Whitehot Magazine

Distilled Signs: Jackson’s Shea’s TV Dinner

Installation view. 

By MIKE MAIZELS May 12, 2024

Does it mean anything..to the painter who made it? To us, who see an implacable presence and a gaping metaphor?”—Leo Steinberg, 1962

Jackson Shea, a self-taught artist from upstate New York, opened an outstanding show last week in an out-of-the-way storefront space on Allen street in Chinatown.  The exhibition is divided into two primary modes—large format, shaped canvases and small contact-printed photo abstractions—both of which draw imagery from the icons and platitudes of the contemporary news media.  The sense of being inundated by patriotism and its discontents is personal for Shea; the present body of work grows out of his day job operating a third party news van that transmits on behalf of stations including Fox, MSNBC, Al Jazeera. The photo works were produced via a technique adapted from  Robert Heinecken—a direct exposure  TV screen-to-paper photogram. The shaped canvas paintings mean to distill the rapid eye movements of the television into residue icons: what is left after endless hours of coverage of wars, protests and myriad other disruptions is little other than over-indexed and underdetermined signs.  The flag waves impassively beside the coiled rattlesnake. 

Shea’s artistic impulses feel drawn from another era. The shaped canvases of course figure within the legacy of Frank Stella, who passed away two weeks ago the age of 87. Indeed, when plain vanilla canvas stretching is a risk of becoming a lost art, the virtuoso curves and edges of Shea’s works are quite striking. But it is not simply a question of breaking the expected rectangle. A legendary figure of “all at once” modernism, Stella would cite Mickey Mantle as his greatest living contemporary because of his hyper-vision. He could, Stella insisted to the critic and historian Rosalind Krauss, see the seams of an incoming MLB fastball. And of course, Stella’s work is closely connected with his Castelli gallery-mate, the ur flag and symbol painter Jasper Johns. Johns was fond of declaiming the specificity of his selections like the Stars and Stripes. Adapting the found icon, he recounted to Leo Steinberg in 1962, “took care of a great deal for me because I didn’t have to design it. . . . that gave me room to work on other levels.” The actual existence, or sincerity, of these other levels has been under discussion since. However, what is more difficult to debate is the effect of stillness and isolation on the signifier. Like a butterfly mounted to a wall, the flag is detached from its meaning-ecosystem and crystallized as a freestanding specimen.  It means little in-and-of itself; it gets all of it’s juice in circulation.

Installation view. 

Shea’s work essentially adapts this interpretative framework but inverts its ethical priorities. Or as the artist puts it, he doesn’t consider himself an appropriation artist because his primary interest is in how signs and symbols circulate, rather than where they come to rest. The process begins with the rapidfire TV imagery—a new event, a new talking point, a new symbol to rally behind—makes its way through the TV news diet of the center-Right, the center-Left and the center-International. When it flashes through these circuits often enough it burns an after image into screen, into retina and into photo-sensitive paper. Heineken may have invented a technique from which Shea drew, but Heineken himself built on a rich legacy of Surrealist photographers who would fused physical impressions with photochemical exposure, the most well known of which was Man Ray. The list of relevant precedents—high praise for a young artist who considers himself a painter—would also include Bruce Conner, whose masterful A Movie (1958) X-rayed the collective psyche with a masterful pastiche of media industry tropes. The industry amalgamated by Conner was film rather than Fourth Estate, but it feels like a distinction without a meaningful difference.

One other aspect of the show that feels deeply historical is its palpable sense of anticipation for epochal turnover. Many now feel themselves to be inhabiting a space of suspended animation, scanning and waiting for fundamentally new possibilities to open up somewhere. The election is a simple rematch of 2020, which itself a rehash of 2016 and before. In the art world, (non) political biennales and commercial fairs overgrow each other into an impossible-to-attend-to tissue of praxis. Almost all of the world’s leading dealers are geriatric white men. A similar knot characterized the early 1960s, a moment in which the staleness of Eisenhower politics and New York School painting was becoming increasingly apparent. At an important panel hosted by MoMA in 1958, museum director Alfred Barr asked rhetorically,  “Should there have been a rebellion by [now]? I looked forward to it, but I don’t see it. Am I blind or does it not exist?”  In the audience was Leo Castelli, who, in some mixture, discovered and invented that next chapter exemplified in the work of Stella and Johns. 

What is this next idiomatic chapter, and by whom will be discovered, invented and promulgated?  Shea and his circulating prefab imagery seem to yearn for a space outside discourse— a space of what be described as credible neutrality in which specificity can return to art and politics.  The world may yet produce the vector of such neutrality, but for Shea the distillation from the hyper-speed of electronic signal into the comparative slowness of paint-on-canvas is reframe enough.  News is often said to be the first draft of history, maybe it is the first draft of art history as well. WM

Mike Maizels

Michael Maizels, PhD is an historian and theorist whose work brings the visual arts into productive collision with a broad range of disciplinary histories and potential futures.  He is the author of four books, the most recent of which analyzes the history of postwar American art through the lens of business model evolution.  He has also published widely on topics ranging from musicology and tax law to the philosophy of mathematics.

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