BRUCEHELANDERA Survey of Works

P E T E R M A R C E L L E G A L L E RYB R I D G E H A M P T O N

BRUCEHELANDER

A Survey of WorksEssay by Donald Kuspit | Edited by Susan Hall

Designed by Daniel Ellis | Photographs by Michael Price

PE T E R M A RC E L L E GA L L E RY2411 Main Street, Bridgehampton, New York 11932

T. 631-338-2723 | 631-613-6170

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Imperial Cove, 2006, Wood, found object collage construction, vintage frame, 25 x 31 ½ in.

I would like to thank Peter Marcelle for inviting me

to join his illustrious gallery, and I offer sincere appreciation

to the dedicated staff at Peter Marcelle Gallery: directors,

Catherine McCormick and Betsy Maloney, and

assistant, Breahna Arnold, for coordinating

the logistics of this exhibition.

I would like to acknowledge the daily encouragement

and support from my wife and partner, Claudia, and

for her enthusiastic diligence and assistance in the studio,

especially for gluing down the works on paper.

My thanks to Susan Hall, the studio manager and

my assistant for more years than we would rather admit.

A sincere handshake to my art and design director,

Daniel Ellis, who always produces a beautiful product.

Thank you to Donald Kuspit for his insightful essay; to

Michael Price for his excellent photography; to our framer,

David Smith/Framesmith; and to Christopher Hurbs

and Palmer Crippen, studio interns.

And finally, to fellow artists, Cameron Gray and

Dan Rizzie, whose regular, trusted opinions assisted

greatly in the development of this show.

This exhibition made possible in part by an artist’s grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

B ruce Helander’s collages have that “high degree of

immediate absurdity”—Breton’s phrase—that marks

them as surreal. The method in the madness of sur-

realist art is what Breton called “pure psychic automatism,”

“a condition in which activity is carried out without con-

scious knowledge.” This allows one to associate, more or less

freely—playfully or compulsively, depending on how deeply

unconscious one is—images that one is ordinarily conscious

of to “extraordinary” effect, as though in a dream. “Automa-

tism” and “free association” are psychoanalytic terms—the

former is from Pierre Janet, the latter from Sigmund Freud

(both of whom Breton acknowledges as “influences”)—sug-

gesting that Helander’s collages invite psychological inter-

pretation: they certainly do look like dream images—Surre-

alism’s “simulated dreams,” as Breton called them. Indeed,

At the Beach, Fun in the Sun, High Heel Helper and My Blue

Heaven are explicitly sexual dreams—images of seductive

dream girls skewed into what psychoanalysts call (alluring)

part objects, more particularly, breasts and buttocks, with

some shapely legs thrown in for good measure.

But, let’s quickly note, there’s something ironical—play-

fully ironic—in this skewing and fragmenting—this surreal

shattering of the image in the very act of presenting it. The

blue heaven is unexpected black, and the dream girls prove

oddly unsubstantial and ungraspable, dissolving into the

atmosphere, leaving haunting residues of titillating flesh.

Helander’s dream girls are tantalizingly out of reach, as

dream girls—mirages that disappear as soon as they are

approached—always are. Helander’s images are peculiarly

“anti-representational,” or incoherently representational,

however ostensibly representational, that is, however much

we recognize that we are looking at a glamorous female

figure—an agelessly attractive, conventionally beautiful

American Dream Girl. She’s the mythical, completely make-

believe goddess of popular culture—it is always “redefining

reality,” as Peter Whybrow ironically put it. More particularly,

she’s the perverse embodiment of what William James fa-

mously called the Bitch Goddess of materialistic Success that

America promises. Helander in effect dismembers her, sug-

gesting that she’s just a transient illusion, not to say a big lie.

He treats Elvis Presley in the same ironical disillusioning

way. Helander also is obsessed with Presley, as Croaked

Double Elvis, Elvis Revisited, and Artist as Elvis (Past Per-

formance) show, to the extent of identifying with him, with

anxious irony: he’s another disappointment, another fake

dream figure, another fraud. He’s a mythical, make-believe

god in the pantheon of American popular culture, another

betrayal of the American Dream in the very act of personi-

fying it. Like Helander’s American Dream Girl, Presley, an

American Dream Boy, and like her a narcissistic heartthrob,

is a case of arrested development, physical as well as emo-

tional. The older he became, the more he struggled to look

young, which perhaps is why he died young, as the ancient

myth tells us Narcissus did by falling in love with his own

image. And just as they are alluring sirens, so Presley sang

siren songs. Helander skews and mocks him with more out-

raged energy than he brings to the desirable demoiselles of

Florida—which is where Helander lives, as Lounge Chair

Lizard (presumably watching them go by), with its pecu-

liarly lurid turquoise green, makes clear—perhaps because

Presley was self-destructive, while the demoiselles fade into

thin air, dematerialized into unstable fantasies.

Like all dreams, both promise more than they can deliver,

although Presley seems much more solid and real for Hel-

ander, as the Croaked Double Elvis sculpture suggests. The

small croaking frogs—Helander’s surrogate comic commen-

tators—suggest that his fame and fortune are a joke that went

to his head: thus his doubled—“swelled”—head, while the

title is an obvious reference to Warhol’s famous double por-

trait of Elvis. Helander decapitates him, but he grows another

head, suggesting that he’s a hydra-headed monster, infinitely

reproducible, as media icons tend to be. But the smiling frogs

Ironic Play: Bruce Helander’s Collages

BY DONALD KUSP I T

At the Beach, 2012, Paper collage on museum board, 25 x 18 ½ in.

stand over what is in effect his corpse, ridiculing him, and

suggesting his inherent ridiculousness—the ridiculousness of

his success and popularity, for it didn’t save him from himself.

I immediately thought of Aristophanes’ croaking frogs when

I saw the piece, which shows Helander’s ability to make con-

vincing three-dimensional work. He’s a cunning comedian,

reminding us, as Aristotle wrote, that comedy deals with the

ridiculously real, indeed, a reality that seems to ridicule itself.

Even “pure art” is treated with ironical irreverence by

Helander. An abstract expressionist painting is a Branch

Office—of Abstract Expressionism Inc., or is each earth-

brown painterly gesture a dead branch on a barren tree of

art? Snobbish Mr. New Yorker—Helander’s famously witty

cover for the magazine of that name, reducing Manhattan

to a fractured map of itself—has its Eye on Jersey, suggest-

ing that’s the place to really be, at least if one wants beaches

and fun. The work is a subtle Sidesplitter, to refer to another

of Helander’s works—also poking ironical fun at the popular

culture’s comic strip figures (Mr. New Yorker is one, and so is

Presley) while using them to ridicule the society they repre-

sent. The skull in Pirate’s Paradise has two evil eyes and is

split in two, the Trunk Show is a shambles, Imperial Cove is

marked by a surreally giant growth but its glory is long gone,

and Sending Out an S.O.S. is a panicked cry for help in the

midst of an incoherent mess of manic details. Helander may

be the broncobuster in Bronco, but the bucking horse is ready

to throw him. The lasso ties head and hooves together, sug-

gesting that it’s about to trip over itself. Helander has come

absurdly full circle, as it were.

Collage readily lends itself to surreal irony by reason of

its use of incommensurate images. It shows the unconscious

playing with itself. It shows the unconscious truth behind the

conscious façade. It shows the personal feelings behind the

social facts. Ironic ridicule is a debunking device. It punches

holes in power and authority—the power and authority of the

popular culture in Helander’s case. It entertains us by satirizing

entertainment. It also reminds us that from the start, Surreal-

ism used popular cultural images to absurd effect, perhaps

most noteworthily in Max Ernst’s collages. Avant-garde art is

socially critical—in dialectically negative, unresolved relation-

ship with society, as thinkers as different as Renato Poggioli

and T. W. Adorno have argued. Helander’s collages continue

this tradition of avant-garde negativity, if in a seemingly lighter

way—deceptively lighter way, for there is a slashing aggres-

sivity and sardonic sharpness to his irony. He offers us critical

avant-garde comedy attacking social icons and illusions in

which we are asked to invest our deepest feelings. He gives

us the dregs of our unconscious desires and social illusions,

ridiculing them and himself—and the populist art he uses to

reveal them—in the course of doing so. His art is a surreal heap

of fragments, ironically accumulated to shore up a sense of

self, as T. S. Eliot said, that may exist only as an ironical illusion.

The question is whether these ruins form an “unstable

irony” or a “stable irony,” to use Wayne Booth’s important

distinction. Does the unconscious “truth asserted or implied”

by the irony—the unconscious truth that “undermines” con-

scious truth by means of irony—show and leave the self in

ruins, so that “no stable reconstruction can be built from the

ruins revealed through the irony”—or does the “underlying

reality” of intense existential feeling revealed by Helander’s

relentless ironic play with widely known social images “ar-

tistically” stabilize to convey a sense of unique self? I suggest

both/and rather than either/or. The ironic playfulness of Hel-

ander’s art suggests a self that is able to steady itself by imagi-

natively acknowledging its own self-contradiction.

DONALD KUSPIT WAS THE WINNER OF THE PRESTIGIOUS FRANK JEWETT MATHER AWARD FOR

DISTINCTION IN ART CRITICISM (1983), GIVEN BY THE COLLEGE ART ASSOCIATION AND IS A

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR AT ARTFORUM, ARTNET MAGAZINE, SCULPTURE AND TEMA CELESTE,

AND THE EDITOR OF ART CRITICISM. HE HAS DOCTORATES IN PHILOSOPHY AND ART HISTORY,

AS WELL AS DEGREES FROM COLUMBIA, YALE AND PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY. HE HAS

RECEIVED FELLOWSHIPS FROM FULBRIGHT COMMISSION, NEA, GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION

AND ASIAN CULTURAL COUNCIL, AMONG OTHERS.

Pirate’s Paradise, 1997, Original paper collage on museum board, Diptych: 10 x 13 in. each.

Post Triangle, 2009, Original acrylic on canvas with printed background, 56 ¾ x 39 ¼ in.

Original paper collage study, gouache, on museum board, 17 ½ x 15 ½ in. Collection of Blake Byrne, Los Angeles (Not in exhibition).

High Heel Helper, 2007, Original paper collage on museum board, 22 x 14 ½ in. Fun in the Sun, 2012, Original paper collage on museum board, 25 x 15 in.

T he assemblage/sculpture titled Croaked Double Elvis is one work in a series of manipulated images of Presley in the

sub-prime of his life. As a child, Helander was so fascinated with Elvis Presley that he transformed himself into an

Elvis impersonator, taking the stage in a junior high school talent show, and it logically followed that as a graduate

student at the Rhode Island School of Design he played the drums in his own art rock band. In 1989, he “traded faces” at a car-

nival photo booth to create Artist as Elvis (Past Performance) (see back cover) and continued his experiments with Elvis kitsch

memorabilia. In Croaked Double Elvis, the artist acquired two painted plaster Elvis lamps, which later he disassembled and

buried in his backyard for two years to promote advanced decomposition. Early this year, he exhumed the two heads and re-

painted them with a Warholian color scheme. The title refers to Double Elvis, the famous Andy Warhol work on canvas that sold

at auction recently. The assemblage is full of metaphors, visual puns and word play for the viewer to discover. The twin heads

are connected horizontally, and recline as if permanently at rest on a section of shelf from a church chapel that also is embel-

lished with a painted bleeding heart. The hollowed out shapes are painted gold like Elvis’ hit records, and are surrounded by

an entourage of found ceramic and plastic frogs that stand guard over the croaked American rock n’ roll legend. – Susan Hall

Elvis Reinvented, 2012, Original paper collage on museum board, 21 x 15 in.

Croaked Double Elvis, 2012, Painted plaster on artist’s shelf, with embellishments and found objects, 13 x 33 x 11 ½ in.

Doubleheader, 2010, Original paper collage, gouache on museum board, 14 x 12 in.

My Blue Heaven, 2007, Unique painting on museum board with printed background, hand-embellished with spray paint stencils and colored

pencil, 57 ½ x 36 in.

Installation photo: Artist Perspectives, October 15 - November 13, 2010, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, Branch Office, 2010, Original acrylic on

canvas with printed background, 58 x 58 in. With works by Deborah Butterfield (foreground) and Dale Chihuly.

Branch Office, 2008, Paper collage on museum board, 12 x 11 ¼ in.

Cactus Chaos, 2009, Original paper collage, gouache on museum board, 12 5/8 x 11 in.

Sending Out an S.O.S., 2009, Original paper collage on museum board, 17 ½ x 11 ½ in.

Original acrylic on canvas with printed background, 79 5/8 in. x 50 in.

Lounge Chair Lizard, 2009, Original paper collage on museum board, 15 ½ x 9 ½ in. Eye on Jersey, 2007, Limited edition giclée print, hand-embellished, 28 x 20 in. (Also available: 44 x 32 in., edition of 20) Original paper collage on museum board on

loan from the collection of Beth DeWoody, New York.

Trunk Show, 2009, Original acrylic on canvas with printed background, 56 ½ x 38 ¾ in. (Not in exhibition)

Bronco, 2007, Original acrylic on canvas with printed background, 59 ½ x 39 ½ in.

BRUCE HELANDER

EDUCATION

Rhode Island School of Design, BFA

Rhode Island School of Design, MFA

Yale University School of Publishing

Harvard University, School of Journalism

White House Fellow, National Endowment for the Arts

Recipient, New York Foundation for the Arts Grant

Fellow, South Florida Cultural Consortium for Visual Arts

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

Abergs Museum, Gothenberg, Sweden

Absolut Vodka Company, Sweden

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York

Albany Museum of Art, Albany, Georgia

Alexander Brest Museum, Jacksonville, Florida

Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, Florida

Boyar Corporation, New York, New York

Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York

Butler Art Institute, Youngstown, Ohio

California State University Art Museum, Long Beach

Center for the Arts, Vero Beach, Florida

Charles A. Wustum Museum, Racine, Wisconsin

Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio

Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan

Cuillo Centre for the Arts, West Palm Beach, Florida

Danville Museum of Fine Arts, Danville, Virginia

Duke University Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina

Fine Arts Museum of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor,

San Francisco, California

Grand Rapids Art Museum, Grand Rapids, Michigan

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York

Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York

Kemper Museum of Art and Design, Kansas City, Missouri

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York

Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, Mississippi

Montreal Museum of Art, Quebec, Canada

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence

Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California

Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, North Carolina

Newport Art Museum, Newport, Rhode Island

Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon

Rochester Municipal Airport, Rochester, Minnesota

San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, California

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, California

Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Georgia

Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C.

Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kansas

Textron Corporation, Providence, Rhode Island

Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, Florida

Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona

Union County College Museum of Art, Union, New Jersey

The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Poughkeepsie

Wellesley College Museum, Wellesley, Massachusetts

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York

Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, Kansas

WXEL Public Television and Radio, West Palm Beach, Florida

The White House, Washington, D. C.

The Vatican, Rome, Italy

Back Cover: Artist as Elvis (Past Performance), 1989, Photo collage with embellishments, 14 x 11 in.

“Signor Bruce -- egreggio collaggiore! His clothes are a collage! His whole house is a collage!

His whole weltanschauung is a collage. Helander out-collages Braque.”

Tom Wolfe

“This work shows Helander’s strongest points as a collage artist --

an intelligent, unpretentious sense of both humor and design.”

Amy Fine Collins, Art in America

“Helander utilizes the formal structure of collage, with its juxtaposition of images,

to open up to viewers multiple layers of reality.”

Sandra Yolles, ARTnews

“Bruce Helander is a camp-it-up comedian, a shameless romantic,

and an intelligent abstractionist: this is an unusual combination.”

Jed Perl, The New Criterion

“Bruce Helander masters his collages with wit, experience, and style. He is the unrivaled eye.

His compositions toy, they entertain, they surprise, they awe.”

Addison Parks, The Christian Science Monitor

“...this South Florida treasure is crashing into the big time. Hard work and originality have paid off.”

Helen Kohen, Miami Herald

“A whimsical whirlwind of a man...who takes his cue from the great Dada masters,

particularly Schwitters, and mixes in a bit of the best of Pop...”

Richard Merkin, Contributing Editor, Vanity Fair

“As a collagist, Helander designs jazzy kaleidoscopic designs from vintage printed-paper.

These riotous images combine snippets of art historical references, cartoons, and advertisements.…

Helander has a special flair for design and a heightened sensitivity to printed matter.”

Bonnie Clearwater, Executive Director and Chief Curator of the

Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), North Miami

“[Helander] is before anything else an artist, and if I may add, a damned good one, too,

and therefore knows how to explain his work and the work of others. … His lucid, unobtuse and

often very amusing writing is what is so badly needed in the art world today.”

Gilbert Brownstone, former director of the Picasso Museum (Paris)

“In all his activities, Bruce Helander has the instincts of a magpie and the energy of

a carnival pitchman. … Helander’s work is refreshing in that it helps make sense of the

information overload that assaults our sensorium at every turn.”

Henry Geldzahler, late curator of 20th century art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art