ARTS REVIEW: ANTHONY LISTER JUNK FOOD ART HOUSE AT HVW8

Surreal Pop Art Depicting Comic Heroes for a Little Escapism in Our Post-9/11 World

By: Josh Moorhead

August 8, 2011

(July 29, 2011 in West Hollywood, California) It's hard to say no to an invite to a secret event. And it's a clever ploy on the part of a good PR firm (so props to you, Michele Marie PR, in an usual article shout-out). So when an invite arrives in the ol' e-mail inbox and has what looks like The Flash inviting you to said invite with the promise of booze and food...well, you go. So last Friday night, I rolled on down to the HVW8 Art + Design Gallery in West Hollywood for some good, not-so-old-fashioned LA pop art, which, it turns out, is what all this ballyhoo was about.

LA is rife with galleries, center of culture as it is, and just as rife with galleries -- most notable among them Gallery 88 -- that bring pop art to the fore. This is no surprise in a city that creates pop and, to a further extent, a world that's built more and more on reference points. See: going into the Rocky Mountains only to exclaim, "It's just like Middle Earth!" Truth be told, this can become exhausting. It's all very clever, of course, but one longs for the day where you can simply admire the stillness of a pond without comparing it to Robert Patrick's melted-down T-1000 goop in Terminator 2. What, you don't do that? Oh, so you're okay.

But before I go on critiquing, this event was about more than feeding me -- it was an installation of Anthony Lister -- an Aussie artist that's becoming more and more notable. Dude's a painter and installation expert whose stuff is much more, like much stuff nowadays, in the vein of street art and fly-by-the-pants spraying and brushing than the meticulous caricatures of classics like Renoir. Making my Wikipedia machine even more efficient, now you could say the current sway of art -- where folks like Banksy, whoever he is, are getting a lot of press -- still have a bloodline back to the greats. For instance, Lister's work was also very color-dependent, like Matisse, you could say. It just so happens that the colors that Lister was painting in were those of superheros.

What was actually refreshing about Lister's work (who was present and putting some final touches on a giant wall-sized mural in the back lot of HVW8) was that it wasn't winking poppy. Much of the work that gets passed around out here operates as the inside joke -- it's winking and punch-lined, and not always as evocative.

If I had to make a guesstimation of Lister's work (and I do, since I got to mosey on over to this thing for free), I'd say it's a reflection of the common man today masking ourselves in our escapes. Superheros have never been bigger than they are now -- something that really started booming in the post-9/11 black-and-white world and has continued with the downslide of the economy and greater questions about hope and justice. It also helps that computers can do such fancy effects work nowadays. But essentially, it's escapism.

The pieces that were emphasized at HVW8 depicted faces that were definitely not those of Bruce Wayne or Hal Jordan wearing the Batman cowl or the Green Lantern mask. The last piece was an anonymous bloke with a mask in a police line-up. What spoke to me here -- and in Lister's other pieces online, where hero faces are blurred or eyes are crossed out, or heroes get all lumped together in muscle-bound clouds -- is the flawed and lofty concept of our heroes in the light of reality -- our escape to them rather than donning the cowl in the ways we could in our reality, and over-reliance on fuzzy amalgams of pop knowledge over reality grasping. Also, it turns out, superheros are just kind of damn cool.

But point goes there was a little something deeper going on in Lister's work than a wink and an "eh, eh?" nudge. I suppose art doesn't say "get it?" A good painting instead lets you arrive at your own "got it." To be fair, this can still happen in the box of a political cartoon or the frame of a comic book, but without reaching, it did seem as if Lister had not just a theme, but a point in mind with his installation.

A little bit more Googling lets me know this movement I describe has earned itself a proper name, "pop surrealism," which, come to think of it, is also a good way of describing LA life. This all falls under the tenet of what's called "lowbrow art" -- a kind of punk painters movement that started sniffing around in, go figure, 1970s LA, and to which Lister now is considered a member of. But perhaps lowbrow is a low blow (though it's not meant as such; it's just going to say the corner at Sunset and Vine ain't the Louvre), but maybe we should follow Lister's seeming lead, or what I've etched on it with my bias: enjoy your heroes, but dawn the cowl yourself, and in your spare time, hit up that pond why don't ya? After all, few of us have Batcaves, but many of us have the origin stories -- the senses of angst and calling and morality -- to mount our own little crusades. Escapism is perhaps not an invitation to live vicariously, but instead an emblem for how to better live. So let's all go be Usmen and Uswomen.

You can check out Lister's work yourself at HVW8 (hvw8.com) for the duration of the installation, running for a few more weeks, or at his website, anthonylister.com, and draw your own conclusions. Oh, and the food and booze was great, and I nabbed a cool Green Lantern tee and poster. So win-win over all. Now about that pond...