Pointed outcry to troubled time
Steven Hull makes carnivalesque hybrids of painting and sculpture whose chief aim is to turn visions of the conventional world upside down. When that world has already been stood on its head, his art assumes an unexpected level of creepiness.
The centerpiece of his recent incisive show at Meliksetian Briggs, Hull’s debut with the gallery, put white nationalism and its perversion of Christian values on sordid display. The assemblage featured an old-fashioned motorized scooter — a vintage 1951 Electric Shopper — towing a model battleship that’s made from wood blocks, packing tubes and old sardine and tuna fish cans, all painted dull gray.
On the scooter’s roof, a big electric megaphone blared the rantings of a fireand-brimstone country preacher. The hourlong recorded audio had been slowed to a deep, drunkensounding bass, its garbled sermon punctuated by alarming warnings of Lucifer’s seductions and wrath.
Driving the dilapidated scooter: a Klansman in a white robe and a blond sidekick. Stylistically, Hull’s trashy mannequins and their cracked demeanor crossed Edward Kienholz sculptures, Philip Guston paintings and 19th century Thomas Nast editorial cartoons. Nast was the scourge of “Boss” Tweed and his post-Civil War corruption scandal around Tammany Hall, the New York Democratic political machine.
Hull’s sharp caricature used history as a scaffolding for a scathing satire of American political life now. The target was underscored by assorted homemade bumper stickers on the Electric Shopper’s back end, together affirming the bigoted rhetoric of putative billionaire-President Trump.
The tableau’s wry title, “If Jesus Gives Us Everything We Want, We’ll Love Him,” zinged prosperity theology, which holds that financial success is a function of appropriate worship. Nearby, a trash can sprouted a tattered tree of knowledge, while two wooden crackerbarrels were topped by a toy church and a toy carnival clown, respectively.
This was the first half of “Sheets Deprived of Wind,” Hull’s two-part show. I haven’t seen the second, which launched Saturday; but given the first, expect equally complex crosscurrents to form a sad, sinister, pitch-perfect lament for our troubled time.
Meliksetian Briggs, 313 N. Fairfax Ave., West Hollywood. Part II ends April 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays. (310) 625-7049; www .meliksetianbriggs.com
christopher.knight@latimes.com