"Burbank Earwache" at Grounds Zero
Grounds Zero, 124 N. San Fernando Blvd., Burbank
by Joe Futtner
A current exhibition titled “Burbank Erwache!” (Burbank Awake!) features the work of artist Ron Tweedie. The exhibition at the Grounds Zero café (124 N. San Fernando Blvd, Burbank) consists of a dozen small works in various media. One appreciates at first glance the range and eclecticism of Tweedie’s sources. There is a logic underlying the mishmash of subject matter and styles that blends comic art, Pop illustration of the 1960s, Surrealism, and an anarchistic, sex-fueled humor. No one will accuse Tweedie of being politically correct, or slavishly consistent in his artistic sources.
I was struck by a number of works. Most impressive is a hand-colored linoleum cut print of the artist’s grandfather, Mr. Frost. (Tweedie talked at the opening about this relative, a Bible teacher. The image conveys not only presumably the physical appearance of this elderly gentleman, but also something of his character, which is underscored by the broad, antiquarian technique.) Equally impressive in the same medium is Wild Wess, in which the apocalyptic imagery associated with the years immediately preceding and following the First World War in Germany is melded with a contemporary punk aesthetic.
Tweedie’s technical facility is impressive, even more so when we learn that this young (just thirty) artist is mostly self-taught (“I couldn’t get into art school,” he reported to me, maybe a bit disingenuously). I don’t mean this as a slight. As with any accomplished autodidact, his shortcomings turn out to be strengths. In Tweedie’s case, perhaps it is his rejection of the practices and discourse surrounding abstract art of the 1960s and 1970s—once doctrine, now a critic’s whipping boy—that allows him today to affect an art that combines traditional pictorial values with modernist biomorphism and a virtual dream-state context. (Pictures in this vein are entitled Intra-Uterine Fantasy and Mephistopheles, a kind of Tweedie homage to Paul Klee.) But like Salvador Dali’s (I’m grasping for a precedent), Tweedie’s images, for all of their nihilist content, are pretty conventional pictures. Contrast this with, say, Ken Scharf, whose work Tweedie’s resembles, but who is (among other things) invested in an undoing of the pictorial window. This is however a quibble, and maybe beside the point. What is clear is that Tweedie likes doing art, and his visual enthusiasm is infectious.
Maybe it’s a generational thing, but I feel a bit out of my league when I look at work like this. I’m okay with the stylistic pedigree, etc., but I sometimes have trouble divorcing the subject matter from associations with a world view that I find, well, problematic. (Am I confusing art with life, or have I just reached that certain age?) That doesn’t stop me from acknowledging it as a potentially significant aesthetic contribution. And the linoleum cuts are pretty engaging, as is, for that matter, the self-effacing Ron Tweedie. Go see. (Through February.) ♦