Life, Death, Politics and Boobies: George Kocar and Friends, at AAWR

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It was perhaps an hour after leaving George Kocar: A Retrospective, on view at Artists Archives of the Western Reserve, that I saw one of the artist’s best-known works silk screened on a T-shirt, worn by someone who didn’t know Kocar’s name. The art was the old Cleveland: You Gotta Be Tough graphic, featuring Cleveland’s skyline in the year of its creation, 1978, clouds of smoke hanging over the city, belched out from a battery of three smokestacks. A full 31 years after Kocar created the graphic, it got a nod in the New York Times, and it still lives in at least one T-shirt. That’s a measure of impact, but just a blip on Kocar’s creative timeline. He worked for years as an artist at American Greetings. He was repeatedly in the Butler Midyear exhibition and the Cleveland Museum of Art’s May Show. He’s had countless solo shows. He’s been commissioned to do illustration for the New York Times and Playboy, Esquire and the Washington Post.

George Kocar is ubiquitous in Northeast Ohio galleries, both in his brightly colored paintings of cartoon-ish figures with big, bulbous noses, and also in person as a regular at opening receptions, where he often knows most of the people in the room. So the juxtaposition of George Kocar: A Retrospective (his inaugural show as an archived artist at Artists Archives of the Western Reserve) with Funny Stuff (a complementary exhibit he curated, featuring artists who influenced him, or with whom he has an affinity) is not just appropriate, but helps audiences better understand several facets of his work. It shows an artist in solidarity with peers, as part of the continuum of teachers and makers across time, and a shared dark sense of humor about life, death, and politics.

GEORGE KOCAR: A RETROSPECTIVE
The painting that serves as the cover for a catalog accompanying Kocar’s Retrospective—To Be An Art Star—is dominated by one of those honk-nosed figures, but this one is upside down. Nods to Kocar’s biography and sense of style mark it as a self-portrait: camouflage pants allude to his service in the US Army during the Viet Nam war, from 1969 to 1972. To balance that, his shirt is one of those Hawaiian print jobs that make no sense at all except on the beach. The colorful figure is surrounded by a tumble of colleagues happily working in paint, clay, photography, and drawing. There’s even a nude woman, modeling for a drawing class. It’s an artist among friends.

Kocar constantly nods to art history: one of his techniques is to slice classical composition into almost-matched facets, acknowledging Picasso-esque cubism while he pokes fun. Edvard Munch shows up, too, in figures wearing masks like the famous face from The Scream. And in plump figures, especially of voluptuous women and their boobs—such as the porcine artist or the female nude squirting from his paint tube in Running Bull–it’s hard not to see Peter Paul Rubens. But where Rubens so often depicted figures in the heavens, or in martial combat, or in courtly action, Kocar’s action happens in more attainable places, like living room chairs, bars, or artists’ humble studios.

Kocar has made plenty of light-hearted works, including a prolific output of daily dog and cat portraits, but his most memorable, enduring pieces are the satirical ones, especially dealing with political issues. The Fool’s Parade is exactly that, a march of characters with a two-faced, torch-bearing leader bedecked in stars and stripes and the pointy white hat of a Ku Klux Klansman. He’s followed by a pig-masked businessman clutching what could be a knife or a pen. It hardly matters. Behind him there’s a wide-eyed accountant who sees it all, but marches along anyway, silenced by tape across his mouth. And they’re all backed up by a portly military man on a white horse, again in stars and stripes. Behind them all, everything is on fire.

Pointless, chaotic conflict is a recurring theme, such as in The Divide. Who knows what it’s about besides partisanship, but the Yeses are on one side, the Nos on the other, the donkeys against the elephants, all angry and shouting and pointing fingers or brandishing fists or, in one case on the elephantine side, a gun. Kocar’s technique alluding to Picasso’s cubism is used to good effect here, chopping up the scene into scores of little facets. Are there all those individual perspectives? Or is it just a muddle of fragments that could fall apart?

Juxtaposed with that, in flowing, uninterrupted brush strokes, is the Demise–another scene of red, white, and blue conflict on horseback. In this case, the people on the horses seem to be civilians, two of them in somewhat traditional stars in stripes, and a third—in a pointy, red hood—with the stars and bars of the confederacy emblazoned on his chest. Trampled on the ground is another man in jeans and what looks like a camouflage shirt, his most intriguing bit of clothing being a red baseball cap. It doesn’t say “make America great again,” but the allusion is hard to ignore. In this picture he’s being trampled in the chaos of flag-wearing patriotism and racism. It was painted in 2019.

Kocar’s Gun Club offers perhaps the same kind of twisted optimism, with figures wearing a knit cap, a red hunting cap, and a white KKK hood. They’ve all got NRA buttons. One has the barrel of a gun for his nose. Guns are pointed in all directions, and is it wrong to hope all these clowns shoot each other? They’re the stars against a background of red and white stripes in this American tragi-comedy.

With his daily cat and dog drawings, ubiquitous presence in group shows, and constant attendance on the scene, it would be easy to take Kocar for granted. This Retrospective shows the serious relevance of his prolific work across decades, and it makes a worthy case for him as an artist to archive.

FUNNY STUFF
Wandering through an opening in the wall to another gallery, one finds Funny Stuff—a complementary show curated by Kocar from his own collection and from friends and influences. Before the works of that show, though, it’s worth talking about that that opening in the wall. Early in 2024, Artists Archives re-opened its galleries after expansion into the western half of its building—the space formerly occupied by The Sculpture Center, which has moved to a storefront venue nearby on Euclid Avenue. The expansion not only creates additional gallery space for AAWR, but the generous openings enable the rooms to flow from one to the next. There are actually two such openings, one of which didn’t previously exist at all, the other replacing the old, standard-sized door that closed off the main gallery from the organization’s former office space. The galleries now could accommodate three or four different shows, or help make sense out of one very large one. It’s a huge boost to AAWR’s programming capacity.

The thirty-two artists of Funny Stuff variably share with Kocar his whimsy, political edge, and dark humor. If several of them influenced Kocar—notably his former teacher at Cleveland State University, the late Marvin Jones—several of them show visual evidence of having been influenced by him, or at least wandering along the same path.

One work with obvious shared sensibility and visual affinity is Laura Dumm’s The Invisible Man Returns (To Fascism). In it, a human figure hooded and caped in an American Flag, draped in the style of the Ku Klux Klan brandishes a pistol and a bible, and wears a hangman’s rope as a tie. He hovers above the White House, which is on fire, and above him storm clouds loom, and the Bill of Rights and the Preamble to the US Constitution blow around in tatters.

If these two shows together are a commentary on the state of this country, we’re in a tough spot. So we might as well laugh about it, or find beauty in it. (Aside: Have you seen the video of the young woman in Ukraine, her beautiful voice harmonizing with the air-raid sirens?)

Politics also appear in Scott Kraynak’s Misogynist, a mixed media portrait of Donald Trump, and seemingly in Donna Coleman’s All that Glitters Is Not Gold, a diptych highlighted by a dark-suited fat man with a combover and a long red tie vomiting a golden blast of apparent vitriol. Artists have often rendered the once-and-future present with a volcano of lies blasting out of his mouth, and this seems to be another example of that.

A completely different connection to Kocar’s aesthetic can be found in Gwen Waight’s soft sculpture, Dirty Knees. It’s sculpted from “nude” colored hosiery, stuffed to Double D size, with knees mended in a slightly darker color, stitched on in circles, and then each one stitched again at the center to resemble a nipple. All together, it looks like a blooming conglomeration of boobs.

Not quite staring at those boobs is Ed Raffel’s animated sculptural piece, Big Fun—a pair of gigantic eyeglasses worthy of the beloved toy, nostalgia and gag store, with eyeballs that animate when a motion sensor is tripped: one eye with its spiral pattern and the other with a mirrored pupil, both spinning as if in a state of psychedelic intoxication.

A gathering of found-object sculptures in the middle of the room by Gail Trunik, Gail Crum, and Annie Becker all share a mix of nostalgia and whimsical humor with a shade of darkness. Gail Crum’s Evil Jack is a parody of a Jack-in-the-box. Gail Trunik’s Beer Run has a bulb-nosed man and his dog pulled along in their Leinenkugel’s wagon by a beady-eyed rat. And Annie Becker’s Cycle of Flight has an angelic, winged child figure riding a tricycle, with a box of Band Aid sheer strips, just in case of the inevitable. All have a nicked-up patina of nostalgia.

Several of the artists in Funny Stuff offer humanoid alien figures. The twisted smiles and profiles of Leslie Edwards Humez’s trio of small sculptures evoke Theodore Dr Seuss Geisel drawings. Victor Melaragno’s bas relief sculpture–SoonMoons: Pay tribute to the universes greatest inventor “Clyde Crashcup” (the trip to earth would have never been possible without Crashcup’s invention of the Flying Saucer)– features his character Soon Moon, which in the style of its lines is somewhat reminiscent of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s Rat Fink. All that alludes to TV cartoons of Melaragno’s youth. And Kocar’s late teacher, Marvin Jones, is represented by Space People Playing Cards for Eyeballs—the composition of which could be one of Kocar’s own paintings, but in place of fat politicians, Jones offers space aliens with their eyes bobbling aloft on springs. The chips in the kitty are eyeballs, just like the ones on their springs. Could there be anything more grisly than playing cards for eyeballs?

Funny Stuff does not include a painting by Kocar’s other notable teacher, Ken Nevadomi, but that would have made a great and appropriate addition. A recent show at ArtNeo juxtaposed canvases by the two lifetime Clevelanders, showing affinity in their composition, the style of their lines, the darkness of their vision, and in that case even their palate.

Nonetheless, both of these shows—Kocar’s own Retrospective, and his gathering of Funny Stuff—are feasts for the eyes and mind. They’re fun to look at. Kocar’s works, including the political ones, transcend topicality. Artists Archives has done a lot of great things in recent years, and this counts among them. Both shows are on view til January 11.

George Kocar: Retrospective
Funny Stuff
November 14, 2024 – January 11, 2025
Artists Archives of the Western Reserve
1834 E. 123rd Street
Cleveland, OH 44106
216-721-9020