an earlier project called Fast Friends, Inc., in which he created elaborate one-of-a-kind posters announcing musical performances and parties, then placed them in a variety of banal locations (bus stops, phone booths) in and around LA, his hometown. For the show at Main, Yates reclaimed the original posters, created enlarged templates and vibrantly covered them in stickers, glitter and googly eyes. Though they vary only slightly from their original format, they are dramatically reframed by the context of the gallery.

The result is physically obsessive, ephemeral and beautifully raw. Yates’ drawings are visually aggressive in their garish synthesis of highly identifiable elements of mass culture with mass-produced materials. A deliberately naïve fabrication technique supports the sometimes-elusive iconography, which runs the gamut: owls and elephants, references to High School Musical and stickers with outdated slang like “You go girl.” The artist’s use of cheap “stuff” reflects a movement in the art world toward a muffled materiality and non-fabrication.

This trend could be read as a subversion of homogeneous and market-driven notions of high art, but more essentially, it simply reflects our time. The world is fast, cheap and out of control. Yates’ drawings are messy and fragile in the DIY vernacular—a shot of real-time physicality in a dominantly virtual reality. One of my favorite pieces literally fell apart over the course of the opening, leaving a small pile of stickers in the corner. Nothing like a little reminder that time is actually happening.

Both of Yates’ Friends projects comment on the swift social networking of sites like MySpace, Facebook and YouTube, which reward superficial self-invention (or reinvention) and personal brand identity through the ability to describe yourself in one line or less. These sites create an illusion of connectivity where none may actually exist. Yates gestures to a kind of cannibalism inherent in fast-paced online communities. They feed off themselves in search of something younger, faster, bigger and brighter.

“There are those of us that will devour ourselves,” claims Yates, and the work in We Used To Be Friends moves toward self-cannibalization—the art destroys itself before the community does. By their materials and methodology, the drawings attempt to mirror the concerns of the sub-cultural community of artists and performers for whom they were originally intended.

But what if you’re not in the club? Despite their reckless appeal, Yates’ drawings come dangerously close to talking only to themselves. The quick high of bright materials and punk-rock fabrication knocked me out, but the subsequent down felt a little bit like a sugar rush. The imagery is clearly significant for Yates, but he doesn’t clue viewers into why. Yates may still be trying to determine what these drawings are independent of the communities they reflect, but the art itself fell a bit flat and left me wanting more.

So I started to crave more—more stickers, more vulgarity, more color and more spectacle. The exhibit’s opening night provided some of the latter: Ariel Pink, a musician and performer featured in Fast Friends, treated the small crowd to a karaoke performance of his own songs. Plugged in, the musician writhed on the floor in huge white sunglasses, managing to simultaneously sing to and entirely ignore the crowd. Crazy sounds and crazy drawings—it was surreal and disorienting, as if YouTube were happening in real time.

In dialogue with the music, the work became more generous. Suddenly, an end-of-the-world party characterized by impermanence, mass consumption and instant gratification didn’t seem so bad. Although in this outing, the work seems to rely too heavily on its original context, I look forward to future efforts.

Still, if Yates’ intention is to tease out Western consumptive tendencies and force me to think about how fake I am on MySpace, then well done. But I didn’t really need any help in that department.

We Used to Be Friends

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Through April 19

257-6246