Imagine a painting by John Young. There’s an image taken from a source of classical Indian, Chinese or Tibetan art or some such, and then there’s some images placed over the top, a boat, or a flower, some clouds or perhaps a nude Asian girl lying on her back absently fondling a rose stem with her fingers. The women don’t have to be Asian, they could be fresh young ingénues from Melbourne. Anyway, you’ve just imagined John Young’s latest show at Sherman Galleries and now there’s very little reason to go and see the paintings in the flesh because the show is exactly what you expect out of a John Young painting and there are absolutely no surprises at all.
The slight variation for the Persian Paintings exhibition is that the backgrounds are presumably taken from Persian sources. The images have been scanned, printed up big using a computer process and then Young’s team of art student minions have set to work applying the other images in a style reminiscent of calendar art or technically proficient photorealism. This style has been a rich vein for Young – as the prices up to $55,000 for the big pictures attest – and whatever change there has been in his work over the years has been incremental, tiny variations in composition, colour and source image. It’s hard to gauge any substantial difference in the artist’s works since the late 1980s.
The popular put down of Young’s painting is that it’s just a copy of David Salle from the 1980s. Young has admitted that Salle was an influence on his work and a comparison between Young’s painting over the last 15 years and Salle finds some pretty startling similarities. But the even more disturbing discovery is that Salle is still painting in his trademark style and so is Young. There’s no argument really – Young’s work is only marginally different from Salle’s and they travel side by side, one an echo of the other.
It’s tempting to think that Young has some sort of ‘project’ behind his work, some sort of conceptual framework that justifies such a flagrant appropriation of another artist’s career. Perhaps Young is questioning the notion of authenticity in the role of the artist, an ironic double bluff that appropriates a highly identifiable style that eventually becomes his own, in the same way that John Nixon was happy to paint Malevich-style crosses until people just forgot about Malevich and thought it was a ‘Nixon’. Imants Tillers raiding of Colin McCahon, Giorgio De Chirico, Jackson Pollock and Anselm Keifer created a similar cognitive dissonance but, in the manner of the best appropriationists, Tillers’ choice of artists was particular and he was beginning with his own style anyway while Nixon’s work evetually changed into attractive monochromes. Young, on the other hand, just keeps on doing the same thing over and over.
As we stood around in the gallery marveling at how slick and finished the works were, and how anodyne they have become, we had one of those art life experiences that puts everything into perspective. A woman was talking to a man and they were shuffling from painting to painting.
“I just don’t know…” the woman said. “I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean.”
”Well,” the man began. “They’re sort of cross referential, cross cultural type of thing…”
“Right.”
“Yeah… they’re persian.”
They are indeed cross referential and cross cultural and they are also orthodox post modernist objects. The popularly understood conceptual justification for Young’s work is largely extraneous to the work itself – a sort of art world whisper game where everyone knows that what they are looking at does not support the claims made for them. The claim that his work is a “cross referential, cross cultural type of thing” is exactly right – it’s a type of thing we assume has a meaning because all the gestures are there (layering, appropriation, ‘cultural’ references) but the longer the look at the paintings the less certain you are that they are really there. As was once said of Los Angeles, there’s no there there.
We think it is a miracle anyone is still talking about these finer points of appropriationist art anymore and we bet not even the artist is trying to frame them that way. Young’s paintings are merely products with all the spiritual, emotional and aesthetic impact of air conditioning. They are inoffensive, pleasant and decorative paintings with not-too-difficult concepts behind them that can be digested like plain yoghurt. They are simply and nothing more than décor.
Maybe it’s too late for Young to change now but if he continues down this path, he’s looking at a career of ever diminishing returns. Eventually people will stop caring altogether and his collector base will be older people who remember when ‘conceptual painting’ was the new thing.
