©

LARI PITTMAN

Alptraume (Nightmares)

1981
acrylic, oil, and wood on treated paper
33 x 43.5 inches

The content of this work is signaled by the title, German for "nightmares," providing at once a concrete basis for a subject as well as a rationale for departing from realism. Less obviously, the title invokes the German artist Sigmar Polke, both by being in a foreign language and by its laconic bluntness. Formally too, Alptraume comments on Polke's art. The seemingly haphazard layering, crude rendering, incorporation of found objects, and variety of painting styles are hallmarks of the German artist's work just becoming known in the United States in the early 1980s.

The picture is divided strictly into two parts. Separate sheets of paper, the left stained lavender, the right gold foil, carry distinct motifs and bear an array of painting styles. The division emphasizes a quality of pastiche that simultaneously creates a disjunctive pictorial space, allowing Pittman to "depict" two separate dream narratives across an unstable, hybrid representational field upon which the stories are told. Each pictorial component seems to function as a surrogate for the artist, whether obliquely, like the wood cut-out that stands in for a romantic bleeding heart, or more literally, like the figural shadow in the lower right. The architectural elements, which stretch across the field, interact, yearn, and flirt, suggesting a narrative progression. As in the actual experience of a dream, the subject's consciousness--whether that of the dreamer/artist, or that of the viewer of the picture--floats from one site to another.

From E. Brown, Lari Pittman Drawings, University Art Museum, UCSB, 1996.

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