Visual Propaganda #13: Justin Lieberman

Ideological warfare and psychogeographical excavation of culture, Justin Lieberman is one of the last artists standing

In 2018, when America had not yet selected an artist to represent itself in the 2019 Venice Biennale, artist Justin Lieberman argued that pro-Trump painter John McNaughton was the only American artist who can truly represent the mood of the country’s citizenry and its hatred of the elite institutions that managed them, including the art world:

“I saw it as an opportunity to put the selection process in the hands of the people, rather than a cadre of curatorial elites, whose abuse of the system has created a situation in which most regular people feel that contemporary art is a big scam perpetrated on the public,” Lieberman explained. “Unlike the flood of readymades, techno-fetishist video environments, and fabricated objects churned out by studios employing innumerable assistants, McNaughton’s paintings embody the American ideals of self-reliance, craftsmanship, and entrepreneurial spirit.”

Shock! Glee! Rejoice!

I was thrilled by Lieberman’s proposition – how rare was it to find an artist that I had admired who had not only NOT succumbed to the vulgar inanity of Trump Derangement Syndrome, but one who shared my interpretation of the Trump movement as a glorious, utterly aesthetic, and nearly Situationist political rejection of the prevailing order by the people against a smug, self-satisfied, and increasingly deranged liberal ruling class. But I was not surprised – Lieberman IS the rarest of contemporary artists who sees the world beyond the tinted hues of ideology, and his work has been confrontational, challenging, and vibrant because of it. One of us. One of us.

Born in Miami in 1965, I’ve always seen the provocatively trashy but knowingly avant-garde aesthetic that Lieberman works in as being to visual art what ‘90s subterranean underground Miami-based bands like To Live and Shave in LA or Kreamy ‘Lectric Santa was to music at that time. Like TLASILA, it has an obvious knowledge of the history of the avant-garde, but embraces trash and the detritus of vulgar pop culture to assault the institutions, their committee approved tastes, disgraceful lack of vision, and monomaniacal control of art and what it can accomplish. In Lieberman’s work, there’s a friend-enemy distinction. Some (well, libtards) might say this harbors a fascist sentiment. I say that it’s evidence of a dangerously creative mind.

Collage. Sculpture. Painting. Installation. Digital art. The specific mediums that Lieberman uses matter less than the manner in which all seem to become extensions of his chaotic and disorganized but sincere and thoughtful brain. Debord and the Situationist Internationale emphasized psychogeography, or the act of becoming lost in a city, drifting through it, and rewriting its meaning and social structure through the vast reservoirs of the imagination. Psychogeography is a method through which the radical can reimagine the world and society and, perhaps, begin the process of destroying the existing society to materialize the psychogeographical vision. Lieberman treats the detritus of commercialism — advertising, used furniture, outsider art, home shopping television, corporate franchises, and even art conservation — as a kind of psychogeographical construct. He drifts through the morass of cultural clutter, the solar anus of late modernity’s overproduction, and sees it anew. His art work then is his radical proposition for an entirely new culture.

Lieberman seems to have, in some ways, dropped out of mainstream art world discourse, and I miss his presence in it. Critics were confused by him. He was a success, represented by major galleries, but had no qualms about lighting his status ablaze if it meant exposing the hypocrisy of the industry that he was embedded in. His last solo show in New York was in 2014 at the since-defunct Know More Games gallery, which existed at the periphery of Carroll Gardens at least five miles from the geographical stronghold of art world control. Lieberman declared the show to be his last in the city, and used it to wage ideological warfare on both the art world and specific dealers most indicative of its abject hypocrisies, at least from his perspective. Marc Jancou, who owns a gallery of the same name and had been one of the most passionate collectors of Lieberman’s work, was apparently directly insulted in a painting of a grimacing face emblazoned with a quote from Rene Magritte. “Above the text is the word J’Ancule, a play on j’encule, French for ‘anally fuck.’” The idea that an artist in the 21st Century would be so courageous, so blasé about alienating their own supporters and risking their own financial and cultural standing, is thrilling, is it not?. Perhaps art can only transpire in the ashes and rubble of a career set aflame?

A new art. A new way of living, creating, and revolting. Hallelujah, glory to new visions of a dead world! I’ve got no fucking time for artists who contribute, knowingly or ignorantly, to this suffocating climate of institutional browbeating, ideological slavery, and corporate control. I can’t get excited about any art that’s placing demands upon how I think, especially when those demands sound so similar to those posed by Don Lemon in his manufactured propaganda broadcast routines. Art should suggest new ways of thinking, and liberate. Lieberman is an aesthetic freedom fighter. Please welcome him, to the Counter-Agency of the Avant-Garde.