Lovable losers
Michael Lucero and his scary-cute Cast of characters
“Cuteness is not an aesthetic in the ordinary sense of the word and must by no means be mistaken for the physically appealing, the attractive. In fact, it is closely linked to the grotesque, the malformed.” — Daniel Harris, author of Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism
Like a tarted-up tiny tot beauty pageant contestant, there’s a fine line between adorable and nightmarish. The element of the grotesque and slightly freakish that writer Daniel Harris detects in the manufactured, outlandish riggings of cuteness certainly apply to artist Michael Lucero’s sculptures in The Cast at Fay Gold Gallery. Lucero’s critters hover menacingly on the line where cute topples over into the grotesque.
Lucero’s ceramic sculptures of spaniels, poodles and porky pigs make these cartoonish creatures so exaggeratedly cute, with their pleading eyes and cute-as-a-button features, they border on the freakish, even frightening.
For this solo exhibition, the University of Georgia professor has created a rogues gallery dedicated to the cuddliest creatures in the kitsch stable: the piggy, the kitty, the baby, the elf. Lucero shows that rather than some natural form, what we consider cute is a contrivance. At its heart, The Cast is about the human impulse for embellishment and decoration, expressed by both artists and lay people. Lucero’s show questions whether taste is innate — a matter of breeding — or just a matter of conditioning.
Wise to the elements of travesty and failure in taste, the savvy Lucero plays with many of the constituent parts of kitsch: the fixation on small, vulnerable creatures whose innocence is telegraphed by their oversized heads, enormous eyes and button noses. “Spotted Puppy,” is a representative study in deformed hug-ability, its gigantic head threatening to topple over its frail little body. As Harris has also noted, an almost perverse vulnerability, a helplessness we pathologically worship, makes “cute” such a loaded term. “The aesthetic of cuteness creates a class of outcasts and mutations, a ready-made race of lovable inferiors ...” he says.
So like a “good Samaritan” who saves from drowning a woman whom he’s just pushed into the ocean, we can only feel protective of these critters when we have rendered them helpless and ourselves masterful.
The 3-foot “Spotted Puppy” is a virtual anatomical model in that kind of lovable vulnerability. The pup’s set-to-wag stumpy tail and aim-to-please eyes waiting for the merest hint of his owner’s commands show how completely we demand gestures of obedience from the things we cherish.
As if those consummately wide-eyed, innocent features weren’t enough, Lucero continues his assault on cute with his use of homey, crafty materials meant to further encode his animals as precious, but which instead render them purposely pathetic.
Lucero has pushed these already adorably coded little boogers into the realm of the ridiculous by decorating their jumbo-sized heads and bodies with obsessive swirls of the kind of synthetic yarns favored by people who crotchet afghans or tissue box cozies. The surfaces of the critters resemble homemade potholders, quilts or some vaguely psychedelic sand art.
Like a craft project gone dreadfully wrong, that attempt to put a personal, cuddly imprint on the creatures shows decoration and craft’s often poignant failure. The swirls of variously colored and patterned topographical relief map yarns often make the li’l critters look like they’ve come down with a bad case of scabies. Even more horrifying is the “Baby” with its gargantuan head resting on a golf tee-sized body and looking like something that crawled straight out of Satan’s womb. The motley array of colored yarn swirls that decorate the baby give it the appearance of headcheese or a hairball urped out of the cultural unconscious.
Lucero pushes his creatures from the realm of decorative tchotchkes into a kind of jumbo-sized Überkitsch to rival the more important busts of presidents or Buddha’s. And like science fiction movies where the ants are the size of Cadillacs or the spiders are pachyderm scale, no one is laughing anymore. By playing with scale, Lucero creates works that can be revealing or even threatening in their refusal to occupy the easily dismissable ranks of tiny dust catchers.
Many of Lucero’s creatures seem to be exacting some kind of revenge for their previous diminishment and seem no longer entirely under our thumb. The jaunty pose and funny pointy ears that make elves such likable mythical creatures become more intimidating, maybe even a little demonic, on this scale. With his hands clasped around one bended knee, the “Elf” might be cutely kicking back. Or it could be the gesture of a restrained, violent impulse.
Can we only love things, Lucero’s work suggests, when we have crafted them into objects and figures inspired more by our own desires than reality? The Cast comments on artmaking with multiple ramifications. In making us look at the seemingly generous gestures of decoration, Lucero’s exegesis of cute is a larger investigation of how obsessively we strive to ornament and what, exactly, that says about us.