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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Painter Laurie Hogin uses the style of Old Masters and a frightening menagerie of beasts to illustrate the nightmares to be found in the American dream.
Sep 30, 2002 | When artist Laurie Hogin, 39, was a child, she lived in a suburb of New York adjacent to a 600-acre woodland. "It belonged to some old guy who just wasn't going to sell it," Hogin says, "so we had these woods to play in -- me and my two friends. It was a wonderful, safe place for us. We were all interested in what was then called ecology; we'd see foxes, deer, wild turkey, pheasant, we'd find mushrooms. But it was a ravine with a road above it and occasionally people would dump tires, garbage and 55-gallon drums. This outraged us."
Hogin expressed her outrage by drawing pictures of the woods with the tires, garbage and barrels scattered about, often giving the drawings to her fourth-grade teacher. "It was sort of an infantile form of protest," she says. It also was, and continues to be, an organizing metaphor for her life.
The pictures Hogin makes today -- startling, provocative, elegant (she calls them "parodies of opulence") oil paintings, some as large as 8 by 10 feet -- still focus on the environment, and on a variety of other cultural and political issues that are both pressing and controversial, which makes her work especially relevant right now. Given the powerful connection between the topics she takes up in her art and the current American dynamic -- not just between humans and a disappearing natural world, but between average folks and the corporate world, the ruling elite of capitalism -- what Hogin's doing, or attempting to do, is both important and, in many ways, amazing.
What sets her work apart is that she's one of the rare artists able to pepper her images with fierce commentary without coming off as strident or didactic -- partly because her paintings are often darkly funny, and partly because their appearance is so striking. Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, critic Margaret Hawkins explained, "The reason Hogin can get away with her intensely intellectual subject matter is that her paintings are visually irresistible, inspiring a kind of optical gluttony that is then surprised in mid-gorge by the paintings' weighty subtext."
What Hogin does, and does brilliantly, is appropriate the seductive language of advertising and dress it in the lush, hyperrealistic style and technique of 17th century Dutch and Flemish painting in order to make scathing visual comment on contemporary consumerism, sexism, the trashing of nature and the inequities of the global economy. She seized on the idea of adopting the exacting style of the 17th century artists in service of her own trenchant, satirical observations because of the strong parallels she saw between their time and the present. The period, she says, "strangely mirrors our own times in [what author Simon Schama has called] its 'anxieties of superabundance,' attitudes toward class, citizenship, the family and the peculiar kinds of stuff people strove to acquire."
Some of Hogin's larger canvases are packed with a frenzied tangle of vividly rendered deer, dogs, rabbits, tigers, albino alligators, snakes and exotic polychrome birds, with titles such as "Allegory of the Free Market" or "The Effects of Substances in the Environment." One of the smaller works features a lone white monkey, draped in a blue and gold wizard's cape like the one Mickey Mouse wore in "Fantasia," baring its vicious teeth and holding an open lipstick, which it has smeared around its mouth, while it glares directly at the viewer. The text on the painting reads, "Because beauty has something to say."
They are mordant depictions of a natural world gone wrong -- or which has been done wrong -- where even the most benign beasts seem outraged; they're also allegorical portraits of a flourishing civilization that has become overripe and is turning toxic. "I think my most successful work is peculiar, a little bit frightening and also funny," Hogin says.
In talking about her work, Hogin refers to Schama's acclaimed book "The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age," in which he meticulously examined how the Dutch built an empire, became enormously affluent and yet lived in fear of being corrupted by their own happiness and complacency.
"There's so much they seem to have had in common with us in terms of how they viewed the rest of the world as commodities or resources for their taking, and their reveling in the commodities fetish," she says. "Also the fact that so many of their social relationships seemed to be through attainment of wealth and markers of wealth."
One of those markers -- the paintings of the period -- functioned something like advertising does today, reinforcing the values and views held by the society's leaders. At the same time, the paintings romanticized the exotic, casting the wonders of the natural world and foreign cultures as commodities to be acquired and controlled.
Those early Dutch paintings "spoke," as advertising images do now, in a distinct language, a subtle, highly persuasive visual code that can be both seductive and flattering. Today, what Hogin terms the "visual codes of corporate persuasion" are employed by advertisers, she says, to "deliver certain fantasies to consumers that are very resonant at a given time."
