To follow any word or statement with "in America" feels like the most worn stunt in a bag of tricks that was tired to begin with. But in morally bankrupt and stupefying times, with our ship being steered by pirates, clichés soak up the bitter-sweet resonance of fresh Walla Walla onions and everything trite and implausible and made of daydreams becomes something to long for once again. I could tell an ether-like cloud of nostalgia was creeping through the air when a friend recently brought up that old soggy log, the great American novel-where is it? When will it happen? Has it already? Perhaps other nations can be encapsulated in the generalities and suppositions of a single voice, but America is a novel told in the
disconnected vignettes of a perpetually unfurling array of different perspectives. Not all such perspectives are written, not by a long shot. They live and die in bowling alleys and Indian reservations, at roadside vistas and grass-guzzling golf courses, in universities and mortuaries and anywhere else you can stumble upon with pleasure or regret. Part of the story is even told in pictures, sometimes by painters who don't even think of their sticky slaps, tense lines and tangled tones as tempo to a country's story, but who find a piece of our common experience in the act of laying their own doubts and demons onto
canvas. Two such glimpses are in Santa Fe right now in the form of exhibitions by Joe Ramiro Garcia and Grant Hayunga.
Garcia's
True Grit
, at LewAllen Contemporary (129 W. Palace Ave., 988-8997), is a colorful onslaught where bunjee cords, sock monkeys, vintage cartoons, Puss-in-boots, Jesus and Budweiser all relate to each other in a celestial hodge-podge of orbiting culture nuggets. It might be late-night TV or LSD, but instead it's Garcia, working overtime to exorcise smatterings of his own memory through rearrangement of these symbols across an increasingly capable command of surfaces. What the surfaces are exactly-besides beautiful-can be hard to determine. Often they appear as walls; garage or family room interiors where Garcia might have grown up or gotten in trouble or got laid. It can be hard to be sure because his paintings are all screwed up. It's not possible to orient yourself in terms of Garcia's sense of depth or perspective. The composition is, in a word, kaleidoscopic. This wheel of fortune vibe, in which ideas and images cartwheel in and out of the paintings, creates a kind of American dreamtime painting-a strange and instinctive, but accessible, pantheon in which the line between cutesy and terrifying is as tenuous as a lone rain cloud in the New Mexico sky.
Cutesy doesn't much enter the picture at Linda Durham Contemporary Art (1101 Paseo de Peralta, 466-6600) where Grant Hayunga's
Red Peyote Works
are hanging with an energy so raw and palpable no one should be surprised if they tear themselves free and go stalking off into the night. If you had taken all the people at Hayunga's opening and peeled off their skins-both their social pretenses and the literal tissue that covers their bodies-you'd have
ended up with something similar to what's on the walls. Nearly two dozen figurative paintings rendered entirely in red gestural strokes, mostly on paper or linen, prowl the walls with bent and sinewy human bodies and dark animal heads. The paintings are pure frenetic perception-bodies stripped of everything but form that manages to be equally furious in conveying grace or pain, with heads revealing the nature exuded by owls, deer, cheetahs, horses. A further organic and feral note is struck by several of the heads being drawn entirely in hair and wax. Forget all the potential connotations of "red peyote." For practical purposes, it's a code for trimming away distraction and seeing clearly. Though the intensive surface preparation of the larger works on linen sometimes intrudes on the immediacy of Hayunga's focused gaze, they still succeed. The works on paper, though, never falter in cutting straight to the heart of the untamed spirit that most of us spend our lives running from. In "Bear Cub," a mid-sized piece slathered across dirty, half-wrecked paper, a stressed and emaciated spindle of body lurches up through legs, gut, protrudant nipples, into the wild, brushy head of the cub bleeding off the top edge. In "Lioness," we see the back of a figure laying down with the spine and the ass arched up toward the viewer, capped by the primal bellowing head of the lioness-the same image familiar from 1,000 nature shows-only this time the cry emanates from the hand shoved, hot and unmistakable, between her legs. It is fat, kinky magic of the most dank and respectable kind. From screamed sex to meditative repose, Hayunga's visions disbelieve the world of money and schedules and prescription plans, dispelling all of human machination with the simple totemic animal presence of something-for all its fantasy-unmistakably real, but visible only between waking moments.
Strangely, I'm reminded of the end of the film version of
The Maltese Falcon
. A cop sees Humphrey Bogart clutching the enameled falcon and asks what it is. "This?" he responds. "This is what dreams are made of."
