a review

MEDIEVAL BASEMENT LANDSCAPE HOBBYISTS
Acid-bath raw like some exposed cavorting hamhock Johann Groebner’s congress of icons heckle the viewer with its New Hapsburg sadistics and creature lagoons of colour. Groebner’s slipshod paintings have always dealt wind-in-teeth with the intimacy of the state and cultural production and how nationalisms are fed through media reproduction seems to be the point of this exercise. In The Thomson Facsimiles - This disfigured homage to basement landscape hobbyists everywhere - there is a smouldering going on with a folk energy reminiscent of a pickup match of renegade lacrosse or one of Elvis Stojko’s more purposive jumpers. Speaking of Canadian rock, and while we are in the pervasive pop territory of cultural imperialism, here is a set of painted minatures that are a far cry from any Pierre Pettigrew style rallying call: this is surely not about any federalist backlash. Or, put another way, the long cosey intimacy between the Canadian establishment and the Group of Seven is a tough egg to split; but, when cottage country appears a-light like Vimy Ridge we know there are no shells in this omlette - it may not even be collective induction into another CBC mini-series! Zola’s emotional food processor definition of art is useful here: a corner of nature through temperment. For Groebner: reproductive tempermentalism through a corner of urban temperment. How does a photo of a painting return back (forward?) to a painting again?
In a city accoladed for its slickly somber professionalized aesthetic Groebner’s raw slapdashery may speak to some as unwitting (say nothing of unmarketable). However, his is territory outside of any expressionist 9th life. In the aggregate canvas Spreading the Weal there is a pictorial slang somewhere between Gerhard Richter, LucTuymans but more like that of Asger Jorn.1 Like Jorn - who preferred to “treat theoretical matter as an expressionist material” - Groebner’s work falls into a “disfiguring” tradition rather than a purely postmodern pastichist one. As with Guy Debord and Jorn’s collaborative efforts in screen printed over-view maps of Paris, Groebner attempts to rejig the instrumentalism of mapping imagery and state control.2

While he is as suspect of “individual artist genius,” (as much as the next conceptualist) Groebner’s own version of minimalist sub-contracting is more related to the multifaceted labours of his own daily “Stairmaster” routine: mechanic, mountain biker, drummer, etc. Groebner’s paintings girdle this continuum of exertion. But, what is this relation between the bicycle and the paintbrush? Alfred Stieglitz anticipated the mutual embrace of pedal and paint: “photography is a fad well nigh on its last legs, thanks largely to the bicycle craze.” Perhaps it is this celebration of the griminess of material life that unites the two: the stink, the muck, hard surfaces, pit sweat, noise. A renewed spirit of metabolism, an aesthetics of strain, all the time, with a cerebral core: wildlife and reproduction.
In the end, these are only gnarled pointed sticks of summer that inadvertently poke others’ bloated marshmallows to the embers. And if these piebald gutbucket sequences are slathered, scuttering, and puzzled together with more points of entry than a wayward whiffle ball, than enter one must into the festooned Stars and Stripes atlas that the Industrial Complex blowback is measured. “Copying” after all according to Hillel Schwartz, “is what we are all about.”2

Jordan Strom


1 Dutch born Asger Jorn was an instrumental member of two twentieth century European avant-gardes–CoBra and the Situationists. As founder of the Institute For Comparative Vandalism he perfected better than most the combination of modernist painting and social justice advocacy.


1 Hillel Schwartz, 1999. Culture of the Copy. (Zone, MIT).