In the Eye of the Spectacle

STEVEN VINCENT

The media-obsessed art of Damian Loeb

A lie that cannot be challenged becomes a form of madness. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle.

Thirty-year-old Damian Loeb belongs to a select group of New York painters - among them Cecily Brown, Inka Essenhigh and John Currin - whom an equally select group of magazine and newspaper editors have anointed stars of the contemporary art scene. In his brief five-year career, Loeb has been featured in several magazine articles, a Vanity Fair photospread and countless art and alternative publications. W magazine and both the fashion and style columns of the Neu York Times have noted his work, while the Times's social pages have chronicled his exploits with best-bud Moby, the electronic music wizard. The artist hangs out with fashion designer Alexander McQueen and visits rock star Elton John when in London. He's even been on Charlie Rose.

At the same time, Loeb has attracted the upper echelons of the contemporary art world. Powerful dealers, including London's Jay Jopling, as well as New York's Jeffrey Deitch, Larry Gagosian and his current dealer, the glamorous Mary Boone, have vied to show his work. His 1999 shows at Jopling's White Cube Gallery and Boone's Manhattan space sold out before they opened, as did his second show at Boone's in 2000. Buyers of his work include advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, fashion designer Nicole Miller, New Line Cinema president Michael Lynne, in addition to New York's Museum of Modern Art. Loeb's canvases have doubled in price over the last two years, currently fetching over $30,000 each. Not bad for a high school drop-out who taught himself to paint.

What makes Loeb's success all thc more interesting is the critics' reaction to his art: they loathe it. 'Soulless', charged Art in America; 'lowbrow', muttered the New Yorker; his work 'lacks real invention or imagination', hissed the Village Voice; it has 'no idea what it is about', sniffed Modern Painters. 'Occasionally a show comes by that's so bad it's good: this is not one of them', sneered the New York Times. One downtown reviewer even advised the artist to consult a psychiatrist. And these sentiments pale compared to the outrage expressed by artists and photographers whose work Loeb uses or, to use art world politesse, 'appropriates' to create his paintings. In this light, a second review in the Times seems almost egregiously cruel: 'Loeb is playing a role', wrote Michael Kimmelman. 'Every circus needs a clown.'

In a town as ambitious as New York, the successful are often richer in enemies than friends, and Loeb is no exception. 'A lot of people are jealous of Damian', Boone remarkee to me. 'They see how rapidly he became a success and they want to tear him down.' And to be sure, there is something grating about the media's fascination with Loeb (recently, the New York Post ran a photo of him and asked three women to rate his overall sex appeal; he received so-so marks). Still, given his ever expanding press clippings and sky-high Q rating, jealousy alone cannot fully explain the vitriol streaming from critics' pens and private conversations - nor why his fiercest detractors tend to be middle-aged Baby Boomers. Among those who either laud or pan Loeb's work, the reaction is frequently overwrought and mis-informed.The artist has clearly touched a nerve. But which?

Full disclosure: I'm a Baby Boomer, born in 1955, and when I attended Loeb's 1999 show at Mary Boone's and first saw his paintings, I didn't like them either. To me, they seemed like glossy rip offs of MTV (as a day job in New York, Loeb once helped produce low budget music videos). His painting entitled Resolution, for example, depicted an Asian woman, apparently dead, Iying on her back in a bucolic field. Heartland, the Prairie showed two robed Klansmen seen through thc windshield of a truck, a roiling mass of storm clouds reflected in the vehicle's side mirror. Love Story portrayed a woman Iying on a New York subway platform with her head bashed in, ignored by a group of men dressed in Santa Claus outfits. Art for the supermarket tabloid crowd, I thought, packed with enough bad-boy testosterone to power a NASCAR race.

But the longer I examined the paintings, the more they affected me. I began to feel old. These works, I realised, were the first I'd seen that seemed to originate not from some art school - trend or tedious critical theory, but from the sensibilities of an entirely different generation. With near-perfect pitch, their intense colours and brutal imagery articulated thc Zeitgeist of Loeb's generation X, those Reagan era children cosseted by 25 years of trauma-free history and the maternal glow of the television set. He seemed to have it pegged: the emotional attenuation of his peers, their lack of historical awareness and indifference to hierarchy, ideology, teleology - anything that might organise and give meaning to the deluge of images spewed forth by the mass media. I became intrigued. If Loeb was aware of what he was doing, he could be a genius. If not, if he was just another avatar of tattoo and-nose-ring anomie, his work was destined for eBay. I decided to seek him out.

My initial impression was not good. There, in the midst of Boone's swank gallery, was a tall, sandy-haired, square-headed kid, wearing, of all things, an NYPD jacket. This was during the height of concerns in New York about police brutality, and I immediately assumed he was making a weary statement against the 'Man', similar to the way '60s flower children wore US Army fatigues. But I was wrong. 'I have no problom with the police', Loeb informed me. 'They're the ones who stand between us and chaos.' From a young artist, this was strange talk, indeed. Now I really became intrigued.

Loeb, I soon discovered, knows something about chaos. He was born in New Haven in 1970 to a Jewish father and Scottish-American Presbyterian mother. Clinging to the bottom rung ot the upper middle class, his parents were committed leftists typical of the '60s. Loeb's father was active in New Haven's Black Panther movement for a time, then enrolled in the Yale Divinity School to escape thc draft; the couple later adopted an abandoned black girl. Their social conscience, however, did not prevent them from divorcing when Loeb was seven - and then going on to embroil themselves in two more marriages each. In particular, his mother was misfortunate enough to become involved with abusive husbands. 'As a child, I avoided violence', Loeb told me during a conversation in his Tribeca studio. 'But I sensed it everywhere. It was like background noise.'

The proverbial high-school outsider, Loeb dropped out of his senior year. By then, he and Moby, whom he met in a Greenwich, Connecticut, nightclub where the musician was DJ'ing, were making regular trips to New York, where Loeb hoped to pursue an artistic career. 'lt's all I ever wanted to do', he said in clipped, earnest tones, continually clearing his throat of the residue of multiple cigarettes. In 1989, Loeb and Moby settled permanently in the city.

I asked Loeb about his painting technique. Befitting an artist with no formal training, it's unusual and highly controversial. 'In the beginning', he said,'I tried to create my own images, but my work ended up too subjective and not that interesting to viewers - like when you describe to someone a dream you had.' Searching for a more objective means to express himself, the artist began assembling montages of photographs culled from magazines, art books and other visual media - he is a voracious reader of these publications - which he then reproduced in larger scale using oil on canvas and coating the finished picture with high-gloss varnish. The result is a hard edged, highly graphic painting nearly totally comprised of imagery appropriated trom the mass media. 'l use the media's objective vocabulary to express my own subjective experiences', Loeb explained.

As an example, he noted his 1997 painting Anything Else. Here, he superimposed an image, lifted from a GM advertisement, of a flying, or falling, child over a 1993 photograph of a London policeman arresting a protestor in a street disturbance. The scene alludes to a particularly painful episode in his life: in 1993, an Asian immigrant whom he had impregnated after a brief affair disappeared with their three year old daughter; because the woman did not list Loeb's name on the child's birth certificate, New York welfare officials refused to reveal the young girl's location. Loeb had not seen her in four years.

In general, the artist balks at revealing such personal details behind his work, preferring people to 'make their own interpretations'. This hermeticism rankles many critics.' There is a laziness in [Loeb's] assumption that art is not a dialogue and has nothing more to offer than what the viewer invents for himself', griped Modern Painters. A noted San Francisco collector recently told me he avoids Loeb's canvases because he finds them 'impersonal and arbitrary'. And in truth, without knowing the artist's life story, it would he difficult to appreciate the intimate dimensions of his work - especially the six-canvas series he completed last year, which depicts the wanderings of a young Asian girl through heartland America before she was apparently murdered.

Still, listening to Loeb describe his manner of assembling his photographic pastiches, I couldn't help feeling a certain poignancy. Loeb is a man whose fear of emotional fragmentation is nearly palpable: eschewing alcohol and drugs, he emits an aura of ambiguous sexuality and a potential for violence smothered by almost militaristic self-repression. Over the entrance to his studio, he has installed a video camera which feeds live street scenes into a colour monitor inside. 'If you sat outside and looked at the same scene, you'd quickly get bored', he remarked. 'But once you put the same scene inside a frame, it becomes interesting.' To Loeb, even the vagaries of a New York street are suspect: life demands order, definition, an authoritarian context to give it meaning.

This compulsion for order permeates both his personality and artwork. In person, Loeb exhibits the rigid wariness of someone under continual self-surveillance - a kind of playing to an inner camera typical of narcissistic personalities. At the same time, his passion for self-control leaves one feeling a peculiar airlessness in his presence. The same holds true for his paintings. Like television commercials and music videos, they are vivid, even beautiful, yet emotionally guarded. Instead of spontaneity, play, instinct, they reveal an obsessive-neurotic will, compelling images to form deceptively superficial tableaux that permits little space for accident or chance.

Loeb prides himself on his painstaking efforts to organise and balance the individual elements of his montages before repainting them - even to the point of rephotographing, as exactly as possible, certain images to supply components cropped in the originals, or to assure an overall continuity of light. His goal, he explains, is to embed visual tensions in his work that can prompt, even trick, viewers into projecting their own predilections onto his scenes. For instance, if, like some people, we detect references to child abuse in his 2000 Notice (School is Closed), which depicts a small Asian girl doing the splits behind a school-yard fence what, Loeb asks, does that tell us about our own imaginations? Moreover, by basing his suggestive images on contemporary photo-journalism and fine-art photography, Loeb deliberately underscores how deeply the media informs our way of perceiving everyday life.

A perfect example is his 1999 Fair Market. In this work, Loeb juxtaposes the image (taken from a photograph by Philip-Lorca deCorcia) of a shirtless black man in a grocery-store parking lot, with the image (taken from a photograph appearing in National Geographic magazine) of two Caucasian figures in a pick-up truck, a white dog lunging through the vehicle's window at the viewer. By situating the man deeper in the painting's background and the Caucasian figures in the foreground, Loeb constructs a scene where any objective observer would consider the animal the immediate threat. But in its devastating 1999 review of Loeb's show, the New York Times described the man as 'armed' when in fact, he is not. 'It was as if I said "who's the racist in the group?" and the Times reviewer raised her hand', Loeb remarked with ill-disguised glee. 'She saw a black man and immediately provided him with a gun.' (This misreading of reality took more tragic form just days after the Times ran its review when four New York City cops shot African immigrant Amadou Diallo to death, mistakenly believing he held a gun.)

Artists, of course, have set booby-traps in their work ever since the famous trompe-l'oeil contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasios. But what particularly distinguishes Loeb is his almost truculent moralism. 'My object is to make people culpable for their interpretation of images', he said forthrightly. But I would take his statement further: Loeb's works attempt to make us culpable for our use of images. In this light, when he appropriates the sky in Roseville and the noir-ish motel sign in Deep South (from the works of photographer Joel Meyorwitz and Jeff Brouws, respectively), the artist effectively simulates how contemporary society constructs a faux-reality out of images of reality - from the histrionic falsity of TV commercials to pseudo events like the death of Princess Diana or John F Kennedy, Jr. As life increasingly becomes a commodifiable simulation of itself, we find ourselves in the midst of Jean Baudrillard's 'hyper-reality' a realm inhabited by such extravagant simulacra as Disneyland, LasVegas casinos, virtual reality and plastic surgery, not to mention the cross-dressing and transsexual scenes. To young people in particular, reality is increasingly understood as that which is reproduced technologically, especially through the media. Like the world seen through Loeb's studio video monitor, reality is only real and meaningful when it occurs within the frame of the television set, movie screen or magazine photospread. To experience media is to be. We 'be' media.

Suddenly, the artist whom critics have condemned as 'lazy' and 'impersonal' presents us with an ontological problem. For to define life - and by extension, one's own existence - as that which one experiences through the media implies the validity of the reverse proposition, as well: only that which the media sees, exists. Here the distinction between subject and object collapses and we watch ourselves through the eyes of our own media. And what do these media see? Human beings fragmented into analysable bits of information: credit reports, bank accounts, police and medical records, actuarial statistics, shopping habits, zip codes, voting patterns, and so on. Gradually, we transform life into computer data readable solely by machines. In this way, Loeb's cut-and-paste pastiches simulate not only how we structure our lives out of the media, but how the media structures us. This is one reason, I believe, why the 'impersonal' nature of his paintings troubles many viewers. When the technology of the Global Consumer State prefigured in French Situationalist Guy Debord's concept of the 'Spectacle' - becomes self aware (as it will: sentient machines are less than decades away), its perception of reality will resemble the world as portrayed in Loeb's paintings. Call it Machine Realism.

Loeb is not the first person to raise thc alarm over the intertwining relationship between capitalism and technology, and its infernal offspring, narcissism. This well-grooved path runs from the Romantics to neo-conservative critics like Daniel Bell and Christopher Lasch to Andy Warhol's machine-like silk screens and the psycho-babble ot daytime TV. But if the popular cinema is any measure, our ontological anxieties have only increased in recent years. In the hit 1998 movie The Truman Show, for example, actor Jim Carrey's character Truman discovers that his life is in fact a television series, his friends and loved ones actors, and nature a technologically constructed environment: nothing is authentic, everything is 'showbiz' manipulated by an authoritarian director-figure to achieve high TV ratings. Other contemporary movies which have addresscd this theme include EdTV, The Matrix and Dark City not to mention TV shows such as MTV's Real World and CBS's Survivor and Big Brother, where people live literally surrounded by cameras. Despite their pessimistic visions of life as media-surveillance, each of these scenarios (with the exception of thc peculiar Dark City) provides us with a way out: Morpheus finds his 'chosen one' to contest the Matrix, Truman literally breaks through the fourth wall of his media confinement, the contestants in Survivor are voted off the island - while in the visual arts, the slippages and imperfections of Warhol's silk-screen reveal the presence of a human artist duplicating thc automated processes of a machine.

Not so with Loeb. In his work, no one escapes their individual Truman Shows, their narcissistic surveillance cameras. Instead, he imprisons us in media, nothing but media, media watching media watching media: a 24 hour process of translating reality into image that flattens the emotional depth of the life ane fragments the soul. His mcchanical romanticism - one critic has unkindly likened Loeb to Generation X's Norman Rockwell - bears keen witness to our society's drift from the Real into thc self-reflecting labyrinth of media and commodified versions of the hyper-real. Where Warhol symbolised this process, Loeb simulates it, imbuing his canvases with the very drives that seek to transform nature into culture, life into technology, soul into image. No wonder his works titillate the nihilistic mass media: in them we experience thc psychopathology at the base of modern life, the fascistic thrill of dominating the world through death-obsessed technology and narcissistic fantasies of power.

The antagonism between Loeb's paintings and Baby Boomer sensibilities couldn't be sharper. The artist's lurid subject matter and colour-TV hues are rapiers directed straight to the heart of the '60s generation's inflated image of itself. Boomers, after all, see themselves as the groovy kids who once rebelled, rioted, burnt draft cards and bras, stopped a war and brought down a President. Now middle-aged, they stoke the dwindling fires of youth by waxing nostalgic about their Counterculture, their sex and drugs and rock-and-roll, their Dionysian forays into the Beyond, the Outside, the apocalyptic Ineffable. 'Break on through to the other side', Morrison exhorted, while Jimi excused himself to 'kiss the sky'. As they grow increasingly uneasy with their Iegacy (especially compared to their parents' more accomplished World War II generation), they cling ever tighter to the myth that once, a quarter century ago, they took to the streets against tyranny and injustice and changed the world. And all they needed was flower power and love.

In contrast, Loeb is a bad - the worst - acid trip. He declares that the Counterculture is dead, there is no 'other side', the sky is just another media representation and love a mere entanglement in the System. There's no hope even for the catharsis of an apocalypse, not now, not ever. Change is impossible because we can no longer find a standpoint from which to initiate meaningful action. There are only ever shifting image patterns of one's own narcissism, reverberating in the endless tape loop of the mass media. As Loeb acidly remarked to me, Boomers recognise and deplore this condition, yet castigate the very art - his - that depicts it. Yet is there any wonder? This is the society that Boomers have built, his paintings proclaim. This is how they 'changed the world'.

'I use a vocabulary of images that the generation before me created and now feels victimised by', Loeb said. That vocabulary includes the forced excitement of television commercials, music videos and fashion magazine ads which Boomers developed, perfected and now pump into the world's consciousness. And if there's no longer an escape from this consumer-mad, media-strangled society, it's because Boomers have also sealed shut the exits. Through his artwork, Loeb denounces how, in the name of 'personal liberation', the '60s flower children destroyed traditions of family, religion and patriotism that once provided an escape route from the Spectacle, while their sexual experiments bequeathed a legacy of repression, disease and fear to their children. Moreover, Loeb notes, from their positions in media, government and finance, Boomers continue the very revolution they started in the 1960s to make the world safe for narcissism, technology, and the Spectacle. 'I want my paintings to make Boomers feel uncomfortable', Loeb said - and judging by the criticism he has garnered, he has succeeded.

But should we accept his declaration at face value? Once again, we return to the crux of the debate surrounding his works. Do Loeb's paintings manifest society's imprisonment in the Spectacle - or his own unhealthy addiction to media? Are his canvases true maledictions against the Boomer generation - or expressions of unresolved anger toward his parents? Is he an artist depicting narcissism or a narcissistic artist? Critics maintain the latter, denying him any objective distance from his art. This exasperates Loeb. 'l know exactly what I'm doing', he insisted, interrupting our conversation to field continuous cell phone calls from Moby, family members and a movie star he is currently dating. 'I'm not your average person consumed by media. If l were - or if I were a totally narcissistic human being - how could I create art in the first place?'

I tend to give Loeb the benefit of the doubt. He is an artist, and a good one. As to whether his works critique or endorse the media world I say, they do neither. Rather, they manifest the anguish of a self abandoned inside the narcissistic chambers of that world. Whether that self is Loeb's own, or that of his Generation X - or our entire culture - is not the issue. Like all significant artists, Loeb both personifies and universalises the spirit of his age. The crisis of a self banished into the mirrored maze of Post modernism and image-fetishism ('the image has become the final form of commodity reification', wrote Debord) is our society's plight, as well. Perhaps Loeb is - as his critics maintain, and the media seems to believe - a front-man for the Spectacle, a narcissistic Boomer manque who will eventually merge into the background buzz of celebrityhood to become nothing more than a media image himself. For his sake, I hope not - but it doesn't really matter. His work is already out in the world. In The Truman Show, the hero's awareness of his media-imprisonment began when he assembled a photomontage of a woman whose attention had awakened his soul. Similarly, Loeb's paintings help awaken us to our own self-entombment, our own death-obsessed yearnings for omnipotence and oblivion and the global Spectacle we have built to institutionalise those desires.

'Damian Loeb', Spring 2001 Mary Boone Gallery, New York.