Kala play Harp 54x62, Oil, acrylic, ink, on canvas, 2004
Kala Eat Fruit, 68x 52.Oil, acrylic, ink, on canvas 2004
Mirror, 2005, 32" x 28" Oil and mixed ia on canvas
Moment, 72:x 72, Oil and epoxy one canvas, 2005
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The Kala Paintings 2002-2006
Kala Nurse Eve, 72x 48. Oil, acrylic, ink,and white-out on canvas 2005
In past epochs, viewers of Art were initiated into a standardized system of (often religious) belief. Art reinforced and reflected these beliefs.In our contemporary society, very few generalized belief systems still exist. As belief systems wane and codices of understanding become fractured, how can an Artist hope to create autonomous works that all viewers can understand? In answer to this question, I have been working a series of paintings and drawings of Kala, a female Sasquatch. One area of contemporary culture that functions similarly to religion is cryptozoology: the study of creatures (Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster) whose existence is unsubstantiated. Regardless of any individuals' belief in these fantastic creatures, they saturate culture and are instantly recognizable much like religious figures. Female subjects form an underlying current in anthropoid cryptozoology. Loren Coleman, one of the foremost Bigfoot researchers, has devoted much of his writing to firsthand reports of men who claim to have been kidnapped and forced to impregnate female Sasquatches. I began to see Bigfoot as something akin to Robert Graves' White Goddess: the unexplainable other, a dangerous Earth Mother that humanity must fear and respect, or else reckon with. This theme is echoed by a variety of Artists and writers. In Robert Crumb's underground comic "Whiteman meets Bigfoot," a man is kidnapped by a female Bigfoot, falls in love with her, and tries to bring her back to civilization. The Zermatism notebooks of outsider artist Stanislav Szukalski are saturated with tales of "Yetisyns" troglodytic near-humans that walk among us. Phillip José Farmer's Mother Was a Lovely Beast explores the oedipal nature of Tarzan and his foster mother. Claude Lévi-Strauss' The Way of the Mask details the Dzonokwa myths of the Pacific Northwest, which often involve the sexual nature of the fur-covered ogresses. In addition to referencing these myths, I wanted to create a subject that could serve as a divine and transgressive embodiment of the history of Art. The Sasquatch Kala is an alternate Venus, emerging from a sea of culture and our deepest primordial memories. She exists as through a dark mirror to all the nudes, nymphs, and muses of Art history. Kala is also a rebuttal to the clichéd pornography that has saturated contemporary Art. As in all images of Sasquatch, her depiction is a synthesis of optical experience and illustrative image. My goal is to seduce the viewer and at the same time distance their reception with a tension between ontological sublimity and epistemological beauty. Kala is the result of my search for a subject that is at once transcendent, comic, sexual, horrific, and impossible.
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Kala Destroy Man-chine! 33ft. x 8 ft. (detail) 004, charcoal, ink, collage, and acrylic on paper.
http://www.gregcookland.com/jasonbell.html
Greg Cook, The Bridge #16
September 2005
It took me a while to make up my mind about Jason Robert Bell's 'Kala' series, which was most recently represented in Chicago at the NOVA Young Art Fair in late April and as 'Untamed Beauty: Kala Versus the World of Men' at Suitable gallery last November, because the paintings and drawings of the adventures of his lady-sasquatch are simultaneously ugly and beautiful, awkward and graceful, sophomoric and profound. Watching the series grow in Bell's Brooklyn studio over the past three years, I've come to believe these are crazy, remarkable works -- and a great deal of their greatness lies in this nagging bipolarity. I keep thinking about them.
Bell's 'Kala' series draws us in by aping pulp and comic book styles, tapping their raw, charismatic, kinetic zing. Here is Kala fighting a giant eagle to swipe an egg for the feral girl she's taken into her protection. Here the behemoth battles a troop of 'sportsmen,' tricked out in the latest newfangled gear, sure to despoil the wilderness. Here she fucks an awestruck, bearded naturalist. Here she snatches a fish from a muddy primordial stream or forlornly plays a harp concocted from a tree and hair and spit or something. And right there is the ludicrous joke of my friend's project -- think 'Bambi' as a musical starring Arnold Schwarzenegger in drag and you're in the neighborhood -- but Bell is joking on the square. He asks why we as a society are still so uncomfortable with powerful, independent women? Why do we mass produce pop whore-heroines outfitted in action-lingerie that leaves just enough to the imagination to evade the censors? Why does the exotic so turn us on? Why is our love of nature so often expressed by driving over it, shooting it, fencing it off, drilling it, chopping it, paving it, polluting it? These are ultimately paintings about morality.
Bell's Kala is Beauty and the Beast rolled into one big, hairy woman-thing with a pig nose and bare breasts and behind. (R. Crumb eat your heart out.) As such, Bell takes the pretty refinement of classical nudes, really the whole Western cannon, (especially Gauguin's sultry, exotic 'savages') and shouts it's all just tits and ass. You squirm because you can't turn her messy seminudity into a classical ideal in safe white marble. Would she just throw a shirt on?
Kala runs around a lost Eden, erected out of the swooning landscapes of the Hudson River School (who themselves were expressing longing for a wild America they feared was being lost) by way of 'One Million Years B.C.' (You know, that 1966 cinema classic with cavebabe Raquel Welch in an animal-hide bikini.) This fear of nature being despoiled is a great American tradition, just ask Thoreau. But Bell undercuts it by making it mock-operatic, and mates it with our parallel traditional heebie-jeebies about what lurks in the woods, which in the American vein goes back at least to the Pilgrims and has made millions for Stephen King.
Bell's technique too teases us with a mix of straight-on skill and lunkhead wise cracks. These are serious paintings full of deft painterly passages a la the New York Action Painters or Bay Area Figuratives. And they are of the scale and ambition of such Abstract Expressionist works too -- which stole the idea from 19th century history painting. You have to be in their presence to really get them. In reproduction they shrivel up into clumsy illustrations. But in the same room, like Kala, they wallop you over the head with their brute physicality.
Then you're stopped short by the purposely ham-handed gags: A diptych shows Kala clocking a coffee-toting, G.I. Joe deer hunter from two different angles. The stream in one painting and Kala's tears in another are executed in clear epoxy, making the paintings' construction all too literal, a visual pun. But whatever Bell gets up to formally, his narrative keeps asserting itself -- Kala refuses to quiet down for such erudite considerations as the way the slathered on acid green resolves into leaves. Just like in a fairy tale we side with the tenderhearted Beast, feel sorry for her, root for her to defeat the superficial jerks of Progress, but in the end we still sorta wish she (and the paintings too) would make it easy for us and turn into a beautiful, cleaned-up young princess -- not stay a Shrek. Bell dares us to love this uncouth, unflinching imperfection.
Bell's artwork has often been about the odysseys of lumbering titans and ancient gods, (male) creatures built as big and as brawny and as ambitious as he is. Here, telling the tale of a beastly woman, Bell speaks of an awkward and ultimately isolating strength and bulk and intelligence and of the resulting melancholy struggle to find one's place in the world. He speaks about vulnerability. And in doing so, he plumbs something more deeply human.
http://www.gregcookland.com/jasonbell.html
Greg Cook, The Bridge #16
September 2005
Greg Cook, The Bridge #16
September 2005
It took me a while to make up my mind about Jason Robert Bell's 'Kala' series, which was most recently represented in Chicago at the NOVA Young Art Fair in late April and as 'Untamed Beauty: Kala Versus the World of Men' at Suitable gallery last November, because the paintings and drawings of the adventures of his lady-sasquatch are simultaneously ugly and beautiful, awkward and graceful, sophomoric and profound. Watching the series grow in Bell's Brooklyn studio over the past three years, I've come to believe these are crazy, remarkable works -- and a great deal of their greatness lies in this nagging bipolarity. I keep thinking about them.
Bell's 'Kala' series draws us in by aping pulp and comic book styles, tapping their raw, charismatic, kinetic zing. Here is Kala fighting a giant eagle to swipe an egg for the feral girl she's taken into her protection. Here the behemoth battles a troop of 'sportsmen,' tricked out in the latest newfangled gear, sure to despoil the wilderness. Here she fucks an awestruck, bearded naturalist. Here she snatches a fish from a muddy primordial stream or forlornly plays a harp concocted from a tree and hair and spit or something. And right there is the ludicrous joke of my friend's project -- think 'Bambi' as a musical starring Arnold Schwarzenegger in drag and you're in the neighborhood -- but Bell is joking on the square. He asks why we as a society are still so uncomfortable with powerful, independent women? Why do we mass produce pop whore-heroines outfitted in action-lingerie that leaves just enough to the imagination to evade the censors? Why does the exotic so turn us on? Why is our love of nature so often expressed by driving over it, shooting it, fencing it off, drilling it, chopping it, paving it, polluting it? These are ultimately paintings about morality.
Bell's Kala is Beauty and the Beast rolled into one big, hairy woman-thing with a pig nose and bare breasts and behind. (R. Crumb eat your heart out.) As such, Bell takes the pretty refinement of classical nudes, really the whole Western cannon, (especially Gauguin's sultry, exotic 'savages') and shouts it's all just tits and ass. You squirm because you can't turn her messy seminudity into a classical ideal in safe white marble. Would she just throw a shirt on?
Kala runs around a lost Eden, erected out of the swooning landscapes of the Hudson River School (who themselves were expressing longing for a wild America they feared was being lost) by way of 'One Million Years B.C.' (You know, that 1966 cinema classic with cavebabe Raquel Welch in an animal-hide bikini.) This fear of nature being despoiled is a great American tradition, just ask Thoreau. But Bell undercuts it by making it mock-operatic, and mates it with our parallel traditional heebie-jeebies about what lurks in the woods, which in the American vein goes back at least to the Pilgrims and has made millions for Stephen King.
Bell's technique too teases us with a mix of straight-on skill and lunkhead wise cracks. These are serious paintings full of deft painterly passages a la the New York Action Painters or Bay Area Figuratives. And they are of the scale and ambition of such Abstract Expressionist works too -- which stole the idea from 19th century history painting. You have to be in their presence to really get them. In reproduction they shrivel up into clumsy illustrations. But in the same room, like Kala, they wallop you over the head with their brute physicality.
Then you're stopped short by the purposely ham-handed gags: A diptych shows Kala clocking a coffee-toting, G.I. Joe deer hunter from two different angles. The stream in one painting and Kala's tears in another are executed in clear epoxy, making the paintings' construction all too literal, a visual pun. But whatever Bell gets up to formally, his narrative keeps asserting itself -- Kala refuses to quiet down for such erudite considerations as the way the slathered on acid green resolves into leaves. Just like in a fairy tale we side with the tenderhearted Beast, feel sorry for her, root for her to defeat the superficial jerks of Progress, but in the end we still sorta wish she (and the paintings too) would make it easy for us and turn into a beautiful, cleaned-up young princess -- not stay a Shrek. Bell dares us to love this uncouth, unflinching imperfection.
Bell's artwork has often been about the odysseys of lumbering titans and ancient gods, (male) creatures built as big and as brawny and as ambitious as he is. Here, telling the tale of a beastly woman, Bell speaks of an awkward and ultimately isolating strength and bulk and intelligence and of the resulting melancholy struggle to find one's place in the world. He speaks about vulnerability. And in doing so, he plumbs something more deeply human.
http://www.gregcookland.com/jasonbell.html
Greg Cook, The Bridge #16
September 2005
Kale! The Rapture of a Cryptozoologist 2021, mixed media on canvas (9x12 inches) with custom frame.
