There’s
a certain look to so much of the painting coming out of Seattle and the
Pacific Northwest that it could be seen as a whole new movement, if it only
had a name. If some savvy art critic (with more cachet than I and a national
reputation to boot) were to name it, it would go down in history along with
such movements as Pop Art and Color Field Painting. I call it Seattle Grunge
art because it began to show up about the same time as the music of the same
name and attitudinally and stylistically has a lot in common with grunge
music. You might even think of it as the Ragged Pendelton Shirt School of
Painting.
Grunge
artists from the Seattle area include Fay Jones, Gaylen Hansen, James Martin,
Michael Brophy, Gene Gentry McMahon and C. Blake Haygood. Seen in the recent
South Sound exhibition in nearby Tacoma were emerging Grunge artists Hannah
Corbett, Katie Baldwin, Greg Lukens and Chauney Peck. Historic precedents for
grunge can be found in the works of Cy Twombly, Susan Rothenberg, Jean-Michel
Basquiat, Leon Golub, Phillip Guston and Jim Nutt. Of course none of these
people know they are Grunge artists because that critic with cachet hasn’t
come along to tell them so. But listen up, folks, I’m telling you now.
There
seem to be two branches of Grunge art. One branch is typified by colored-in
drawings in a cartoon style and relates historically to painters such as Nutt
and Basquiat. The other branch is more painterly and relates historically to
Rothenberg and Guston. What both branches have in common is a working-class
look to paintings that eschew any sense of elegance and thumb their noses at
... well, just about everything and everybody.
More
than anything, Grunge is an attitude characterized by sarcastic and twisted
humor, and outrage over social injustice and environmental destruction;
although these messages are often hidden within highly personal symbolism and
iconography. Stylistically Grunge can be abstract or figurative, but it leans
more toward the figurative and narrative. The figures often look like
cartoons; common images include fantastic machines, instruments of war and
vintage vehicles. Haygood, for instance, draws fantasy machines of his own
invention that look as if they may have been used in 1933, and Peck included
fighter jets in large-scale drawing in the South Sound show.
Objects
in Seattle Grunge paintings seem to exist outside of time. Industrial design
combines elements from different time periods; vehicles and machines look old
but exist in futuristic scenes. (The film equivalent was Alan Rudolph’s
“Trouble in Mind,” which was set in a mythical “Rain City” --
Seattle, naturally --
in some non-specific future time wherein everybody drove 1950s automobiles.)
Space
is an important consideration in Grunge art. Figures and objects tend to float
or lay flat on the surface. There is little or no perspective, either linear
or atmospheric, and the arrangement of objects usually has nothing to do with
nature. Houses may be above, on or below the ground; figures can walk on air
or water. And things do not necessarily appear smaller as they get further
away. In fact, there seems to be no near or far in grunge art (but there is in
and out). The size and placement of figures and objects and abstract shapes --
which take on a life of their own as if they are objects too, simply not
recognizable --
all depend on aesthetic considerations rather than truth to any natural order.
Most
Grunge paintings have a strong graphic look. Things are drawn in contour and
colored in with little or no modeling. Line is paramount. Heavy lines,
delicate lines, staccato lines, and lines as smooth as vapor trails left by
the Blue Angels. These Grunge artists really know how to draw. Granted, there
is a kind of crudity to much of the drawing that to the untrained eye may look
like bad drawing, but most of us learned from Matisse and Picasso how to see
the finesse and power within so-called inelegant drawing.
Now
you know how to recognize Seattle
Grunge art when you see it.
When your children see it mentioned in art history texts, you can tell them
you knew about Grunge before it even had a name.