Title: The National- Macabre, But Colourful
Info:
April 29th, 2009 By Charles Crowell
The Ultimate Mom Painting is a labour of love. A hand-made card that’s seven feet tall. A collage of paper flowers, hundreds strong.
What could be more guileless? It ought to have macaroni stuck to it. As its creator, Amir H Fallah explains: “My mom, about a year ago, said: ‘I want some of your artwork for the house.’ I was like ‘Mom, you like ducks and geese and flowers, and I don’t really do that, you know?’ She was like: ‘No, just make me something pretty... Just make it really colourful with lots of flowers.’ And I was like: ‘I have to make a flower painting. How am I going to pull this one off?’”
Short answer: with glee. Fallah’s Mom paintings – the other one in his new show at the Third Line Gallery is a smaller version of the ultimate, titled Mom You are No. 1 – draw out the most exuberant strain in his style. In fact, it’s hard to see what problem he could have foreseen.
A little background. Fallah is a 30-year-old Iranian-American artist, raised on the east coast but schooled at UCLA. His speciality at the moment (or rather, his artistic speciality; he has a number of other irons in the fire which we will come to) is a sort of psychedelic collage, typically representing makeshift platforms and shelters. Occasionally he puts together a sculpture along the same lines: a multi-storey wooden lean-to adorned with pot plants and vases, objets d’art and nondescript rubble. But for the past few years, the bulk of his output has been wall-art. The Third Line show is dominated by these compositions: views over flimsy towers pieced together from magazine cut-outs and construction paper and great dollops of acrylic. They look like oil derricks standing in a blasted world: splurgey, splattery Ralph Steadman creations pumping out noxious effluent against a day-glo sky.
“The structures,” the artist sighs. “Originally they were referencing these childhood forts I would build, that I would go and play in and let go of reality in.” Presented with the psychotic intensity of the work itself, it’s disconcerting to learn that this playful spirit remains central to Fallah. But on inspection, it’s true: he uses child-like art techniques to replicate childish constructions. And it isn’t simply that his art is about childhood, either. In his account, pretended childhood is the route to artistic vision per se. “When you’re younger,” he says, “you don’t take things as serious and you can let go of reality a lot easier. And I think that’s really conducive to making art.”
Thus the forts, to use Fallah’s name for them, become the stages for juvenile daydream scenarios. In The Saddest, Saddest, Saddest Love Song Ever, multiple copies of Morrissey, Johnny Cash, Elliot Smith and Daniel Johnston, each an icon of adolescent melancholy, are formed into a fantasy supergroup, manna to the wilting teenage romantic. “I wanted to create a painting where all my favourite musicians were in a band together and were all performing together to make the ultimate sad love song,” says Fallah.
“So it’s kind of poking fun at those teenage years when your girlfriend of two weeks would break up with you and you think life can’t go on.” Earlier works have come plastered with armies of Arnold Swarzenegger cut-outs; another avatar of youthful wish-fulfillment.
On several occasions, Fallah tells me that his work is meant to be entertaining. “I take my work very seriously,” he says at one point, “but I don’t want it to be this, like, heavy-handed, brooding artist sitting in his studio, crying himself to sleep every night. That’s not me.” On the contrary, his art should be: “very light-hearted, and have some humour and fun in it,” he says. And so it does, in its lurid and surrealistic way. Yet the fun comes with a macabre streak. In The Hopefuls, the heads of three smiling elderly Asians atop a scaffold, rolled together like eggs in a nest. A desiccated pot-plant extends spidery branches across their faces.
What can they hope for, when they’ve come to this? And there are clearer hints of mortality in Baby Snatchers. A shaggy figure looking like a cross between Swamp Thing and Mr T clutches an infant to his chest. The pair are surrounded on their rickety stage by more blighted plants, a geometrical sculpture, a pair of skulls. Considering how toxic-looking Fallah’s images are at even their most upbeat, it seems absurd to suggest that there’s a touch of et in Arcadia ego about this. But it’s an instructive reminder that the imagination can go to dark places. Youthful vision entails youthful terrors.
Along with these thematic or narrative elements to his work, Fallah has a number of more homely preoccupations – recurring motifs that have less to do with fantasy than with the specific texture of his childhood. “When I go to my mom’s house,” he says, “she has all these coffee tables everywhere. Next to every couch there’s a little coffee table. And she’s got all these little knick-knacks and trinkets and all this kind of inexpensive sculpture. And I always found it interesting that it was like an everyday man’s art, that everyone’s parents have.”
Thus his own forts double as kitschy mantlepieces. Their surfaces are cluttered with oriental vases, moth-eaten yukkas and shapeless thumb-pots. “All these little trinkets have sentimental meaning to their owners,” says Fallah. “And I don’t know why but that really struck a chord with me, so in the paintings there’s always these little still-life elements.”
For all their humbleness, the trinkets look strangely at home beside the celebrity cut-outs and daubed-on oddments (Fallah has a Mighty Boosh-like fondness for vaguely tribal cartoon faces, which he conceals all over his work; he also painted large pastel versions of them onto the gallery wall, giving the space – not coincidentally – the atmosphere of a street fashion boutique). These are disparate ingredients. But they gel: the resulting images look like they were meant to be.
There are riddles here, of course. For instance, are Fallah’s works about childhood, or in some sense products of it? Why, if his method is intended to access a childlike freedom of imagination, do his pieces come out looking so similar to one another? There’s something judicious, even reserved, operating beneath the anarchic surface of these pictures.
Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. Fallah is hardly making art brut here. He’s a savvy art-world entrepreneur: the founder and editor of an international art magazine and the proprietor of a hip clothing line and a design firm. For the past eight years, his quarterly magazine Beautiful/Decay has mixed the worlds of high art and urban fashion to some success. His spin-off fashion brand offers T-shirt and hoodie designs made by the artists featured in the latest issue – a shrewd piece of synergy for an indie outfit. The whole operation began, true to Fallah’s style, as a skate-punk fanzine which he produced when he was 16. “It was made at a local photocopy shop, black-and-white, stapled, and I did about three copies like that, with a friend, and then forgot about it until my senior year in college.” He resurrected it in college with the proceeds from a few sold paintings. And it grew: it now has around eight full-time employees, engaging upward of 15 freelancers at at time. How does Fallah fit it into his painting schedule?
“I’m a really good multi-tasker,” he says. “I mean, really. Not to toot my own horn, but I really – somehow thus far I’ve made it work. Most days I wake up at seven in the morning and I go to my painting studio for two hours, and then I go to my office. I keep a really strict schedule of that, five days a week for the last three years.” Playtime it isn’t. “Artists,” Fallah told me at the start of the interview, “are some of the few people who can tap that energy that they had when they were a kid.” There’s no doubting his energy, but it isn’t always easy to see the child in him. I ask him what his mother thought of the big flower painting that he made for her. He laughs. “She asked me if she could keep it,” he says, “and I was like: ‘No, I’m gonna sell it!’ So I have to make her one. It’s too big for her place... at some point I’m going to actually make her one and actually give it to her.” Here’s hoping his schedule allows him.
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