Kitsch Salon

Make no mistake; “Gregory Crewdson: Disturbed Nature,” a survey of recent photographs by the New York-based artist and art instructor, was the worst exhibition I’ve recently seen in Vancouver, easily beating out the hippie surrealism, expressionistic landscape painting and “community”-based group exhibitions with which the city is often associated.

Crewdson’s long list of exhibitions in public and private venues throughout North America and Europe—including Toronto’s Power Plant—testifies to his works popular appeal. But to my mind, Crewdson’s art is a profoundly unambitious academicism masquerading as avant-gardism. On the day I visited the Emily Carr College of Art and Design to see Crewdson’s show, a student photo exhibition was up in the concourse gallery beside the entrance to the Charles H. Scott Gallery. Without exception, the work in the student show demonstrated far more conceptual ambition than Crewdson’s, raising questions about the curatorial priorities that brought his work to Vancouver in the first place.

Crewdson makes elaborately staged, large-format colour photographs that call attention to their own artificiality, juggling taxidermy specimens, coloured lighting gels, model railroad foliage, plastic limbs, rubber maggots and plenty of stage blood into a baroque grand guignol, and equally indebted to Dutch vanitas painting and films like Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Formally, Crewdson’s compositions emulate those found in films like Blue Velvet and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and in TV shows like Twin Peaks and The X-Files. Decaying corpse parts float under water, or are tastefully obscured by a scrim of fallen leaves. Brilliant blue and yellow butterflies cover a severed head, and maggots sprout from a mannequin’s plastic arm.

Crewdson’s work contrasts images of an idealized, human-managed nature with a repressed “disturbed nature.” In this sense, his stage sets, which frequently incorporate images of pastel-coloured suburbia, are equivalents for the soothing mask modern society lays over the natural world’s savagery and decay. Often, the images depict beauty and grotesquery side by side. His photographs are constructed in such a way that viewers must quickly shift between conflicting emotional extremes. Violence is aestheticized, while beauty becomes suspect and sinister.

Crewdson’s priorities puzzle me. The themes he addresses are not new. Rather, they represent the mannered conventionalization of approaches pioneered by filmmakers like George Romero, John Carpenter, Roger Corman, Wes Craven and David Lynch. Crewdson genuinely seems to like these directors’ work. He recognizes that they possess a nervy energy totally absent from the contemporary art world. Part of the appeal of films like Dawn of the Dead and the Scream trilogy is the way that their plots and compositions work almost in spite of themselves, improvised under conditions that don’t give their creators any time for detached reflection. Crewdson, unfortunately, has far too much time on his hands. His photographs’ slick, formal polish deadens the snap of his pop-cultural sources. Every detail that allows us to recognize his pictures’ ambition “as art”—thick, expensive frames, hyper-saturated colours, carefully crafted compositions—detracts from their ability to shock or provoke us. They’re like illustrations whose lack of conceptual ambition can be illuminated by comparison with the work of another American photographer, Los Angeles-based Paul McCarthy. McCarthy’s films, photographs and performances also draw on motifs derived from cheesy science fiction and horror films, but, unlike Crewdson’s, they maintain their sources’ power, resisting any absorption into “art.” McCarthy’s bloody fucking figures are often impossible to look at, a sign of their success. Crewdson, on the other hand, is profoundly conservative. He wants the freedom to emulate non-art sources, while also wanting his work recognized as art. But there is nothing to feel in Crewdson’s blandly disturbing pictures, and not that much to think about, either.

Even worse, Crewdson simplifies and trivializes his pop-culture sources. One photograph in the Charles H. Scott Gallery show depicts a woman inside a darkened house. Dressed in a skimpy nightshirt, she kneels astride a huge mound of dirt inexplicably placed in the middle of her living room floor, her face tilted up to the ceiling in an expression apparently meant to convey sexual longing. Laughter is the only appropriate response to this misogynistic and profoundly vacuous picture. Crewdson’s allusion is to a scene from Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which Richard Dreyfus’s character, possessed by the knowledge that aliens are on their way to earth, builds a scale model of the Devil’s Tower, the Wyoming mesa the aliens have chosen for their landing site, in his basement, hauling in dirt and bushes from outside. In the film, Dreyfus’s actions are unbearably moving. The film’s audience knows what he’s up to, but his wife and child don’t. Sure that he’s finally cracked up, they fear for their safety. Spielberg’s film creates dramatic ambiguity between our perception of Dreyfus and his family’s perception of him, opening a space for critical reflection on our understanding of mental illness. In Crewdson’s picture, the delicacy of the Spielberg film’s psychological ambiguity is rooted out and destroyed. The woman in his photograph is depicted as a symbol, the sensuous “earth mother” of bad 19th-century salon painting. As such, she is far less interesting than Dreyfus.

Many of Crewdson’s images are beautiful. More accurately, they are simply beautiful, as soothing and pleasing as a painting by Sam Francis or Richard Diebenkorn. I despise Crewdson’s work and everything it stands for, for its triumph of technique over art, and for its humourless art-school simulation of criticality. Most of all, I hate Crewdson for the way that he steals from sources that I love, shamelessly quoting everything from Roger Corman to Chris Carter and converting the snap of pop culture into a monumentally vacuous kitsch salon. ■

“Gregory Crewdson: Disturbed Nature” was on display at Vancouver’s Charles H. Scott Gallery from January 26, 2000, to March 6, 2000.

Christopher Brayshaw is a Vancouver-based critic and curator with a special interest in conceptual photography and aesthetic theory. He is curator/co-director of Anodyne Contemporary, a privately funded independent project space.