Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 75

8H DETROIT FREE PRESSSUNDAY, MAY 7, 1995 Shaw and the art of fooling around (J movement in progress; of basement sounds and journals of peace, love and disaster." After Ann Arbor, Shaw went to the No. 1 school for conceptual art, California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. He felt even more insecure about that and doesn't talk much about the art he did then. After Cal Arts, Shaw, who was working in Hollywood doing special effects, began airbrushing distorted faces over printed images. He did a book of them parodying Life Magazine, called "Life and Death." Images include those of a "Burn Victim with Skin Grafts on Face at Party," and "Mormon Missionary and Prostitute Making Each Other Feel Guilty." SHAW, from Page 1H knows Jeff Goldbluni's sister.

He was head animator on the fourth "Nightmare on Elm Street." And his goal is to get a dentist to back him in a celebrity art gallery in Las Vegas where he will sell fake versions of his own work. He also wants to start a new religion. Rut that has been one of his aims since he first got to Los Angeles. In a prescient 1977 letter to his mates from the Detroit-based noise band Destroy All Monsters, Gary Loren and Niagara, Shaw wrote: "I am considering starting a bogus religion, a cross between TV fundamentalist Christianity and flying saucer speculative crackpotism. I would put out bogus leaflets, magazines, videotapes, fotos, cassettes, movies." fj "-j 1 NOW YOUR DOLLAR IS WORTH jf 40 MORE IN CANADA! I ubject to currant exchange rate f.

lRC-ilt19C li3'iL4 (416)872-2222 C1 HM A PAY, 7 DAYS A WKK VfcJs' i nt; i ill 1" I I i i Mil Qi tsjtflli' jlr -EE 1 'PHANTOM' HOTEL. I I THE PHANTOM ROOM RATE 'Destroy All Monsters: 1974-79' Art by Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, Niagara, Jim Shaw Book Beat, 26010 Greenfield, Oak Park Through May 22 10-9 Mon.Sat., 11-6 Sun. 1-810-968-1 190 with a stump in a pool of blood is bizarre. It also reveals his penchant for creating narratives by relating unconnected images and stories from popular culture. Advertising and mass magazines, like 1950s Life and Look, are the source of images for his early collages.

In one, a giant woman's head from a jewelry advertisement dips into the water where a pilot is signaling for help to a helicopter that is part flying dinosaur, while an elegant woman below the helicopter holds up her glass full of ice cubes. "I did subliminals like in advertisements with that one," says Shaw. If you look closely the ice cubes turn into Godzilla. Loren describes Shaw's work from this era in his new book, "Destroy All Monsters: Geisha This," as a "nostalgiccampy off-kilter, cubist-collage aesthetic." "I related more to Jim's collages because they are closer to photography. Jim was the most technically adept of us.

Both Jim and Mike's views of pop culture were twisted, not Kellogg'? but Count Chocula." Loren describes them all as an "underground band of mad scientists. We seriously wanted our delusions to expand and contaminate society. Our flow of music, films, drawings, paintings, photographs, collages and magazines was a romantic imitation of an art 'Hil 11. FordMotor Company -Production Sponsor Ameritech Corporate Sponsor Lear Seating Corporation i Performance Sponsor, Sunday, May 20th irroibMJtBP Accu-Weather for the Next 7 Days! Call Free Press Plus, 1-900-884-wdfp 85 cents a minute to order fax on option 1 Shaw says he wants his collages to be shocking. He is inspired by things such as flip pictures, 3D postcards and anything embossed in gold perfect art for LA.

In 1984 he began a series of collage drawings called "My Mirage," named after a 1968 Iron Butterfly song. It is about an innocent young boy in the '60s who gets involved with a psychedelic cult leader, then turns his life around to become a born-again TV preacher. It was this work that made his art world reputation. At the moment, Shaw is getting ready to publish a book of his dreams. He's been recording them for years.

"One is a horror story about a workaholic artist, which is one of my favorite motifs. I deal with the way an idealistic movement can get subverted into banality, into the evil of everyday life. Like surrealism, which started as a revolutionary ideological thing and ended up being used by beer commercials. Here in America, what else is there to do?" 'nil I 4 4 4 Zaj I ua I I I II Jim Shaw, 42, lives by fooling around. He also flies as little as possible.

Loren, now owner of the Book Beat Gallery in Oak Park, had to cajole Shaw into visiting a few weeks ago. He made the trip. He played his Jim Shaw toy guitar and sang in a monotone for the Destroy All Monsters reunion concert at the Magic Bag. He was at the opening of Book Beat exhibit of the art (he band members Kelley, Shaw, Loren and Niagara made during their 1974-76 college heyday for Destroy All Monsters Magazine. And Shaw taught for an afternoon at Cran-brook Academy of Art.

He didn't flaunt his success, the fact that his chameleon-like, comic-based art is shown in major New York and Los Angeles galleries, and that he's now considered one of LA's hip artists. "I find myself being in the establishment even though I didn't have a gallery until three years ago. I was an underground artist." Like Kelley, his famed fellow pop-culturalist, Jim Shaw doesn't care about such things. He seems more comfortable on the outside. He sees significance where others see none.

He wants dissonance because he knows harmony has become a joke. Seemingly suspended in a permanent state of adolescence, he sees the absurdities of everything and makes superbly satirical art of it. Shaw bought hundreds of naive paintings at thrift shops, including that picture everyone has seen of a sad clown. Then he opened the clenched New York art world's eyes to thrift shop values. There is a traveling exhibit of many of the paintings that showed in Manhattan, and a book, "Thrift Store Paintings" (Heavy Industries Publications, "I have low self-esteem, so it's always weird to be accepted for anything," he says.

"I was amazed that the (Thrift Store) show was reviewed in all those fashion magazines," including Vogue and Elle. Shaw also collects old clothes. The day of the concert he had on a loden-colored jacket that must have belonged to a Swiss yodeler. But Shaw, who shed his long hair of art school for a short cut, is handsome in a Brad Pitt-ish sort of way. The jacket looked right on him.

"I buy old clothes, but at some point they fall apart," Shaw says. "They are tied to a certain era. But thrift store painting is not necessarily nostalgic because you can't tell the era. It's generic. What's interesting about bad taste is not that it is bad, but that it is taste.

Good taste is the work of rich people. Bad taste is poor people. So taste is just a class distinction. "My own aesthetics are tasteless. I don't have a very good color sense, nor design sense.

I'm good at rendering things. I can draw something that looks exactly like a photo." It's hard to pin down exactly what a Shaw looks like. As with Kelley, the whole psychedelic-poster, rock-music aesthetic is an element. Both treat alternative culture like high art, by using it conceptually to analyze and critique. Shaw is more socially oriented, penetrating layers of unexplored attitudes and interrelationships with his art.

He understands people's immediate reactions are not necessarily logical or rational, and he uses that as a structure for his collages. They can have a curiously transforming elegance that seems at odds with their content. Shaw's work at Book Beat includes a few drawings of characters from comic books and monster movies sur-really interacting. The one of a were wolf eating a pin-up model's leg which has been ripped off, leaving her Interact with the Free press On CompuServe. 1 -SOO-848-8 1 99 'iti'tiiiin mm ess: ffHnrtn a fhrriTjlta fHmna QAl cH MICHIGAN OPERA THEATRE Tchaikovsky's SWAM LAKE TODAY 2 P.M.

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