Paintings (on car hoods) by Jonathan Monk

I am sorry I haven't updated my blog in a while, but I really wanted to highlight this show that I went to a couple of weeks ago.

Jonathan Monk is a contemporary British artist that seemed to have lost himself in the 1960s in California.  In "Californian Conceptualism" that is.   To be brief, this past show that Casey Kaplan had with him was chock full of interesting stuff, however, his paintings on car hoods are what really appealed to me (see above), called the "Rew-Shay Hood Project".  At first glance, this is a fantastic series of black and white photo realist paintings on car hoods.  The works are pristine depictions of retro gas stations.  Some of them are single car hood paintings hung on the wall while others are placed in a more sculptural context on the floor (which I like better - it seems to break with the convention that painting must be hung on a wall - but then again, a figurative painting on a car hood is a little rebellious in itself) as well as diptychs made from two adjacent car hoods.

I thought these images of the old gas stations looked familiar, and then I realized they were based on photographs that Californian-based artist, Ed Ruscha, had taken in the late 1960s along Route 66.  These black and white documentary-like photographs had been a series that Ruscha had published in 1967 called "Twentysix Gasoline Stations".  These photographs, and gas stations in particular, were a source of inspiration for Ruscha's hard-edged series of paintings from the same era (see an example below) and as well as for Jonathan Monk here.

In true Conceptual fashion, Monk defies the idea of authorship here by appropriating from this series of images.  This imagery is not his own.  Furthermore, he is not painting these at all himself.  From these photographs, Monk commissioned a New York hot-rod car painter to apply these images to the hood using an airbrush.  The painting style here is a complete departure from Ruscha's painting style, but the idea of the expansive American highway and "car-culture" is taken one step further by painting these works directly on the car hoods from Plymouth Barracudas, Chevy Novas, Datsuns and Dodge Demons from the late 60s and early 70s (according to the gallery description and similar to those automobiles depicted in the paintings themselves).  I can't help but think of the artist, Richard Prince, the king of appropriation and masculine imagery, here among these muscle car hoods.   The concept here is stretched to the limit and the works are, at the same time, both intellectual and witty.  There also seems to be a tension between the cold and slick color and style of the images and the romanticizing and nostalgia for the old American highway and automobile.  Foremost, the work is defiant in terms of originality but it engages the conceptual art of the past and actively continues the conversation.  They're cool.

Link to exhibition