Primitivism, that utopian urge for the supposed purity of pre-industrial society, has been a recurring staple of art since the first smokestacks belched greenhouse gases, and for good reason: It represents high culture’s reaction to the challenges of technological transformation, especially during periods of economic disruption like our own—making this wryly titled group exhibition somewhat timely.
“Early Man” doesn’t trumpet some new millennial reengagement with primitivism, but it does distill how differently 21st-century artists tackle the idea compared to, say, Gauguin in the 19th century or Picasso in the 20th. The distinction lies mainly in a sardonic acknowledgement that there’s no ticket to regeneration through the prelapsarian past and never has been.
Rude, crude and at times hallucinogenic, the works share a deliberately naive style and a focus on the abject—seen, for example, in the way paint is treated as primordial ooze in both Bjarne Melgaard’s lumpen portrait faces and Francine Spiegel’s paintings of seminaked models covered in multicolored goo. But that’s just one of several interlacing themes here.
Another is the breakdown of civilization’s niceties best represented by Dennis Hoekstra’s dark, flooded Cave Installation, a show within the show that contains not only Spiegel’s pieces but also Takeshi Murata’s pixelated video of an enraged yeti and David Pappaceno’s Venus of Willendorf tributes. Nearby, Barry McGee’s pair of carved-wood aborigines vandalizing a wall with spray paint and David Shirley’s drawings offering self-mutilation tips continue in a similar vein.
These works and others remind us that a blink of geological time separates the cave from Facebook. But early or late, mankind has always undermined its capacity for change with its baser survival instincts. This show cleverly captures the age-old disconnect between the two.—Howard Halle