James Krone.

Russell, Christopher

Circus Gallery, Los Angeles CA February 23 * March 29, 2008

James Krone's first solo show in Los Angeles, "In Lieu of a Science of Memory," seems to add another layer to the historical back-and-forth between painting and photography. Krone uses painting as a documentary medium. In this instance, painting's authority is equal to the beleaguered history of photography's truth claim. Krone's images have the abstract qualities of Bay Area Figuration, yet their subjects are recognizable faces and cultural icons. Krone takes inspiration from Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel's renowned Evidence (1977), which mined police and other official photographic archives with surreal and often absurd results. In a similar fashion, the various subjects Krone culls together point to overlapping schemes of political intrigue. Like Sultan and Mandel, Krone's work tends toward the illogical, but also leaves us with such bittersweet imponderables as whether today's more pressing social and political issues could have been avoided had Ronald Reagan's assassin hit his mark.

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There is a semblance of nostalgia in Krone's images of Jody Foster, Ronald Reagan, Warhol, and redacted White House documents, and yet the sum of these images amounts to more than a 1980s-style pastiche. In the gallery, a circuitous narrative develops around John Hinckley's 1981 assassination attempt, fueled by his obsession with Jody Foster. Concerning the theme of assassination, Warhol--represented here by obvious yet low-fidelity appropriations of his flower paintings--is linked to Reagan through Valerie Solonas's 1968 attempt on the artist's life. Warhol, as art commodity par excellence, draws associations with the 1980s art bubble and the triumph of conspicuous consumption typified by the New Republicans catalyzed around Reaganomics, while simultaneously pointing to CIA support of Ab-Ex painters. Before one stops to consider what would have happened had either Warhol or Reagan actually died from their shootings, enormous paintings of pseudo-official documents begin to cloud possible solutions, drawing on ideas of government conspiracy, the inscrutability of widely impacting events, and the absurdity of institutional doublespeak.

To this end, Krone's show includes doubly coded works that scramble the assumed meanings crisscrossing the main subjects under investigation, among them Black Sucker (Sleep) (all work 2008), a painting of a censored National Security Council document, and the sculpture Good Shooter's Chair, a plastic-covered chair standing in four empty Kleenex tissue boxes. Krone's documentary handiwork does something that cannot be done with ordinary photography. Krone's Jody Wet painting, for instance, is overshadowed by ominous contextual concerns, superimposing a rape fantasy on her otherwise youthful innocence. The same kind of confusion and contamination also spills over into the treatments of Reagan and Warhol. The kitschy Reagan Mask lividly marks the origin of that political spiral which eventually led to Abu Ghraib, and Museum Calendar Vapor points to more perverse aspects of Warhol's flowery chef d'oeuvre. Krone courts the unfashionable idea of active, Romantic imagination, ultimately taking us beyond mainstream news into paranoid fantasies about what the CIA has on Jody Foster, the truth of Hinckley's "insanity," and Warhol's role in a government-led consumerist conspiracy.

Unlike many younger artists today who appear reluctant to tackle political issues head-on, Krone's "In Lieu of a Science of Memory" is truly subversive. Through a kind of historical about-face, the current preference for Lockean, passive imagination over transformative operations of the mind upon external objects has only led to a mere recording of received impressions, whether as safely formal or stridently academic work. Krone's show is different in that it uses painting to hijack a photographic truism while slowly maneuvering into the darker corners of contemporary imagination.