CATALOG ESSAY FOR 'FREEDOM FARMERS', AUCKLAND ART GALLERY, 2013
Poet and filmmaker Nick Twemlow is a senior editor of the Iowa Review and co-editor of Canarium Books. His first collection of poetry, Palm Trees (2012), won the Norma Farber first book award from the Poetry Society of America.
When I encounter Martin Basher’s work, I feel something. I know, I know, ‘feel’ is a four-letter word when it comes to describing contemporary art. You must ‘think’ before you feel, if you are to ‘feel’ at all. What I feel is something like nostalgia, something like revulsion, and the rip of decadence that simmers under the surface of just about every work of art made since 1982.
Basher’s art frightens me. His vision of utopia frightens me. His paintings and sculptures are Frankenstein’s Monsters, a hewing of disparate materials (a Jack Daniels bottle, a warehouse lamp) into synthetic creations that baffle not by their precognition of some distant dystopian future, but of their picture of how janky and strange and possibly awful our near-future will look.
Look at Basher’s paintings. Gilded palm trees and popping vertical columns of color recall Patrick Nagel’s early ‘80s revisioning of the line and figure, restored and buoyed by a Technicolor vision replete with Barnett Newman’s geometric obsessions and Frank Stella’s fuzzy, irregular geometric puzzles. Nagle changed the direction of those lines, as if he had internalized the poet Emily Dickinson: “Tell all Truth but tell it slant—”
Basher’s utopic vision adds another wrinkle—he’s a Kiwi. He may call the States home, but he’s rustic and rural to his core. Basher paints and builds hyper-real objects that slick past your eye at first then burn into your retina, finally boring into your brain and throwing a party. You’re invited, but this is All The World’s Party, a liminal free market zone where the bold and beautiful let their hair down, revealing their webbed toes, deformed thumbs, liposuction scars, and all the rest of the war wounds celebrity requires.
Basher’s work claims a stake in Foucault’s heterotopic realm, where mirrors contain everything and nothing. His art is to surface incongruous desires, the scenes we’re not supposed to see (but desperately want to), like the cum-spackled sheets in the made-up bed in the hotel room we can only see via black light. As Basher puts it: “I am drawn to the tenacious scum that clings to the images I use.”
Immerse yourself into the dazzling colors, the photo real images (reproduced images of other reproduced images, such as vacation postcards)—the work of a master draftsman—and discover his crafted, fraught responses to his own desire for refined, glittery objects (he’s like a magpie), a desire always rebuffed by the slippages between here and there, who he wants to be and who he is.
Once you’re done, forget about utopias and let Martin Basher’s work transport you to some other place, a place you shouldn't plan your family vacation to, but a place you will find yourself careening toward sooner than any of us would like.