Dream Object (I was looking at drawings of successful businessmen which became increasingly distorted and became a pornographic hedge...)

The basic circuits that make us dream are hard-wired the same way into people everywhere. The stock of images that the individual psyche plays tricks with are acquired locally. For a long time. American artists of a surrealistic bent tried with varying success to dream in French or Spanish. Soon enough though, Surrealism leaked out of the polyglot salons where art went along with acquired accents and entered the public domain, which in the United States meant it had to compete with the indigenous forms of weirdness that popular culture fed and fed off of. Tabloids, TV, monster magazines, and cartoons were where most post-1950s artists went to school before they went to art school, if at all, though judging from his connoisseurship of screw-ball Sunday painters, Jim Shaw appears to have made a precocious study of rummage sales and thrift stores as well. Not that classic Surrealism escaped anybody's notice. Dali was everybody's pre-drug favorite-after drugs it seemed like he was trying too hard-and Shaw irreverently gives him his due along with Matta. The impact of TV and comic strips is more readily apparent in Shaw's collected dreamwork. In the current baiting style, the artist's subtitles set the conceptual framework for his more generic titles. Dream Object (I was looking at drawings of successful business men which became increasingly distorted and became a pornographic hedge...) is a case in point. One is reminded in this connection of a remark that critic Peter Schjeldahl once made about economic booms and busts of the past. "The 1980s," he said, "was about the sex-life of money" So what does that make these captains of industry and finance: facilitators, efficiency experts, program consult ants, performance enhancers, expeditors, avid onlookers, or primary movers and shakers? Whatever their particular expertise and position, it would seem as if prolonged attention to the mating games of currencies and the sexology of balance sheets has done something to them. The eighteen Boardroom-wall-like portraits collectively compose and decompose, frame by frame, as one reads through them into the homogeneous mass that constitutes the bottom line of Shaw's miasmic transaction. Call it hedge fun.
Text written by Curator Rob Storr for the exhibition catalog.