Art In America

Lawrence Gipe has explored the relationship between authoritarianism and art practice since the late 1980’s. He has appropriated and re-presented heroically scaled images of progress, technology and power in the manner of social realism, inviting us to consider the seductive promise of ideological driven art.

The four understated paintings in Gipe’s show at Alexander Gray Associates, all dated 2006, presented a change of pace, if not direction. The focal point was Lombardsbrücke, 1938 (60 by 84 inches), a tranquil cityscape of figures of figures walking into brilliant sunlight. In another section of the gallery were two more oil paintings of about the same size, one of armed and agitated Qash’qai nomads on horseback (Iran, 1946), the other showing two wooden ships packed with Jewish immigrants (Palestine, 1946). A small gouache depicting four Americans playing golf beside an oil pipeline in the desert (Saudi Arabia, 1948) provided a coda to this group.

The last three works are based on pictures taken by the American photojournalist David Douglas Duncan, who worked in the Middle East for Life magazine from 1946 to 1950. Gipe’s use of documentary photographs accounted for the show’s initial impression of restraint and detachment. However, this veneer was peeled away by the obvious irony of golfers teeing-off beside a desert pipeline. The use of images from the 1940s reminds us that the problems in the Middle East have lasted decades, and the selection of pictures from an ironic American journal subtly alludes to the lengthy history of this country’s interventions in the region.

Offering such readings fulfills one of Gipe’s central intentions: he omits labels and personal statements from his shows to cultivate what art historian Ernst Gombrich once called “the beholder’s share.” This is intended as a calculated contrast to the programmatic images he typically appropriates and is a means of highlighting the malleability or, in Gipe’s words, “the amorality” of art.

His method of appropriation emphasizes the distance between the “objective” lens of the photographer and the “subjective” act of painting. By reworking small black-and-white photographs on canvas, Gipe invests the image with a new grandeur, craftsmanship and chromatic appeal. In the Hamburg street scene Lombardsbrücke, 1938 Gipe has painted the sky with the luminosity of a Turner landscape and the passersby walking into the light towards the eponymous bridge with the shadowy ambiguity akin to figures in de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings. This enhances the lyrical qualities of the original picture, which was reproduced in a prewar German photographic annual because it fitted Nazi aesthetics. Gipe’s painting is a radiant but disturbing vision that left the visitor wondering whether the shadowy figures were victims or fellow travelers with the Nazis and, taking in the whole show, whether more immediate issues were implied by exhibiting this painting adjacent to a group of works evoking tensions in the Middle East.

Alexander Gray Associates
526 West 26 Street #1019
New York NY 10001

by Ann Compton

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Pick of the Week: Lawrence Gipe

The modes of entertainment Lawrence Gipe refers to in the title of his series “Zirkus und Varieté” were the circus and cabaret performances of early-20th-century Middle Europe. As such, the images Gipe lifts from vintage photographs and publications, ren­dering the performers in action but silhouetted against inky black backgrounds, are fraught with historical implications: the tightrope, balancing, juggling and other acts depicted in these grainy but vivid apparitions — clownish in their exaggeration, balletic in their poise, almost militaristic in their precision — stand as metaphors for a time of great hope, change and peril. A few full-color paintings, aping early color photography, fulfill Gipe’s obsession with mechanical-age technologies and prewar race and class clichés. Such foreboding, heightened by a nocturnal gloom, complicates the aura of nostalgia induced by the images. The good old days, Gipe reminds us, were nasty, brutish and short.

Hunsaker/Schlesinger
2525 Michigan Ave., No. T3
Santa Monica;

LA Weekly

By Peter Frank

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Beauty beneath ideology

The Arizona Republic, Mar. 26, 2006

In the 1930s, Nazi spies photographed strategically important locations in the United States: oil refineries, airports, military installations, railway stations. And in at least one instance - Penn Station in Manhattan - the photographer could not keep himself from finding a kind of artistic beauty in the picture: Sun rays stream through the windows like the beams angels ride in religious art.

It was an unnecessary fillip considering the purpose of the picture. But it underlines an odd alliance between totalitarianism and aesthetics. Hitler, after all, was originally an artist.

Painter Lawrence Gipe has seized upon this connection to make it the subject of his art: the aesthetic surface of fascism and what it might mean.

The period between the two great wars was one of ideological battle, mostly between the forces of communism and those of fascism. What is odd is that the prevailing artistic style - Art Deco - should become the lingua franca of both sides. Propaganda art from Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany can be told apart only by the text accompanying it: On one hand there is the solidarity of the proletariat, on the other, the solidarity of das Volk. Same faces in both pictures, same poses, same heroic message.

Even democracy used the same style: You can see it in the FSA photographs made for Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal America.

Gipe has used many of these original images and made large paintings of them, often with ironic text painted on the canvas.

In a series about the Krupp factories that kept Hitler supplied with tanks and railroads, Gipe has painted three locomotives, half obscured in their own steam. They are three black, brooding shapes backlit with a sheen of sunlight caught on the rail tops. Under is written a quote from the Roman maximist Publilius Syrus: "Necessity knows no law." (In German, as Gipe writes it, it is Noth kennt kein Gebot.) It was a favorite Nazi sentiment.

The painting oozes dread, but it also oozes a kind of gorgeous painterly surface. And it underlines the horrible irony of this pan-totalitarian aesthetic: These images are not mere prettiness, but rather aspire to the sublime. There is power being shown and glorified. It is almost an apotheosis of industrial progress.

The sublime is the aesthetic appreciation of that which should frighten us, whether it is the vast Rocky Mountains of Albert Bierstadt or the sea storms of Turner or the heavenly rose of Dante: It inspires awe, and a sense of the smallness of the individual in a universe so mind-bogglingly immense that we cannot begin to fathom its depths or its indifference.

Totalitarian propagandists used this same sublime to suggest the smallness of the individual and the immensity of the collective, or of the state - or whatever "greater good" it wished to promote, and the sublime is subverted to political ends.

In his groundbreaking TV series The Shock of the New, art critic Robert Hughes spent an entire episode exploring this deadly dance of Romanticism and fascism.

Gipe is fascinated by the perverse connection of all these elements: beauty and ideology, fascism and Romanticism, Art Deco and a universal aesthetic of the victory of our good over the forces arrayed against us. And, what is more, how this aesthetic continues to play a part in the propaganda of governments - even our own - today.

For the Arizona State University Art Museum exhibit, Gipe has created a wall-size collage of imagery: Nazi propaganda, 1939 U.S. World's Fair postcards, Soviet recruiting posters, magazine ads for cigarettes and Fords, idealized families, idealized Woman, industrial workers and dirigibles floating over cities. They combine to tell us an all too familiar story.

But they also say something equivocal: Underneath the political and social manipulation there is the uneasy truth that beauty exists outside any political meaning, and insensible to any ideological message; that beauty remains, in some ineffable way, beyond good and evil. It's an almost Hindu way of looking at the universe: No matter how horrible things get on the human scale, the cosmic scale takes little notice, but burns with the radiance of the infinite "I Am."

By Richard Nilsen
See The Arizona Republic.

ARTFORUM New York

Critic’s Picks Summer 2005

“No Apology for Breathing” presents exactly what we didn’t see enough of during the crucial summer of 2004 – an intelligent group show that considers American political culture without preaching or sinking into half-baked one-liners. Organizer Matthew Lusk (who contributes three pieces) buttresses the exhibition by importing a model of the facade of McCarren Park Pool (a local WPA project built in 1936), gesturing towards the show’s guiding concept – the shift in national consciousness and concepts of governmental responsibility that occurred between the New Deal era and today.

Lawrence Gipe’s paintings (with titles like Halliburton Girl and Halliburtonproudmonkey) filter the constructed idealism of Cold-war era American ads through Dali’s dreamy image combinations, where soft watches are replaced by hard hats of Halliburton employees.

Julian LaVerdiere’s iconic eagle bust, Jean-Baptiste, 2004, symbolizes the nation’s current evolution. Literally tossed into a corner and laying on its side, this eagle has fallen from its lofty perch, its once proud beak twisted into an insecure, melancholy pout.

“No Apology for Breathing”
Jack The Pelican Presents
487 Driggs Avenue
July 21 – August 28

By Nick Stillman

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ARTFORUM March 2000

The panels on view from Lawrence Gipe's series "The Last Picture Show", 1999, are tours de force of irony, both conceptually and visually. Lifting images from Nazi-era German source material (magazine reproductions of "politically correct" paintings, pictures out of photography manuals), Gipe repaints them, often in glaring, artificial-looking colors. The result is often oddly beautiful: his simulacra glow with aesthetic virility, subliminally in Panel No. 12, where the light has a tenebrist density and intensity, and in Panel No. 5, where the female figure takes on a visually exciting, elusive edge. But the virility is more than aesthetic: it also derives from the figures and scenes, all of which are sturdy, wholesome, solid, and sometimes emotionally febrile - officially deep and stirring.

In Gipe's work, painting and photography all but cancel each other out - it becomes difficult to say which contributes what to the work - leaving rootless images that seem to become vulgarly evident. Gipe suggests that art as such is a species of rhetoric, adding no substance to what it renders but only ãoratingä it in a convincing way.

Does Gipe's rhetorical aestheticization of his found images, particularly those paintings from the Nazi era, make them more significant, by making them more elusive and consummate, more purely art, or does it paradoxically confirm their banality, reducing them to historical curiosities? Does the question seems beside the clever aesthetic and rhetorical point of his own art? In other words, does Gipe make these images more suggestive than they would be on their own, or does he reduce them to eloquent inconsequence?

In Antiquity, theorists debated the merits of the plain versus the florid style of rhetoric. Gipe takes plain-style images and makes them aesthetically ornate, combining the best of both rhetorical modes. This makes one wonder whether delivery matters more to him than meaning as such. But an analytic spark is generated by his rhetoric. It makes us realize that the Nazis were modern in spirit, however traditional their art. That is, they were not retrograde nostalgists for the Old Master days but brilliant propagandists and rhetoricians. Gipe has in fact shown that art is propaganda for the cause of its own power and that it loses power when its aesthetic strategy becomes too obvious and ironic.

Donald Kuspit

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TIME OUT NEW YORK January 13-20, 2000

LAWRENCE GIPE, "THE LAST PICTURE SHOW"

Realist Lawrence Gipe has been busy deconstructing the fading ideological charge of heroic imagery for some time now. His subjects have included everyone from members of the Krupp family of German arms manufacturers to Robert Moses, the great public builder of modern New York. For his current show, Gipe zeroes in on the content of German magazines from the Nazi era.

The pictures - of beautiful mädchen, of the bucolic German country-side, of muscular, nearly naked athletes and of classical art museums - aren't all that different from the sort of idealized imagery you might find hawking cars, underwear or the Olympics today. But, of course, what differentiates Gipe's art is that it doesn't explicitly comment on it either.

What you see are strange, silent images with a certain creepy allure you know you shouldn't find compelling - and yet still do. Gipe seems to be posing the question of whether it makes one sympathetic to Nazi crimes to find enjoyment in something like Panel No. 2 (Kunsthalle 1937), a retreating perspective of beautiful, green-tinted galleries. The answer is yes and no: with its soothing Corot-like landscapes, its chastely nubile classical figures and its wildlife sculptures, the scene looks pretty serene.

Similarly, Panel No. 3 (Madonna and Child), features a capped and customed mutter smiling brightly at her baby; Gipe heightens their folkloric charm almost intolerably by enveloping the pair in a bright blue background. The result forces one to maintain a certain distance from the image, even as its innocence obscures its role as racial propaganda. Here as in the rest of the show, Gipe's subtlety and restraint leave the conclusions to be drawn by you, making this work his best in some time.

Robert Mahoney

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ART NEWS April 2000

In 1937, the Nazis mounted the "Great Exhibition of German Art", thereby putting their stamp of approval on an unsuspecting body of paintings and sculpture. A documentary photograph of this exhibition is among the Nazi-era images Lawrence Gipe appropriated for the insightful and disturbing paintings in his own exhibition, "The Last Picture Show".

Gipe's images are based on black-and-white photographs in mid- to late-1930s German journals and magazines, which he has blown up and colored. Divorced from their original contexts, his simple compositions, with their slick, sentimental charm, are initially very seductive. But the gloss also highlights the troublesome subtext.

The art advocated by the Third Reich provides perhaps the most dramatic example of images stigmatized by their context, but "The Last Picture Show" is more than a deconstruction of the Nazi propaganda.

The most striking work, Panel No. 3 (Madonna and Child), is a portrait of a mother and child in traditional German dress against a blindingly effulgent ground of turquoise blue. More than a ironic re-presentation of a poster originally designed to promote the propagation of the Aryan race, it is a variation on the far older theme of the Madonna and the Child.

All the images in Gipe's formulation bring with them the baggage of history, and the artist calls further attention to how far they are from being his own by painting them from photographs. In this way, not only is the ultimate meaning of his paintings preordained, but his every brushstroke is as well.

Christina Cho

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"THE LAST PICTURE SHOW"

(Brochure Text, 1999)

Continuing his ongoing deconstruction of "heroic" imagery from between the two World Wars, Lawrence Gipe's latest paintings focus specifically on the complex, propagandistic effect of Nazi-era photography. Appropriating his imagery from German photo journals and magazines from the mid to late 1930s, Gipe translates the small black and white images into large, visually seductive color paintings. Radically severed from their original contexts, Gipe's reinterpretations force us to actively reconstruct the images' ideological significance.

At first glance, Panel No. 2 (Kunsthalle, 1937), 1999, appears to be a muted, interior view of a typical art museum. Devoid of visitors or museum staff, the empty galleries take on a timeless, ineffable quality that transcend a specific cultural time or place. However, it turns out that the museum space is ideologically pertinent: the image is derived from a documentary photograph of the official "Great Exhibition of German Art" of 1937 which proclaimed the superiority of "true German art" over what the Nazis dubbed "Degenerate, Bolshevik, and Jewish Art." By reducing the image's political specificity, Gipe forces us to negotiate the active, ideological role of the art institution as such, while simultaneously reiterating its conventional, comforting role as both the arbiter and producer of public taste.

We see a similar effect in Panel No. 3 (Madonna and Child), 1999, which superimposes the tropes of a traditional art historical religious painting (redolent of the works of Renaissance masters such as Raphael) onto a German image of a mother holding her baby while dressed in traditional peasant costume. The photograph was related to the ongoing propaganda campaign in which the Nazis encouraged early marriage and motherhood as part of a long-term program to increase the population of the burgeoning Aryan nation. Significantly, Gipe adds a synthetic, vivid blue background which further de-familiarizes the image.

However, far from simply recontextualizing familiar historical genres, Gipe deliberately brushes history against the grain by juxtaposing and imbricating official Nazi imagery with the suppressed Modernist movements of the period, particularly the politically denounced documentary realism of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), a genre usually associated with the Communism agenda of class-conscious photographers such as August Sander and Renger-Patzsch. Although Modernist innovation in painting and sculpture was virulently condemned as Entartete Kunst, Gipe discovers an important harnessing of this otherwise stunted Modernist project to Nazi ideology via photography, particularly through its lionization of German social, technological and scientific innovation (the building of the autobahns, the development of fitness and holiday camps, etc.).

In "Der Blick",1999, which was appropriated from a "How-To" photo manual published in 1942, features the distorted facial perspective of a man looking through a large lens. The image is quintessentially modernist, evoking radical artists such as Alexander Rodchenko and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, thereby tying Nazi-era documentation to the hated Bolshevik and Bauhaus avant-garde.Thus, far from propagating a monolithic aesthetic agenda, Nazi representation is in fact riddled with ideological contradictions.

Because the artist invites us to admire and enjoy, yet also profoundly question the harnessing of such affecting strategies for ideologically sinister ends, Walter Benjamin's famous distinction between aestheticized politics (the Nazi's predilection for giant spectacle, typified by Albert Speer's choreography of the Nuremburg rallies) and politicized aesthetics (the 1920s bolshevik agenda of "Art into Life") is effectively deconstructed. In Gipe's hands, beauty itself seduces us into ideological orthodoxy while at the same time transporting historically informed images by opening them up to a more open-ended critique.

Colin Gardner

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ART IN AMERICA, March 1999

In his latest series of paintings, titled "20th Century Limited", Lawrence Gipe continues to critique the myth of progress, a project that has consumed the 35-year-old artist for most of his career. With parodies of industrial propaganda (WPA publications, Fortune Magazine advertisements and Fascist hortatory posters, to name a few sources) generated between the world wars, he creates a mock portrait of technological triumph. At first glance though, the work appears genuinely nostalgic. Images of skyscrapers, airplanes and locomotives push up against the picture plane in bold silhouettes, or recede into sepia-toned shadows. Everywhere there is motion: steam billows, electrical currents zap and propellers whir. Contrary to its forward-looking message, a lot of machine-age propaganda gained its visual allure from just this romantic sensibility - a contradiction the artist formally underscores with highly varnished surfaces and refined brushwork.

With titles like Departure (Hamburg 1938), Stalled Engine and Insignificance (all 1998), Gipe's emblems of utopian design soon cloud over their potential (and eventual) use. In past works, the artist inscribed Krugeresque slogans ( "Here dwells the heart's repose", "Necessity knows no law") and single word phrases ("faith", "complicity", "pride") across his images to achieve this ironic effect. Without such prompts, the current pictures are nonetheless sinister, and perhaps more so for their lack of immediate criticality. They allow the viewer to initially engage the rhetoric of progress as a seductive visual form and, in doing so, better convey its persuasive powers. Persuasion is essential to Gipe's premise. His decision to impart its significance through visceral rather than didactic means signals an important shift in the work.

Gipe is an admirable painter, and in the service of satire his technical acumen can dazzle. The exhibition's centerpiece, 20th Century Limited, exemplifies this talent. Comprising four abutted panels, the 32 foot-long painting constructs a complex montage of images - a forerunner of the atomic generator, a fighter plane, monuments from New York World's Fairs, a dam-generator piston, Rockefeller Center's mighty sculpture of Atlas - rendered from diverse perspectives and depicted in varying scales. In sham tribute to the achievements he depicts, Gipe exaggerates the finesse of the facture to the point of hubris. An impressive work, it is almost too obvious in its intentions. The best of the new paintings are less so; their strength lies in the insidiousness of their attraction and their ability to con the viewer accordingly.

Jane Harris

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ART NEWS, September 1996

Lawrence Gipe reconstitutes and reinterprets heroic images from between the world wars to create paintings that memorialize the false premise of man's triumph over nature - the empty promise of politics, science, and technology. In this, his fifth exhibition in New York, the 33-year-old, California-based artist has dropped the propaganda-like titles he formerly incorporated into his images. Without them we can see more fully what a masterful painter Gipe is, and how seamlessly he is able to unite his technique with his ideology.

The focus of the exhibition was the monumental Documentary Painting, which, in four abutted panels, spanned a long gallery wall. It is a montage of images that segue smoothly from one to the next - the profiles of Washington and Lincoln as carved on Mount Rushmore serve as book-ends. Images of metal and stone set against sky, Documentary Painting is a panorama of failed promises and shattered utopian dreams. By dramatizing the already-over-dramatized, Gipe exposes the fictions inherent in history and the pompous proclamations of authority.

Gipe's is an indirect but effective means of reminding us to heed the lessons of the Industrial Revolution as we speed down the Information Highway - and he entreats us to observe ourselves as we will be judged by future generations.

Carol Diehl

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