Robin Williams. Your Good Taste is Showing. Acrylic, airbrush, and oil on canvas 72 x 72 inches. Copyright Robin Williams, Courtesy P.P.O.W
We live at a time of extreme disconnects between the representations and reality, fueling a compulsive cycle of consumption in search of illusions and false ideals. Nowhere can this be seen better than in advertisements, which are designed to provoke a complex mixture of desire and dissatisfaction. What makes them eerily effective is the way they integrate into our lives, informing our attitudes, opinions, and aesthetics. As time passes they become something more: memories of the “good ol’ days,” which we can wax nostalgic upon while simultaneously rewriting our histories to flatter our self-images.
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The subject of gender is infinitely complex, with its ideals and archetypes that are far more constructions of fantasies and fears than they are upon the mundane reality that makes them infinitely more messy, revealing the inherent nature of paradox at the root of existence when we live in a state of conflict rather than harmony with our lives.
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Advertisements are false paradigms that are readily absorbed for their reductive thinking that enables people who like to avoid responsibility to readily allow someone else to dictate the terms. Naturally, they are far more seductive otherwise they wouldn’t work. By provoking us with pragmatic solutions (buy this! use that!) they cultivate dependency not only on their wares but also on the very medium itself. Perhaps there’s nothing so delicious as a reflection upon which we can project our ego’s demanding neediness. Invariably, short term gratification wears off, and we return to the well even thirstier than we were when we first took a sip.
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Robin Williams. It is Not a Pipe. Acrylic and oil on panel 30 x 30 inches. Copyright Robin Williams, Courtesy P.P.O.W
The construction of the female gender is American society has long been a losing paradigm, dating back to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s idealistic essay Woman (1885), which overwhelms with the weight of virtue and vulnerability. “They are victims of the finer temperament,” he writes, clearly enamored with the pedestal upon which he places them.
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Fast forward nearly a century to the 1970s, as liberation movements began to free women from these tiresome constraints. The pendulum, being what it is, swung in the other direction, where wanton grace became the idea. Advertisers understood the power of aping the zeitgeist, corralling the chaotic displays of self-exploration into neatly packaged archetypes.
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These aesthetics fascinated American artist Robin F. Williams and became an integral motif throughout her new body of work, which combined genre painting and portraiture to subversive effect in the new exhibition Your Good Taste Is Showing, now on view at P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York, through November 11, 2017.
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Williams’ work deftly mixes takes 1970s advertisements as its departure point, examining the ways in which they drew upon art historical tropes to sell everything from cigarettes to shampoo. Where the advertisements wanted to draw you in to their world, Williams’ forces you to back off, subverts expectations of propriety, giving her subjects the agency to figuratively flip the bird while still looking, soft, sensual, and glamorous. Here, sexy is a double-edged sword, for it both makes you look but places a clear boundary between the desire it stimulates and its ability to fulfill your dreams.
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No, the works says, not this time. I’m not yours.
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Robin Williams. Bather, 2017. Acrylic, airbrush, and oil on canvas, 38 x 23 inches. Copyright Robin Williams, Courtesy P.P.O.W.