Installation view, Spotlight: Joel Mesler at The FLAG Art Foundation, 2023
Photography by Steven Probert
Spotlight: Joel Mesler
JULY 19-AUGUST 11, 2023
The Spotlight exhibition series includes a new or never-before-exhibited artwork accompanied by a commissioned piece of writing. It is the hope of this series to create focused and thoughtful dialogues between the visual arts and critics, poets, scholars, etc. In this iteration, the Spotlight features Joel Mesler’s Untitled (Burn Baby Burn), 2023, with a text by art writer and curator Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer.
On Joel Mesler’s Untitled (Burn Baby Burn), 2023
By Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Fire sears speech both ways, invoking destruction and desire, danger and attraction, ferocity and radiance. Whether threatening damage or glowing like a beacon, its burning conveys real intensity, telegraphing some serious fist-clenching, teeth-grinding shit. You don’t have to be from California, as Joel Mesler is, to know that fire is no joke. The total loss it inflicts signals something final and definitive—no-turning-back. We commonly say things spread like wildfire, or we refer to its hollow, ashen aftermath to describe feelings of burn out. Raging hot and fast in language, fire’s heat rises from gut and groin—an emanation of id. We associate it with anger, madness, passion, lust, determination, obsession, and all-consuming feelings. Mesler’s painting Burn Baby Burn’s idiomatic exclamation reads like a chant, something shouted by riled up crowds and mobs or whispered fiercely under one’s breath.
And yet, the imagery by which Mesler delivers his message implies the opposite. His m.o. is often to sneak in something unsettling or charged under the thick cover of surface gloss and calculated appeal. Slicked with highlights and contrasts that fracture solid form, the painting’s gold mylar balloon letters (often used to spell out his textual centerpieces) goof on reflectivity, shine, and polish. Their first impression is an easy-going, fun birthday party vibe. Dreamily happy, they cast no shadows. The contrast between message and messenger is jarring and confusing, the pathos of bathos being much of the point. Not entirely happy-go-lucky, the puffed-up shapes embody tensile fullness, over-stuffedness, and a bloat that is also buoyant, if airheaded—a lightness that can drift away, deflate, or suddenly burst.
The banana leaves of the background–an idée fixe for Mesler that recurs as the ground for many of his paintings–are similarly hyperbolic; they are too lush, too rollicking, too preening, too plastic, too much themselves. Each leaf is striated with volumizing strands of sheen, curling, and unfurling like locks of hair. At the same time, this kind of illusionism is hard and heavy, as though carved. Mimesis happens by meticulously mapping paint-by-number areas of flat color. Within form and text, excess pulses through an otherwise basic composition. In fact, this painting is a dialed up, flashier version of Untitled (Burn Baby Burn), 2019, a much flatter previous canvas displaying the same words scripted across foliage over a red ground, each element monochromatic within loose, wobbly contours. Stoking a primal spark, embers have been smoldering in his pictures for some time. The banana leaf motif that Mesler is so partial to quotes the iconic wallpaper of the Beverly Hills Hotel, a pattern called Martinique made by local Los Angeles-based company CW Stockwell and first installed in that particular lap of luxury in 1949. Elegant and attractive though it is, the foliage is Mesler’s principal aesthetic madeleine channeling a particularly volatile family memory from his Southland upbringing that transpired at the hotel and left a deep wound, which haunts him still. The specter of flames encroaching on an idyllic oasis resonates. The not-too-subtle glitz and pop exuberance of this and all his text-based paintings bely the suppression of private psychic tumult, roiling emotions, and gnawing anxieties that continue to compel him.
Burn Baby Burn has a twin, born of the same fire, in its sister painting, Burn It Down, 2023. Both were triggered by the same experience of rejection that immediately preceded their making, though Burn It Down, with its more aggressive tone of punk nihilism, was exhibited earlier and across the Atlantic at Art Basel in June of this year. But much more had originally been planned for Mesler’s presentation at Basel, the ritziest marketplace at which the art world gathers. Not that you necessarily need the gantse Megillah, but there is an involved backstory to this painting and its twin. They are the expression of an artist’s recently chipped shoulder—a readiness to punch back—and his intention moving forward. These paintings reel from hopes dashed and a dream denied, or at least delayed. See, Mesler had this whole shmaltzy spiel planned for Basel. He proposed a big suite of paintings plus a performance, which would have been the commercial debut of a new product and, alevai, a spectacular feeding frenzy. First, picture a room of large paintings that read Home Run and Run Home in regular alternation, repeating in pairs to worry questions about the artist’s ideas of home, its demands and expectations, as well ancestral homecomings and returns. They are diasporic, Jewish questions wrestled with by a third-generation American Jew who has inherited a shared sense of identity built upon ambition and foreboding, opportunity and fear, resilience and catastrophe. With backgrounds riffing on quintessentially Jewish-American tropes like deli food and baseball, the series’ whiplash of Home Run/Run Home announced victorious big things and a broad sense of basking in one’s own realized potential only to be followed by crippling woundedness, failure, insecurity, fear, and a broad sense of bottoming out.
Then, debuting with the paintings was to be a custom-designed kosher hot dog cart featuring, for the first time, Mesler’s Mustard, a brand of deli mustard developed by the artist in lockdown first as a hobby and now as a business. Mesler envisioned himself delivering a genial performance slinging dogs to fairgoers, a kind of throwback to when his immigrant grandfather sold metal hangers in New York City to get his start. This time around, he would be coming from America to the old country with a retail plan and goods in tow. His commitment to the venture, together with his famous warmth, smile, and love of schmoozing, may understandably embarrass you with earnestness. Call it epigenetics or culture, he has fully inherited the survivor’s mentality of needing a side hustle, backup plan, and quick escape (in his case) from art market fickleness, which can desert an artist tomorrow as surely as it may lavish fortune upon him today. Looking apprehensively to the future, and not wanting all his eggs in one basket with a family to support, Mesler’s Mustard opens up his options and the start of a new chapter.
But Mesler’s Basel dream was not to be; the pitch to hawk paintings and souped-up dogs side-by-side was rejected by the committee. And so, Burn Baby Burn and Burn It Down are a kind of “fuck-you” response, projecting cartoonish resentment and a resilience only more determined for having been rebuffed. The artist casts himself, not unlike his immigrant ancestors, as having missed his first ship to the promised land but waiting with bags packed full of longing, ready to catch the next ride. Indignant and undeterred, but not without self-deprecation, he is fueled, like so many, by an “I’ll-show-you fire”—tending a flame that will not be extinguished. If this painting is a sly articulation of doubling down and digging in, it still has the carefree air of not giving any fucks—or rather, floating away on the smoke-filled breeze.
About:
Joel Mesler (b. 1974, Los Angeles, CA) is an artist living and working in Sag Harbor, NY. Mesler earned an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA in 1999. Recent solo exhibitions include Spiritual Journey, Long Museum, Shanghai, China (2023); The Rabbis, Cheim & Read, New York, NY (2023); Mental States, LGDR, Hong Kong (2022); Pool Party, Lévy Gorvy, Palm Beach, FL (2022); and Surrender, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2021). His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including 20, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2023); Pop Masters: Art from the Mugrabi Collection, New York, Home of the Arts, Surfers Paradise, Australia (2023); Tropic of Cancer, Pace Gallery, Palm Beach, FL (2023); Via Cafe, Tif Sigfrids, Comer, GA (2021); and Summer Rental, Rental Gallery, East Hampton, NY (2019).
Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer is an art writer, curator, publisher, and educator based in Los Angeles, CA. Lehrer-Graiwer is the author of Lee Lozano: Dropout Piece (Afterall Books, 2014) and a contributor to Artforum, as well as exhibition catalogues. She co-runs The Finley Gallery and is the editor of Pep Talk publications, which will release the collected poems of Bob Flanagan later this year.