Some thoughts on Condo and how his work relates

When we were at the museum last week, I thought "Introvert" and the sequence containing Uncle Sam, the Screaming Priest, and "Client No.9" were particularly striking.

At that time, I thought "Introvert" was captivating mainly because I couldn't tell for sure what was going on. It's not quite abstract enough to just think "oh this is abstract art" but it was not definitive what was in the painting. And I couldn't stop thinking about the room that contained Uncle Sam, Client no.9, and the Screaming priest, because each painting had such cartoon-like characters in brightly colored fantasy lands that it seems like a screen shot from a Saturday morning cartoon show, but the subjects of the painting were disturbing enough to be R-rated. The blurb on the wall said that Condo is known for creating simultaneous multi-layers of contradicting emotions, and indeed paradoxes abound in many of the paintings we saw, but I thought for some reason the contrasts between happy bubbles (literally) and sinister scenarios in the Uncle Sam series was particularly jarring.

After we left the museum, as I looked up more of Condo's works and rethinking the ones in the museum, it occurred to me that the paintings that were particularly intriguing to me are the ones where the paintings sits on a mid-point between social critique through parody and irreverent dark humor. Paintings in the Melancholy series such as Jesus, the Secretary, and the Sitting Women were so effective in capturing the melancholy that I thought the paradoxically comical caricature faces was over-powered and thus did not create enough tension.

My two thoughts are that

1. I did not realize when I was at the museum, but the faces in each painting plays a really important role in maintaining this paradox that I found so compelling. For example, in Uncle Sam and Client No.9, my first response was that I was intrigued by the juxtaposition between the smiley-face bubbles and the bright colors with what the characters are doing. But later I realized that what the characters are doing is a little odd, but my immediate perception of sinister came large from their facial expressions. If these paintings had characters with smiley faces, the irony would be of a different sort. Similarly, I thought the melancholy paintings portrayed a particularly lugubrious atmosphere, but afterwards I realized that there wasn't really very much about what the characters were doing that was melancholic. Instead, their faces were all kind of bland, to the point where the cartoony caricature of their faces only seem like a mockery at their blandness/melancholy.

I thought a lot of what we've read in this class has to do with how we read faces and what faces is supposed to represent and what messages a face is supposed to send by making an expression, and it was interesting how much I couldn't help myself but to do exactly the reading into the faces that all these authors have been debating about. It also surprised me how easy it was to see past the exaggerated facial features, and the degree to which I responded to these faces without ever consciously thinking that I am going to read the facial expressions.

2. The other thought was that these faces are kind of becoming the face of Condo's artworks as they thread together the exhibition. I found that quite interesting-- as he obliterates a face he creates a face in another sense.