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CHARLES BROWNING
Exhibition: "Weasel Pop," the paintings of Charles Browning Opens: Friday, May 6, 7–9 p.m. |
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Charles Browning offers a timely send up of the blithe, plain-lore idealism at the heart of contemporary American populism. Stock characters from period comedy—Daniel Boones, country boys and Scarlett O’Hara types inhabit his large-scale paintings. They are Saturday Evening Post men and women of destiny in a virgin land, untainted by the smell of anything urban, socialist, French, avant-garde or even slightly hip. Apologists for the New American Right sidestep the Hollywood and Madison Avenue media to appeal directly to the grass roots biases and nostalgia of ordinary folks. With heritage-lore redux, they undercut and summarily dismiss the values of liberal democracy. In this context, vintage 60s Pop and its cool Post-pop spawn are coming to seem less relevant. Browning’s “Weasel Pop” instead mimics these conservatives’ dopey, homespun-yarn style to meet them directly on their home turf. His high kitsch of American ambition is sentimental, sweet, really kinda dumb and right on the money. His mammoth, twelve-foot Battle of the Indians is wrought in the grand manner of Benjamin West (1738–1820). In it, Christopher Columbus heroically presides over the ensuing melee. So credibly pompous is Browning’s execution, it takes a moment to realize that only one of the two tribes is native American—the other is from the Indian subcontinent.  It Will Come to You, this Love of the Land, 2004, oil/canvas, 72 x 84" In another of his canvases, It Will Come to You, this Love of the Land (from Gone with the Wind, a warning to Scarlett O’Hara from her father Gerald), a smarmy negro house slave stands at the base of a hillock, like Tiger Woods in the rough, as he dashes off a grand portrait of the jolly gent, his master, sprawled out against a tree, devouring a roasted chicken. The saccharine charm of the scene, the sweeping, cinematic vistas
and the wholesome and sanitized palette point to a time of "harmony," before the Civil Rights Movement. Similarly, in Greenest Tree in the Land of the Free (misquoted from the Ballad of Davy Crockett, 1955), the coonskin-cap frontiersman suspended in triumphant mid-stride over a cliff—as he gazes in mystical delight foward to his destiny—reads all over him Disney Disney Disney, if not George Bush.
Allusions to seminal moments in popular American nativist conciousness recur throughout this body of work: the genre paintings of George Caleb Bingham and prints of Currier and Ives from before and after the Civil War; the history paintings of
Benjamin West from the period leading up to the Monroe Doctrine; and the transcendant landscape paintings of the Hudson River School and Asher B. Durand from the age of Manifest Destiny—nothing, in short, ever embraced by the 20th-century cultural elite. Browning throws it all right back at ‘em. Gallery 1: Gil & Moti
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Battle of the Indians, 2004, oil on canvas, 84 x 144"
