Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/603573
254 CULTURED im Shaw never got the memo that less is more. At 63, the artist is a maximalist, in spite of his doubts about himself. He's not someone who is used to using a filter in art—or in life for that matter. It all just pours out of him. It's hard to imagine another artist who would say, about their biggest American museum show to date, "There's a real danger with my work, of it just being exhausting. This is about as much as you want to force down anyone's eyeballs." That statement is not likely to send people running to see "Jim Shaw: The End is Here," at the New Museum in New York until January 10th, 2016, but the grotesque phrasing is of the same vein as his work—and it has the benefit of being true. The show sprawls over three floors, and strange wonders abound. The Los Angeles-based Shaw deeply mines his subconscious and lets dreams rule the day. But the word Surrealism, with its connotations of Magritte's tidy little juxtapositions, doesn't really cover this artist's work. Comic book styles and themes are everywhere, as is religion—Shaw invented his own, called Oism—and his preoccupation with the body and with sex is on full display. "They are going to see a lot of pornographic dreams," he says of the show. Shaw changes styles and media frequently, tackling everything from drawings to paintings to huge installations. And even though he doesn't always let it show, he's a talented draftsman— his Distorted Face series and his sketches for Giant Face series are plenty proof of that, delivered in glorious black and white. "I pretty much have ADD and couldn't possibly do the same thing over and over again," he says. His late '80s and early '90s series My Mirage—in part a bildungsroman about a fictional boy named Billy—is a highlight of "The End is Here," and it gets across his virtuosity. The work careens from riffs on high-end comic art like that of R. Crumb, to psychedelic posters, to the writings of William S. Burroughs as well as every crappy TV commercial and adolescent-oriented publication of the 1960s. "There was a period when mining your actual biography wasn't considered that cool," he says. "I looked for a way that I could actually be accepted doing all these different things. So I invented a sort of pseudonym for My Mirage." From the start, identity was self-consciously mutable for Shaw. Like his close L.A. friend, the late, great artist Mike Kelley, he hails from Michigan. "I'm from a small town. I was supposed to go to Cooper Union but I couldn't handle New York City in 1970," he says. After attending the University of Michigan, he headed west to CalArts, which proved fruitful in creating lasting connections. "I wouldn't have met Mike if I had stayed in New York," Shaw says. "I wouldn't have had John Baldessari as a teacher, I wouldn't have met Tony Oursler." Surprising for someone who's having a big museum show and is now represented by Metro Pictures, he struggled for a long time. "I just assumed I was never going to make a living as an artist, so I worked in special effects for at least a decade until I really didn't have the time to do it anymore," says Shaw, who worked on Earth Girls are Easy, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 and The Abyss. Another twist is that one of Shaw's known bodies of work isn't by his own hand. His Thrift Store Paintings are actual canvases by others, unloved and unlovable to many people, but when assembled together in a room they form a kind of conceptual art project. "A weird effect of doing the thrift store paintings is that now I'm even more self-conscious of the things that are wrong in my work, because the things that are wrong are often the things that are most interesting about a thrift store painting." In other words, it's not easy being inside Shaw's head. He's convinced his work isn't odd enough, despite all evidence to the contrary. "I'm hoping to get weirder and feel less concerned about the economics of it all," he says as he looks forward. "In three years I'll be eligible for Social Security. I'd like to be a little more relaxed." Untitled (Distorted Faces series), 1985 COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND THE NEW MUSEUM J