William Lewis: Signs and Wonders

Painting is impure. It is the adjustment of impurities which forces its continuity.
-Philip Guston

Every work of art carries the past around in its bones. The imprint is unavoidable, but how it is borne by each object can mean the difference between willful amnesia or nostalgic pastiche on the one hand and the possibility of transformation on the other. The worthiest objects accommodate their obscure inheritances and tangled, nearly forgotten birthrights, accepting the burdens that will sustain them through the bright, short day of the present. To the maker of such an object, the past offers no refuge, no safe haven. It is the historical undertow against which the here and now struggles.

For William Lewis, whose work is by turns erudite and scatological, slapstick and scholarly, the world--as it is now and as it has always been--is a wilderness of signs and wonders. It is an attic packed to the rafters with dusty family heirlooms whose aura is at once personal and talismanic, but whose purposes no one fully recalls: obsolete things that must be examined and puzzled over and put to some use. His complex imagery--drawing in part from the encyclopedically arcane (references to antiquated scientific illustrations, alchemical treatises, botanical and zoological studies, and instructional charts abound) and the vernacular (Depression-era signage, comics and cartoons, cheap print advertisements, roadside folk art)--is predicated upon the experience of looking intently at a once familiar thing and perceiving its inherent, persistent strangeness. The obsolescence of images and objects and beliefs is in itself a form of transformation, a kind of radioactive decay in which every cherished certainty and permanence slips away from us to find more stable forms of being, always drifting down into a past that has no bottom. For Lewis, art-making is a variant of this transformative process, an alchemy performed in the deepening chasm between an artifact and its purported meaning, where the adulterated materials of the past are fashioned briefly into the stuff of the present.

One of Lewis's recent large-scale works, Taking Form (2002), is constructed as a series of overlapping drawings on discolored sheets of paper that form a patchwork of amendments, marginalia, discursive commentaries, enlargements, second thoughts-the visual equivalent of a medieval tome in which blossoming addenda threaten to eclipse the original text. Painted in gouache but flecked with the rough cross-hatching and scored contours associated with crude woodblock prints, a small inventory of images and objects twist in the wind, some tethered to what looks like a pike-mounted Catherine's wheel. (It's the kind of macabre Maypole seen in the background of Bruegel's apocalyptic The Triumph of Death (1562), upon which thieves and adulterers were once offered as carrion to the crows.) Scanning the bafflingly symbolic arrangement of images-the silhouette of a dangling squirrel, a figure resembling a circus strongman, a cenotaphic form that could be a tomb or a kiln chimney, and a free-floating eye-is like stumbling unannounced upon some unfolding secret ceremony whose consummation depends upon the right catalytic combination of esoteric objects, each remaining indecipherable to the uninitiated.

In fact, the rolling catalogue of motifs and objects in Lewis's paintings are often treated with the same solemn theatricality usually befitting the fetishized relics of some obscure saint or the curious physical anomalies of a sideshow freak. (In the upper left corner of Taking Form a curtain is drawn aside, revealing the unsettled convocation of objects). With their shallow, rudimentary sense of space and flattened, presentational style, the pictures function a little like improvised stages in a penny theatre (or even like the painted backdrops for such a place). It is here that Lewis's bestiary of suavely rendered, prop-like objects comes to tread the boards-the gazing eyeball and disembodied hand, the cornocopian horns, the crudely-hewn wood planks, and blobs of cartoonish excrement-all hopscotching from one work to another with the dependability of itinerant comic-strip characters. A menagerie of forlorn, gawky objects, down-on-their-luck body parts, and stumblebum abstract forms that nonetheless retain a descriptive thingness, get chummy in ways that are vaudevillian in their blunt comic precision and unnerving in their effect.

What this suggests is an easygoing familiarity with the shared visual shorthand of a bygone popular culture, the "great grungy unconsciousness of lower middle class America," as Robert Crumb once called our vast and largely unsung collective iconography. The homespun roadside advertising and woebegone commercial signage that Crumb redeemed, and to which Lewis's paintings sometimes indirectly refer-the kinds that once matter-of-factly extolled the virtues of Miss Emily's Castor Oil or Dapper Dan Hair Pomade from the sides of downtown buildings--was crudely rigged to whet the ocular appetites of rubbernecking passersby and extort desire for anything, no matter how mundane. Lewis exploits the unintentionally tragicomic dramatization of objects found in such anonymous imagery, whose flimsy promises for the rube and questionable salves for the sick of soul have over time acquired a patina of lowbrow, offhand surrealism. His own mise-en-scènes remain elusive, stubbornly hinting at more than they are actually prepared to divulge while registering the familial unease characterizing our co-existence with the everyday things around us. In New Man (2002), for example, an unblinking eye stares out at us as if from a creaky shop sign announcing some second-rate ophthalmologist's digs, while echoing the ominous oracular baby-blues of F. Scott Fitzgerald's West Egg highway billboard in The Great Gatsby (1925). Similarly, in Hammer (2001), an commonplace hand tool--rendered with the commercial brevity of an illustration clipped from the back pages of a hardware catalogue--is given a totemic monumentality, recasting it as an heraldic emblem of some unknown violent truth, a portent of a darker condition.

While many of Lewis's pictures enjoy a kind of wordplay without words, in a recent series of paintings executed on salvaged grade school maps of North America-the sorts of pedagogical aids once used in every classroom for visually internalizing topographic myths and expansionist narratives-Lewis overlays bits of existing text and cartographic information with his own disjunctive imagery. In Twine (2002), a giant ball of string obscures the minutiae of forgotten 18th-century land grants, while a constellation of glyphic markings the color of dried blood slowly orbits its gravitational mass. In Claims (2002), a billowing field of shimmery gold unfurls across the map from west to east, like a territorial banner taking possession of everything it conceals. On another map, beneath the momentous legend, "Claims of the Nations," a garishly cartoon-like set of dentures sits in regal triumph bestride two adjacent charts of the virgin continent, madly grinning and poised to consume. With its brawny gums and glistening rows of pearly whites, the toothsome image is lusciously sinister and ingratiating at the same time-just like the best advertising: a clownishly grotesque momento mori for a sweet-toothed nation.

The human form is usually glimpsed obliquely in discrete bits and pieces in Lewis's paintings, each constituent body part pressed into service within a broader drama that includes the animate and inanimate, the abstract and the figurative. Innards, organs, and unidentifiable organic matter may pass the time of day in each other's company, perhaps lounging on a two-by-four, like skid row confreres shooting the breeze and trying not to notice one another's shortcomings. Meanwhile, stylized, chocolate-colored turds glisten with a newborn sheen, wobbling uncertainly as if taking their first baby steps in a world full of possibility. Elsewhere, a plump and veiny human heart appears sitting outside the concentric tiers of an antiquated operating theatre, as though patiently awaiting its big moment in the limelight. By reshuffling his dismembered iconography first this way and then that, Lewis addresses not only that pre-modern conception of the body in which every scrap of human anatomy was invested with its own symbolic jurisdiction and emblematic power, but the chimerical conceits of completeness and purity that persist in every age.

When the pop star Beck sings about "turning shit to gold", he's comparing the process of songwriting to gleaning for inspiration in the forgotten trash heaps of the past. In much the same way, Lewis finds in the raw materiality of image-making a down-and-dirty alchemy: the conversion of waste and junk, the outmoded and the castoff, into things that give authentic voice to the present. Nowhere is this more clearly embodied than in Transmute (2002), a painting in which rosters of colloquialisms listing all the base bodily excretions from which we are conditioned to recoil viscerally-"scum", "pus", "mucus", "snot", "puke", "shit"--converge upon, and condense into, a small compressed golden nugget. In every pure thing, Lewis seems to be suggesting, are contained all the destabilizing, germinative impurities of the world. (It's probably no accident that the painting uses as a ground another map of America, all but obliterated, bearing the legend "The Compromise of 1850.") The redemptive and transformative impurities that we too briefly and too rarely experience, the ones that we search for and that art sometimes makes possible, are guaranteed to drift and change and succumb. But the junkyard of the world which gives them birth is everywhere and forever.

-James Trainor