Lari Pittman was born in 1952 in Los Angeles, California. He has a BFA and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. He is inspired by commercial advertising, surrealism, gestural abstraction, Victorian silhouettes , folk art, and various traditions. He works are known for being far from minimalistic as every area of his canvases are full with details and meaning. He uses many symbols and decorative motifs to get those meanings across. The ideas he is trying to convey range of social and issues like aspects of commercialism and even aspects of tradition like crafts. In an interview with Art 21 the interviewer says his work manages to “strike a funny balance between gore and beauty” to which he responds, “If you have a bittersweet cultural context, it allows you to entertain the possibility of the gorgeousness of personal suffering. You can actually fetishize it and make it beautiful. Suffering and beauty are not antithetical but actually complementary. It isn’t about morbidity. It’s actually a cultural mindset that is predisposed to aestheticizing even pain and suffering. It’s not seen as decadent. It’s just about a duality of things.”
He makes using paint, and he also creates prints. In his early works, he used silhouettes of people to convey what he wanted more directly it was like using a social code so his work was more declarative. He is very interested in this code which comes through in his use of symbols and the silhouettes. One of his works that employ the use of silhouettes is This Landscape, Beloved and Despised, Continues Regardless which he made in 1989. His more recent works include a Six illustrated books, each opening to more than four feet in width called Mood Books. They have 65 paintings total by Pittman within them which make various social commentary and reference real and made up mythologies. Major ideas and themes in his work include love, violence, mortality. He also focuses on narratives like rich heterogeneity of American society, the artist’s Colombian heritage, and the distorting effects of hyper-capitalism on everyday life.
I found his work, The Dining Room, to be interesting as it tackles the idea of spaces having a male or a polymorphous identity. He focused on residential spaces as he wanted to depict residential spaces in the paintings with as much power as public spaces that had, for long felt predominantly male in a sense, like banking world or law. I found that it was an interesting concept that even buildings have this assumed power to them.
In the Art 21 video interview Lari Pittman says, “As a male, it’s about a type of focus and social comportment that usually isn’t expected of a male. I guess there’s a dutifulness [in craft] that maybe has historically been referenced or attributed to females. So I guess I’ve always seen my devotion to craft as a type of protest.” The idea that crafts are for women is a stereotype that bothers me whether it’s more along the lines of trying to force women to fall into craft media or pressuring a man away who wants use crafts in his work. The entire idea that gender can influence media someone uses intrigues me. At one point art itself was seen as for men, and art had been stereotyped again in a way. Hearing him talk about that is just one reason why I wanted to talk about him. There are aspects of what he says here that I am tackling in some of my own work.
https://art21.org/watch/extended-play/lari-pittman-craft-short/
Works Cited
The Broad, www.thebroad.org/art/lari-pittman.
UCLA Arts: School of the Arts and Architecture, www.arts.ucla.edu/single/lari-pittman-mood-books-at-the-huntington/.
“Craft, Lari Pittman.” Art21, art21.org/watch/extended-play/lari-pittman-craft-short/.
“Culture and Aesthetic Sensibility.” Art21, art21.org/read/lari-pittman-culture-and-aesthetic-sensibility/.
“Lari Pittman.” Art21, art21.org/artist/lari-pittman/.“Lari Pittman.” Regen Projects, www.regenprojects.com/artists/lari-pittman/biography.