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Arts & Letters

“Whatever Tickles Your Fancy: Works from the Seventies to the Present,” the title of the most recent exhibit by Greek-born, New York-based artist Steve Gianakos is surely an accurate description for the vulgar, libido-laden content of his paintings and drawings. Since 1969, the artist has been offering close to psychopathic wet dreams under the guise of modernist compositions; the photocollages of his recent work employ male fantasies of captive women who offer themselves openly in an atmosphere in which anything goes. Interestingly, the subjects of his work are mostly children, so that the ribald pranks often represented become tinged with an aura of morality. Gianakos might, or might not, be presenting his audience with a view of sexuality that is intrinsically moral, even when he goes over the top; at the same time, it is equally fair to read the art as symbolic of his own sensibility, which would then seem, at the very least, tainted with a predilection for pedophilia.

That it proves hard to discern which side of the fence Gianakos is on only makes the imagery more intricate and disturbing. His cartoonish graphics appear to be more or less generic in their appropriation of a Fifties style, which is forcefully grafted onto a highly charged sense of sex. The artist also judges: the human enterprise, in Gianakos’s view, is seen as remarkably insipid and dumb – in one telling acrylic on canvas from 1987-88, a couple sit on either side of the Ernie character from the children’s show, Sesame Street. The pair’s anonymous features and dated clothing contrast with the puerile stupidity of Ernie; they smile away while, on the right of the painting, we see the words, “He’s our only child.” Because the composition is not an overtly eroticized image in any way, and therefore does not lay claim to our sexuality, we see it as a perfect parody of the unhappy dumbing-down of America. Clearly, in an image such as this, Gianakos’s contempt for a certain way of life makes itself known.

It would be easy to characterize Gianakos’s sense of humor as outdated; however, he has addressed such issues for a very long time. Satire is a good place to start in the indictment of a culture: the parody of the obvious suggests a replacement with something subtler, more attuned to a different stance. In another acrylic on canvas, entitled Village Idiot (1982), the artist shows a man in a plaid shirt and overalls, wearing an expression of stupid glee while staring bug-eyed out and over three adolescent boys who face him. The words, “Village Idiot,” hang over the scene with the weight of moral opprobrium; the vacancy of the scene is at odds with the seemingly happy sense of encounter. American excess seems to be the key to Gianakos’s caustic undressing (figurative as well as literal) of the culture’s mores. One imagines Hogarth and Daumier proceeding in a similar fashion if they, too, were subjected to the ambiguous pleasures of the American dream.

The savagery of such judgment is not to be taken lightly. Gianakos appears to inhabit a world in which desire is matched by vacuousness. The humor is there because the indictment is so broad; it applies both to audience and artist. Yet such blatant spite carries more than a grimly comical awareness of life; it might also serve as a judgment on the nature of people. Are the children in his paintings merely stand-ins for adults, or is the painter commenting on the inherent sensuality of children? Do we judge ourselves for our reaction to the scene, or do we deflect our discomfort toward a judgment of Gianakos himself? The absurdity of many of his paintings tends to cover over genuinely moral areas of concern, but it is also true that Gianakos himself is playing with fire: the boldness of the sexuality portrayed is highly provocative, and not only in an erotic sense. The shock value of such art creates a disturbing awareness of self, in which desire struggles with a sense of moral rectitude. It might well be that Gianakos wishes to move past desire toward an expression of outrage, but he takes the chance that he will be seen as constructing a world disfigured by lust. Not everyone can make the leap from an image to a more nuanced reading of eros.

This ambiguity becomes clearer on seeing the sexualized content of much of his work. The acrylic painting, Nothing Doing (1984), depicts a young boy and girl dressed in adult, Spanish costumes against a yellow wall with a window whose panes are painted orange-red. The boy sports a ridiculously large erection, and he is shown looking toward the girl, who, dressed in frilled blouse and long skirt, breezily rebuffs him with the phrase, “Nothing doing.” It is hard to say whether the artist is commenting on the lasciviousness of children; he may merely be content to shock his audience. The composition is formally arranged, giving a sense of solidity to an image that breaks the rules. Gianakos’s boldness is not immediately available as critique; consequently, the work can seem more than a little oppositional, flagrantly brazen in its application of value. That is part of both its weakness and its charm. In another painting from 1984, entitled Twat, a small girl climbs a hobbyhorse; she wears only a top, revealing her open sex to the viewer. On the right side of the painting, a small bird perches on a window ledge, while, in the upper left corner, we see the single word, “Twat.” The rawness of the image contrasts with its seeming innocence – once again, we are being forced to read a provocation as though it were a statement of imaginative value.

The Pop nature of such imagery may in fact undermine a too serious reading of its meaning. Can Gianakos claim his work as valuable entertainment wherein anything goes? There is a chance, a good chance, that overinterpretation is a response to the unsettling sexuality of the paintings. In the more recent works on paper, for many of which Gianakos will reproduce parts of images from other sources and collage them onto a distressed ground, there is a greater sense of formal play. Here, a vulgar surrealism takes over; sexuality is oriented toward chance. This means that Gianakos’s audience can safely regard his art as a kind of polysemic play, and somehow the perversity of the imagery loses its capacity to jar or offend. In one collage from 1994, entitled Her parents were…, an octopus penetrates the vagina of a young girl with elephant ears. She looks off to the side, seemingly resigned in her acceptance of a violation. In another work, from 1996, called His thoughts were considered…, we see a woman from behind, bent over a desk, more likely than not sexually servicing the man sitting behind it. The woman is provocative, wearing stockings and skimpy underwear, while the man, wearing a mustache, has indifferent features and a lumpy gourd for a head. On the desk is a rabbit, which looks benignly over the scene and holds a smoking cigarette on a tray.

Only surrealism could justify the juxtaposition of such images, and we see their coexistence as evidence of the unconscious at play. Maybe Gianakos, in his irreverence, is serving a mixture of infantilism and inspired sarcasm that applies not only to the audience but also to himself; under such circumstances, the Village Idiot painting might be seen as a self-portrait. The artist makes no case for any particular reading, and so we are at sea with our interpretations of his art. As a result, our versions of his art may well have more to do with our own feelings than those of the artist. The point is that these paintings communicate enough ambiguity to render their meaning problematic, even neutral, in regard to their content. That Gianakos has been able to do this shows him to be savvier than his work might seem. If irony is to succeed as meaningful criticism, one part of it must be seen as poker-faced, sans emotion. Gianakos’s tongue is very much in his cheek, and, characteristically, he presents a wild and wooly world meant to shock – and perhaps to chasten.