american hello kitty

Review of Joyce Pensato's "Batman Returns" @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery 537 W. 22nd St.

Out of all the mainstream American superheroes, Batman has enjoyed a particular kind of attention as the alluring bad boy of few words: one that fights evil, but whose motivation stems from a place as dark as that of his own villains. He cleans up societal waste, but is not exactly the friendliest; his mask performs a double duty of hiding and projecting. Christened after this pop icon—whose most significant battle between of good and evil occurs within his innermost self—Batman Returns, Joyce Pensato’s solo exhibition at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, presents an artists’s cave filled with popular (mostly children’s) characters and demands that we now question the surface of those images. Born in Brooklyn and practicing art in her East Williamsburg studio since the late 1970’s, the artist focuses her latest work on a seemingly obsessive preoccupation with quintessential images of the American childhood, most notably, Mickey Mouse and his Disney friends, the Simpsons, Sesame Street characters, and the occasional South Park boys and Felix the Cat.

Let’s return for a moment to the overused cave reference: the paint-splattered heaps of toys, thickly coated paint buckets and brushes, and the dizzying collage of images on the walls rest on the pristine interiors of a surprisingly clean gallery space, opposite traditionally hung large canvases of dripping faces. The initial impression of the lived-in bat cave is a deception; artifacts from the den has been cut-out then re-installed for display in a space designated for such purposes. Like a historical museum recreating a uni-bomber’s nest to provide insight into her disturbed psychology, the exhibit presents a carefully preserved and displaced private space that now stands naked before the public eye. The lurking evil beneath smiling Mickeys and abandoned Elmos with blackened eyes come into full force with their publicized private aspect; it is difficult to avoid the rapidly approaching childhood fear of the party clown.

Why is the clown such a source of fear for so many Americans? Pensato suggests that we might benefit from holding a similar suspicion for what lies behind the rarely questioned masks of cartoon characters, which pop culture feeds our children. The tension between the projected image—deliberately constructed to rouse a very specifically intended effect—and what that projection thereby seeks to obscure in turn, rings especially poignantly with the dreaded school portraits sprinkled throughout the installation in similar or identical pairs. The anonymous cameraman tells every child to give her very best smile; the image that results is intended to serve as a reference of her happy school years, frozen in time. With the flash, she is wearing the best mask to remember herself by; years later, that mask best reveals what lay beneath that forced expression.