Mike Paré’s current exhibition at the Green Gallery, “Best of the Last 50 Years,” offers plenty of stand-alone works that require no additional context to enjoy. There are literally hundreds of individual pieces, on the walls salon-style and in folios which visitors can freely page through.
Any well-curated group of 12 or 16 of these, framed, 60-inches on center, would make for a perfectly engaging show, demonstrating his fluid, confident handling of various drawing media and trippy, punchy, offbeat subject matter; but the show opts to go in a very different direction. Rather than isolating works as autonomous conclusions of a single artistic act, it pans out as far as possible and takes Paré’s life in art as a holistic subject. The main wall of the Green Gallery is covered in drawings spanning decades, interrupted only by a skateboard and a vintage table displaying books about the infamous cult figure Rajneesh. Over this table hang two detailed drawings of the controversial mystic.
Nearby, a number of other drawings appear to reference mandalas and meditative geometries, while a technically accomplished graphite rendering of a cross-legged nude female figure alludes to meditation more directly. The transcendental-ish inference on the wall is brought firmly to earth, however, by an actual motorcycle in the center of the gallery on whose black gas tank Paré has executed an original drawing in white paint.
The discursive narrative continues to unfold in the back gallery, where an assorted array of videos, zines, drawings, prints, T-shirts, cozies and incense are on full display as if the Green Gallery was having a stoop sale. Paré’s subjective expansiveness brings up a fascinating issue pertaining to our basic assumptions about artistic production. Is art the product of making, the act of making, the concept of making or the life lived around art making? Perhaps life itself is art? The contemporary art world has preferred the most former of this list, happy to separate the artist from his work. The high priests, of course, love a good biographical backstory, but only inasmuch as it complements individual artifacts. It’s difficult to invoice someone for the purchase of life and spirit after all.
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I thought of Joseph Beuys as I sifted through Paré’s sundries in the back room of the Green Gallery. Like Beuys, Paré’s work is interested in maintaining a total understanding of art, or Gesamtkunstwerk, as the German termed it. Beuys always considered the artist as a sort of grand spiritual diviner of worldly meaning rather than simply a maker of things. The artist was to be a liver, knower, teacher and general shamanic visionary. Paré comes across as a groovier pop-culture counterpoint to Beuys’ more intense historical version, living out the comprehensive pursuit of art coolly and casually in this show marking his 50th year of life on the planet.
Additionally, both Beuys and Paré seem particularly interested in defining the terms of their artifacts’ display and classification, because, again, life is the subject, not simply the material souvenirs it deposits. “Life itself” is slippery, though. It’s an abstraction, but one that confers meaning on a concrete art object as surely as faith does religions and fiat currencies. Though such abstractions are fundamental, the artifacts and rituals are the stuff our fleshy bodies indulge in. And Paré’s stuff is pretty extraordinary. His ink drawings of rockers, bikers, boozy Santa Clauses, urns, cowboys and artists are loose, fast, rollicking and yet surprisingly sophisticated. One could spend hours leafing through his hundreds of individual drawings and leave the gallery perfectly satisfied.
On the back wall above two long shelves of magazines and folios of Paré’s drawings, two adjacent graphite works from his time in the Bay Area capture different visions of private euphoria. They seem to touch something primary about Paré’s interests. One depicts a portrait of an individual with a crystal drawn to his or her forehead, and the other a crowd of beer-swigging young male fans, perhaps at a music concert, obscured slightly by a foreground of rippling marks. They reiterate Paré’s fascination with ritual and practice, in art, and through various cults, cliques, tribes and demimondes that give meaning to social existence (he may be even more Tocquevillian than Beuysian in the end).
One will leave “Best of the Last 50 Years” with the feeling Paré sees subcultures like skateboarding, motorcycling, ’ziners, and, of course, the art world itself, as so many parallel universes, possessing the same basic spirits, whose particular rituals and symbols are all that truly separate them.
