House of Pain
Pascal Rousson
The House that Rousson Built
For his first solo show at Vegas Gallery, Swiss/French artist Pascal Rousson presents House of Pain, an installation which elaborates upon Museum of the Dispossessed, previously shown at Vegas as part of the Loose Booty exhibition.
House of Pain scavenges elements and themes from Rousson’s back catalogue. These include flea market and charity shop paintings reworked with satirical references to canonical Western artists, an interest in the metaphorical potential of American pulp fiction and amateur D.I.Y. craft-making manuals, and a preoccupation with the constricting myth of The Great Artist as Rock Star, programmed to burn out and leave a trail of beautiful, history-altering corpses.
Rousson’s work ironically debunks ideologies and values embedded in modernist art. His mixed media installation Museum of the Dispossessed incorporated paintings, which appropriated covers of the late 1960s D.I.Y. magazine Practical Householder. The paintings staged comical narratives that cast American modernist artists as self-obsessed bricoleurs with nameless and compliant female sidekicks, whose great works echo the “low” aesthetics of amateur home improvement projects. Through juxtapositions of imagery and text within the canvas frames, and, through their status as parts of a larger whole rather than as self-contained pictorial objects, the paintings challenged the concept of art and artists as singular entities by foregrounding plural presences, influences and voices inhabiting the installation.
House of Pain extends the D.I.Y metaphor into darker territory. In the centre of the gallery stands a structure resembling a garden shed, constructed from a skin of closely packed paintings that mix references to canonical artists with American pulp novel cover art, teenage bedroom aesthetics and trippy pop- surrealist infused imagery.
Traces of the artist as sinister loner, blazing comet and petty criminal reverberate through the structure. Rousson rams textual references to famous male artists (Andy Warhol, Christopher Wool, Dan Flavin, and Sigmar Polke) against snippets of kitschy science-fiction landscapes, which mock the hallowed inner-space model of artistic imagination, and lurid Russ Meyer style mannequins disrobing for virile men wielding palettes and paintbrushes in place of guns.
These latter images are copied and reinterpreted from American pulp novel covers to emphasise the macho dynamic entrenched in artistic production by high-priests of the canon including Picasso and Pollock. Threaded through the installation, a group of paintings based on a famous photograph of Picasso in a stereotypically French striped sweater and underwear extend the dissection of this dynamic by turning the artist into an auto-erotic spectacle entranced by his masculinity and nationality.
The pulp imagery highlights another satirising device; the character of the criminal anti-hero, culled from the “noir” films and novels which Rousson admires. This character dovetails into House of Pain’svisual reference to facades, which sets the stage for a presentation of artists as self-mythologizing thieves of ideas and images. The installation’s garden shed silhouette ties into this strand of associations by conjuring a spectre of a solitary back-to-nature obsessive exemplified by Theodore Kaczynski, The Unabomber, cobbling together lethal missives. Kaczynski’s disturbed actions represent the epitome of a life-performance with devastating consequences, a grotesque parody of artistic solipsism and subversion.
Drawing on a musical metaphor, Rousson describes the House of Pain as a cover version of Kaczynski’s remote cabin. It is a hybrid unit, a shed that doubles as a large, three-dimensional canvas made of jammed-together articles. Each element acquires meaning relationally, from other elements. Shapes, objects, text, imagery and colours reconfigure into wisecracks, insinuations and combinations that are literally on the surface.
This surface, evocative of a salon-style bedroom poster display, alludes to a past-tense idyll of adolescent rebellion. Rousson mocks art’s dissident vision of itself by comparing it to a secret teenage bedroom garden of jumbled, fomenting drives and intoxication. The paintings’ enamel veneer also puns on teeth, which, in the vocabulary of pop-psychological dream analysis, signify sexual neurosis. This added layer of textual-visual repartee circles back to a caustic joke, which sticks another knife into the fiction of originality at the heart of the great artist myth.
Viewers stepping inside the installation encounter empty square footage lined with the paintings’ raw wood and canvas behinds, reminiscent of the backs of painted film sets. A popular conception of the artist, portrayed in films such as Lust for Life, depicts him as possessed, literally occupied by an inspired spirit that creates and self-destructs. House of Pain slyly exposes this story. Its blank inside highlights the “beautiful illusion” of the artist and the art object as self-supporting and full of depth.
Aline Duriaud © 2007