Jim Shaw's O-ism and American Nightmares at CAPC Bordeaux

From May 7 to September 19, 2010, CAPC musée d'art contemporain in Bordeaux presented a comprehensive exhibition of American artist Jim Shaw. The show featured fifteen monumental paintings executed over the past decade on old theater backdrops, sculptures, a floating fetus, a carnivalesque labyrinth, videos, and collections of Christian objects. Shaw's work is characterized by a dense, buzzing amalgam of incongruities, juxtaposing sources, techniques, and styles from comic books, cinema, art history, and biblical imagery. Recurring motifs include apocalyptic scenes, zombie businessmen, Masonic symbols, 1890s music-hall dancers sucked into an eight-tentacled vacuum, a gas station trapped in a spider web, obese men swimming with eyes on their long penises, political caricatures, and consumerist critiques. Central to the exhibition is Shaw's invented religion, O-ism, which recycles American founding myths and crypto-sectarian beliefs. The artist's approach oscillates between hostility and proximity, rebellion and contact, as he probes irrational fears, delirious anxieties, and the monstrous underbelly of American society. The exhibition creates an atmospheric envelopment that is both ludicrous and unsettling, moving from fairground facades to darker, violently lit zones. Didier Arnaudet wrote the accompanying text.