Richard Jackson: Ain’t Painting a Pain

Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, Calif.

Through May 5

Any artist who hopes to create a better 2013 show than this one “has giant-sized clown shoes to fill,” said Dave Barton in the OC Weekly. The first survey of Richard Jackson’s 45-year career succeeds on several levels: as a spotlight on an underappreciated California artist, as a deconstruction of the painting process (he includes more than 100 sketches of his works in progress), and as a statement on humor’s place in art. For an example of that last point, you don’t even need to leave the museum’s parking lot. Simply direct your attention to Bad Dog, the 28-foot-tall puppy that appears to be urinating on the building, leaving an “impressively bright” spray of yellow paint. It’s hilariously irreverent.

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But Bad Dog is a “mild joke” compared with the inventive work that waits inside, said Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times. Jackson clearly takes his profession lightly. In his 1997 work Painting With Two Balls, he spoofed the machismo of Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionists by tipping a Ford Pinto on its side, attaching two canvas spheres to the raised wheels, and pouring paint over the top as the balls spun. Re-created here, it turns a whole room into a splatter painting. Elsewhere, Jackson has poured paint into a bathtub, let it drip from glass models of human heads, and had it spewed from a hose. In fact, “this is the only museum exhibition I’ve seen that posts a sign at the entry warning visitors not to touch the art for the specific reason that the paint might not be dry.” To Jackson, painting apparently isn’t dead today in any way that it hasn’t always been dead. “Any painter’s job, past or present, is to make painting live.” He’s simply one of the few to embrace that insight as a vocation.