BRUCE HELANDER A Survey of Works PETER MARCELLE GALLERY BRIDGEHAMPTON I would like to thank Peter Marcelle for inviting me to join his illustrious gallery, and I offer sincere appreciation to the dedicated staff at Peter Marcelle Gallery: directors, Catherine McCormick and Betsy Maloney, and assistant, Breahna Arnold, for coordinating the logistics of this exhibition. I would like to acknowledge the daily encouragement and support from my wife and partner, Claudia, and for her enthusiastic diligence and assistance in the studio, especially for gluing down the works on paper. My thanks to Susan Hall, the studio manager and my assistant for more years than we would rather admit. Imperial Cove, 2006, Wood, found object collage construction, vintage frame, 25 x 31 ½ in. A sincere handshake to my art and design director, Daniel Ellis, who always produces a beautiful product. Thank you to Donald Kuspit for his insightful essay; to Michael Price for his excellent photography; to our framer, BRUCE David Smith/Framesmith; and to Christopher Hurbs and Palmer Crippen, studio interns. HELANDER And finally, to fellow artists, Cameron Gray and Dan Rizzie, whose regular, trusted opinions assisted greatly in the development of this show. A Survey of Works Essay by Donald Kuspit | Edited by Susan Hall Designed by Daniel Ellis | Photographs by Michael Price PETER MARCELLE GALLERY 2411 Main Street, Bridgehampton, New York 11932 T. 631-338-2723 | 631-613-6170 www.petermarcellegallery.com This exhibition made possible in part by an artist’s grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Ironic Play: Bruce Helander’s Collages BY DONALD KUSPIT ruce Helander’s collages have that “high degree of she’s the perverse embodiment of what William James fa- immediate absurdity”—Breton’s phrase—that marks mously called the Bitch Goddess of materialistic Success that them as surreal. The method in the madness of sur- America promises. Helander in effect dismembers her, sug- realistB art is what Breton called “pure psychic automatism,” gesting that she’s just a transient illusion, not to say a big lie. “a condition in which activity is carried out without con- He treats Elvis Presley in the same ironical disillusioning scious knowledge.” This allows one to associate, more or less way. Helander also is obsessed with Presley, as Croaked freely—playfully or compulsively, depending on how deeply Double Elvis, Elvis Revisited, and Artist as Elvis (Past Per- unconscious one is—images that one is ordinarily conscious formance) show, to the extent of identifying with him, with of to “extraordinary” effect, as though in a dream. “Automa- anxious irony: he’s another disappointment, another fake tism” and “free association” are psychoanalytic terms—the dream figure, another fraud. He’s a mythical, make-believe former is from Pierre Janet, the latter from Sigmund Freud god in the pantheon of American popular culture, another (both of whom Breton acknowledges as “influences”)—sug- betrayal of the American Dream in the very act of personi- gesting that Helander’s collages invite psychological inter- fying it. Like Helander’s American Dream Girl, Presley, an pretation: they certainly do look like dream images—Surre- American Dream Boy, and like her a narcissistic heartthrob, alism’s “simulated dreams,” as Breton called them. Indeed, is a case of arrested development, physical as well as emo- At the Beach, Fun in the Sun, High Heel Helper and My Blue tional. The older he became, the more he struggled to look Heaven are explicitly sexual dreams—images of seductive young, which perhaps is why he died young, as the ancient dream girls skewed into what psychoanalysts call (alluring) myth tells us Narcissus did by falling in love with his own part objects, more particularly, breasts and buttocks, with image. And just as they are alluring sirens, so Presley sang some shapely legs thrown in for good measure. siren songs. Helander skews and mocks him with more out- But, let’s quickly note, there’s something ironical—play- raged energy than he brings to the desirable demoiselles of fully ironic—in this skewing and fragmenting—this surreal Florida—which is where Helander lives, as Lounge Chair shattering of the image in the very act of presenting it. The Lizard (presumably watching them go by), with its pecu- blue heaven is unexpected black, and the dream girls prove liarly lurid turquoise green, makes clear—perhaps because oddly unsubstantial and ungraspable, dissolving into the Presley was self-destructive, while the demoiselles fade into atmosphere, leaving haunting residues of titillating flesh. thin air, dematerialized into unstable fantasies. Helander’s dream girls are tantalizingly out of reach, as Like all dreams, both promise more than they can deliver, dream girls—mirages that disappear as soon as they are although Presley seems much more solid and real for Hel- approached—always are. Helander’s images are peculiarly ander, as the Croaked Double Elvis sculpture suggests. The “anti-representational,” or incoherently representational, small croaking frogs—Helander’s surrogate comic commen- however ostensibly representational, that is, however much tators—suggest that his fame and fortune are a joke that went we recognize that we are looking at a glamorous female to his head: thus his doubled—“swelled”—head, while the figure—an agelessly attractive, conventionally beautiful title is an obvious reference to Warhol’s famous double por- At the Beach, 2012, Paper collage on museum board, 25 x 18 ½ in. American Dream Girl. She’s the mythical, completely make- trait of Elvis. Helander decapitates him, but he grows another believe goddess of popular culture—it is always “redefining head, suggesting that he’s a hydra-headed monster, infinitely reality,” as Peter Whybrow ironically put it. More particularly, reproducible, as media icons tend to be. But the smiling frogs Pirate’s Paradise, 1997, Original paper collage on museum board, Diptych: 10 x 13 in. each. stand over what is in effect his corpse, ridiculing him, and entertainment. It also reminds us that from the start, Surreal- suggesting his inherent ridiculousness—the ridiculousness of ism used popular cultural images to absurd effect, perhaps his success and popularity, for it didn’t save him from himself. most noteworthily in Max Ernst’s collages. Avant-garde art is I immediately thought of Aristophanes’ croaking frogs when socially critical—in dialectically negative, unresolved relation- I saw the piece, which shows Helander’s ability to make con- ship with society, as thinkers as different as Renato Poggioli vincing three-dimensional work. He’s a cunning comedian, and T. W. Adorno have argued. Helander’s collages continue reminding us, as Aristotle wrote, that comedy deals with the this tradition of avant-garde negativity, if in a seemingly lighter ridiculously real, indeed, a reality that seems to ridicule itself. way—deceptively lighter way, for there is a slashing aggres- Even “pure art” is treated with ironical irreverence by sivity and sardonic sharpness to his irony. He offers us critical Helander. An abstract expressionist painting is a Branch avant-garde comedy attacking social icons and illusions in Office—of Abstract Expressionism Inc., or is each earth- which we are asked to invest our deepest feelings. He gives brown painterly gesture a dead branch on a barren tree of us the dregs of our unconscious desires and social illusions, art? Snobbish Mr. New Yorker—Helander’s famously witty ridiculing them and himself—and the populist art he uses to cover for the magazine of that name, reducing Manhattan reveal them—in the course of doing so. His art is a surreal heap to a fractured map of itself—has its Eye on Jersey, suggest- of fragments, ironically accumulated to shore up a sense of ing that’s the place to really be, at least if one wants beaches self, as T. S. Eliot said, that may exist only as an ironical illusion. and fun. The work is a subtle Sidesplitter, to refer to another The question is whether these ruins form an “unstable of Helander’s works—also poking ironical fun at the popular irony” or a “stable irony,” to use Wayne Booth’s important culture’s comic strip figures (Mr. New Yorker is one, and so is distinction. Does the unconscious “truth asserted or implied” Presley) while using them to ridicule the society they repre- by the irony—the unconscious truth that “undermines” con- sent. The skull in Pirate’s Paradise has two evil eyes and is scious truth by means of irony—show and leave the self in split in two, the Trunk Show is a shambles, Imperial Cove is ruins, so that “no stable reconstruction can be built from the marked by a surreally giant growth but its glory is long gone, ruins revealed through the irony”—or does the “underlying and Sending Out an S.O.S. is a panicked cry for help in the reality” of intense existential feeling revealed by Helander’s midst of an incoherent mess of manic details. Helander may relentless ironic play with widely known social images “ar- be the broncobuster in Bronco, but the bucking horse is ready tistically” stabilize to convey a sense of unique self? I suggest to throw him. The lasso ties head and hooves together, sug- both/and rather than either/or. The ironic playfulness of Hel- gesting that it’s about to trip over itself. Helander has come ander’s art suggests a self that is able to steady itself by imagi- absurdly full circle, as it were. natively acknowledging its own self-contradiction. Collage readily lends itself to surreal irony by reason of DONALD KUSPIT WAS THE WINNER OF THE PRESTIGIOUS FRANK JEWETT MATHER AWARD FOR its use of incommensurate images. It shows the unconscious DISTINCTION IN ART CRITICISM (1983), GIVEN BY THE COLLEGE ART ASSOCIATION AND IS A CONTRIBUTING EDITOR AT ARTFORUM, ARTNET MAGAZINE, SCULPTURE AND TEMA CELESTE, Post Triangle, 2009, Original acrylic on canvas with printed background, 56 ¾ x 39 ¼ in.