ART REVIEW : Foulkes’ ‘Place’: Demise of American Myth

Llyn Foulkes turns 61 this month. He’s one of the great originals of L.A. art. He’s often styled as a species of Pop artist, but the classification leaves out more than it encompasses and muddles more than it explains. Now there’s a chance to see what he’s really about in a 35-work traveling retrospective making its debut at the Laguna Art Museum. Subtitled “Between a Rock and a Hard Place,” even the exhibition only hints at the range of his significance.

The earliest work here dates from the late 1950s and reveals Foulkes’ kinship to the assemblage generation--Edward Kienholz, Wallace Berman and George Herms. All of it was a morally driven brand of Expressionism that became Angeltown’s three-dimensional pop-up version of Beat poetry and the most scathing denunciation of its air-headed refusal to see tragedy down the road.

Much of Foulkes’ early stuff appears to have been made by an anonymous guy on the road glimpsing equally anonymous sights from the car window. There’s a cow called “Cow” and a big stone megalith titled “Sleeping Rock.” It hovers between looking like a natural formation and one of the great carved heads of Easter Island. Viewed by a naive traveler, its hallucinatory presence might well make the wanderer wonder if he’s cracking up.

Some of these images are tricked out as post cards, the kind of thing you might send home to re-establish human contact after a brush with insanity. Psychosis is a rather personal matter, but it does bounce back echoes from the real world. This causes one to wonder if one is living in a crazy head or mad environment. Foulkes provides a clue by often including the phrase, “Dedicated to the American.”

Much of Foulkes’ art is about a virtually universal dilemma. It’s about that feeling that when something goes wrong it must be our fault. It’s also about the relieved fury that follows when you realize that it isn’t.

The artist was born in Yakima, Wash. His father left the family when Foulkes was 3. His mom worked and his sister drove a school bus. So, the artist has said, he invented his own fathers. One was musical comedian Spike Jones. Foulkes wanted to make people laugh too. He formed a series of comedic musical groups in the ‘60s, culminating with the Rubber Band. Eventually he became a one-man band, an avocation he still practices. That makes him a precursor of performance artists, but of a very innocent sort.

Another of his “fathers” was clearly Walt Disney. Foulkes drew Mickey Mouse as a boy and is still at it. Disney is depicted holding the world in his hand in a small picture titled “To Ubi Iwerks.” The magic castle of Disney’s theme park stands in a desolate landscape. Mickey bursts out through Uncle Walt’s eye, causing blood to course down his cheek.

The image of the bloody head recurs. Sometimes it’s Foulkes, sometimes it’s a male authority figure--a military officer or a bureaucrat with a face full of money. All pose the question of where life’s pain comes from--evil men, oneself or harmless fictions like Mickey? Is Mickey the worst because he teaches kids that life is happy when it’s not?

In the ‘80s Foulkes’ art came into its own in a fresh way. Two things happened: He welded his vision directly to the interplay of the American myth and a new, far more grim American reality; at the same time he developed a startling technique he calls “Three Dimensional Painting.” A wonderful melange of Kienholzian tableau and Hollywood special effect, these shallow reliefs look amazingly real while revealing their nature as optical fictions. They’re like visual metaphors of a disappearing American dream.

It’s all still fairly benign in “The Last Outpost.” The Lone Ranger lies apparently dead, but he smiles because it’s all a game to please a little boy. Soon, however, Superman sits in the desert wondering, “Where did I go wrong?”

“Pop” is installed in a dark alcove to enhance its visual enchantment. Here “Pop” is not an art form but a Superman daddy paralyzed by the paranoid vision on the television set. He’s too obsessed to help his son with his homework, notice the comfort offered by his daughter or pull his .357 Magnum.

There’s an essential sweetness to even Foulkes’ goriest, angriest images. He’s always just a decent guy trying to figure things out. His recent “The New Renaissance” offers a panoramic view of Santa Monica Bay.

The artist, blindfolded, paints the Chinese sign for “man.” His brain shows convolutions labeled with all man’s contradictory qualities. His wife stands nearby like a spectral angel holding a book called “The Human.” It’s a picture about dawning wisdom.

The exhibition was organized by the always smart and angelic Fellows of Contemporary Art.

* Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach; through Jan. 21, closed Mondays, (714) 494-8971.