Thom Shaw: Life Stories-360 Degrees
Thom Shaw, Cincinnati's finest living visual artist, is part muckraker, part commentator on visual and popular culture, part art historian, part didacticist and polemicist. He's also a consummate craftsman, autobiographer, narrator and, when he chooses to be, witticist. Shaw has, for decades, been the great explicator of the violence of urban black life to a mostly white art audience. He succeeds so brilliantly not to titillate a prominent middle class pruriently looking through the window of the poor, because he hybridizes his woodcut figures in a manner that has the strength, the timelessness and the eclectic genius of Picasso. Thom Shaw is as serious and ambitious an artist as we know.
If Picasso borrowed what was formerly called 'primitivism' from African masks and sculpture and integrated their reductionist, abstracted qualities into his art, then Thom Shaw does the exact opposite, building from African and American Cubist stylizations into and through European, particularly German, Expressionism. As you see the Kathe Kollwitz in Thom Shaw, you understand the incredibly fine line between high and low art, or high and popular culture, in Shaw. Black inner city life is a demimonde, too, frequently found fascinating by both rich and bohemian/liberal whites. German Expressionism comes close to explicating the horrors of contemporary inner city life. Woodcut, a medium in which Shaw is peerless, exaggerates the stylized qualities of abstracted Expressionism; a Shaw figure may appear down and out, yet regal, iconic, totemic concurrently. In Makes Me Wanna Holla, Throw Up Both My Hands, 2005, Shaw overtly borrows Edward Munch's The Scream, yet titles it with lyrics by Marvin Gaye. The racial reversal is a stunning tour-de-force, and, also, flat-out hilarious. Shaw's huge, black Thugzilla, about to destroy New York, has crushed a church in his right hand, but one serving of his enormous penis will knock the whole city over. Here another white stereotype is wildly and hilariously spoofed, while concurrently referring to icons of American film history, as he has since he made the woodcut Pulp Fiction.
Shaw's recent bouts with heart disease and radical diabetes are narrated, explored, and explicated similarly. The artist portrays himself in a series of hospital settings, in gowns, the subject of tests, always with his cartoon-like heart depicted in nearly child-like form. (The analogies to the bleeding-heart of Jesus are both clear and terribly moving; he portrays himself in a state we are all reduced to in the out-of-our-control setting of the hospital, the surgery). One image shows Shaw briefly moored to his vitals-reading machines, while he maintains his sanity and identity by reading Artforum. Stairways to and from nowhere, one blocked at the top with the patient trapped at the bottom, are particularly unsettling-frightening, really-the nightmare of helplessness and entrapment. In Idle Time For Decision Making, 2004 Shaw appears to be unclothed, surrounded by what look like exotic plant leaves and forms, but seem likelier to be a drug-induced sense of being lost in wrapped surgical bandages. There are ways in which Shaw's overscaled woodcuts veer into the psychological terrain of the fairy tale.
Another section of Shaw's new work examines Thugs, and their female equivalents or victims. He suggests that the inner cities are currently more, not less, violent (in Jamal's Nightmare, one young man is either eating or vomiting a cascading, spaghetti-esque assortment of guns). Faces sometimes look like they come from Picasso's Guernica.
The rich, deep blacks of Shaw's ink contrast starkly with the pure whites of his paper. These technical masteries offer all his figures and his narrative a larger-than-life sense of grandness, and an exaggerated emphasis on scale. His images of the medical world to which he was recently subjected are as nearly race-specific as his inner city gangsters and thugs, but what sustains Shaw (and gives us hope) is his redemptive ability to make art out of the surgeries to help illnesses. Two of his own X-Rays are attached to one woodcut (The Big Hurt, 2007), a brilliant insight on the loss of personal identity in both illness and hospital to the language and imagery of medicine.
It turns out, by sheer accident, that I was in the same hospital undergoing emergency heart surgery as Shaw, and at the same time. The most frightening afterthought occurred when I was released after my surgery, and perused my post-operative instructions, only to discover that the hospital had given me Shaw's discharge papers. I'm always happy to be Thom's friend and colleague, but this extra chill still gives me a horrified shiver when I look at the new work. The denouement of such a performance isn't supposed to be real.
