June 14–21, 2001

art

Sentimental Journey

Virgil Marti, preparing his first museum solo show, treads lightly through fields of pop nostalgia.

by A.D. Amorosi

Big Marti: The artist inside The Pathetic Fallacy, the centerpiece of his PAFA installation. photo: Eddy Palumbo

It’s a beautiful sun-dappled day on Girard Avenue. The toxic smell from the Ryder rental center seems less noxious than usual. A nestful of catbirds chatters and chirps. A faux Crown Royal billboard nearby — "Just Get Drunk" graffiti’d across its regal front, its purple bag reflecting the sun’s rays — seems an apt backdrop for a visit with artist and pop-culture archaeologist Virgil Marti, who’s working today at the Sculpture Lab, fabricator Kait Midgett’s project studio/gallery garage in North Philly.

Marti is tending to a section of the installation he’s preparing for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts’ Morris Gallery, where his first museum solo effort opens June 15. With his large-frame glasses and slight build, Marti, 38, looks like a doctor examining a patient as he inspects the installation centerpiece-in-progress: a nearly 6-feet-around red/orange "hippie candle" of resin/Fiberglas and driftwood, punctuated with one of those bulbous R & W Berries sculptures kids used to give their parents from Spencer’s Gifts. The candle will co-star with a panoramic room-hanging landscape — a black-light-able Garden of Eden — equal parts flaming mushrooms, star-shining cobalt nightscape, waterfalls and royal blue skies.

"You can almost see the fireballs screaming by like a Yes album cover," says Marti. His imaginary suburban volcanic strip-mall take on Tales From Topographic Oceans is so vivid I can hear Rick Wakeman bear down on his synthesizer. But he knows that, despite the spectacle of a drawing studio in the Frank Furness-designed building stuffed with his cultural totems, his installation could get reduced to "a big candle with blacklight wallpaper around it. People miss the personal stuff in my work. It gets buried. Maybe that’s what I do."

	Curiously strong: One of Marti’s Bullies on an Altoids Tin.

Anyone familiar with Marti’s work knows the backstory behind his infamous wallpapers Bullies (1994) or Beer Can Library (1997): that the Bullies boys were his high school classmates (their pictures come from his high school yearbook), or that the tin totems to Milwaukee are representations of his father. Perceptive observers might recognize that the pieces comment on gender role-play, and on the class struggle between high and low art forms, between personal and public tastes. But none of this is immediately evident. Similarly, unless you’ve been told, you might not notice how his "site-dependent" PAFA installation refers to the building’s mushroom-pattern wainscoting, or that Beer Can’s original display in the grand library of the Art Alliance mansion was an ironic comment on the "erudition of yuppies who thought microbrews were the new wines," he says with a smile. Like a painting in a frame, his installations exist in dialogue with the buildings that contain them, from Community Education Center to Holly Solomon Gallery in Manhattan.

Marti’s tastes were framed as an only child in Paddock Estates, a St. Louis suburb. Normality, not flashy funky furniture or clothing, was the rule. "We had early American reproductions. I really envied my friends who had more modern houses. That was glamorous to me…."

He equates his art with those things he never had. Black lights. Wack furniture. During his studies at Tyler School of Art and an apprenticeship at Fabric Workshop during the ’80s, his aesthetic took hold.

"I was trying to get class issues into my work, trying to find why people were so judgmental toward certain tastes and styles," says Marti of the garishly decorative fabrics he remembers envying from childhood, the brocades and motifs that were supposed to create a sense of status.

A penchant for decoration was always a faux pas in art school. But Marti sees that notion as knee-jerk instinct, a learned response. "I had to relearn to see things of my youth as lovely again… It renewed my sense of wonder." Plus it gave him ideas for his own work, like, say, the repeating garlanded images of Bullies, which is, like Warhol’s Most Wanted series, thuggishly sexual and explosively queer.

Marti was never actually confronted or bullied by the cold faces curtly staring down from the velvety black lit Bullies wallpaper. He had his own nerdy clique of theater people and punk freaks who had their own fun. "But we had serious rivalries, where liking punk rock vs. liking Kansas and Yes were the issue."

Now his Bullies totem has been bought up by Altoid mints for their Emerging Artist series of specially decorated tins. "It’s just a promotional tool for them," says Marti of the curiously strong mint’s curiously odd use of oppressive boys. "Nothing more than images."

He doesn’t think his own work will ever be mainstream enough for the public, despite the fact that his Couch at Ardmore train station, part of the Points of Departure: Art on the Line exhibition, was so adored by passersby that some asked him to upholster their own home furnishings. Though he is uncomfortable with mass-reproduced prints and fine-art artists’ sales at the airport, his own high-minded wallpaper is the stuff of a radical mind, one that combats the academic anathema to the decorative, the flowery and the graphically emotive.

The current mainstreaming of ’70s iconography — Afrocentric Shaft styles, the bulbous lettering introducing Fox’s That ’70s Show, Rhino Records’ shag rug on the Have a Nice Day box set — makes Marti surprisingly happy. "It’s helped clarify stuff I was trying to get at in my work — that adolescence informs all that we do… I think it’s interesting that kids are taking to things not necessarily in their pop-cultural framework." He jokes about those Calvin Klein ads (done in front of paneling, nearly pornographic in their seediness) that he mimicked in self-portaits like Hot Lava and Double Self-Portrait With Paneling. "I see so much of what’s done in the name of the ’70s as funny… like Happy Days for our generation."

Still, his work is not camp or kitsch. Exaggerated. Oversized. Overluxuriated. The ultimate knickknackiness. But not kitsch. He avoids it.

"I’m interested in how the sentimental is utilized in art," he says, evoking queer theorist David Deichter. "In the ’50s, Abstract Expressionism was viewed as the masculine artform. Feeling or sentimentality was viewed as second-rate, too-feeling. Feminine."

Marti uses the ploy of pop art’s mass culturalism to open the dialogue of gender and high/low class structure in his work: If it feels, it’s not necessarily feminine. If it’s decorative, it still can be art.

The explosion of feeling in his PAFA display pits the Garden of Eden against the candle’s fire — the possibility of divinity against an existentialist hell. He may not be sure how the installation follows through on his continuum of fantastical earnestness or frank overemotion. But he is certain that it will touch a nerve, whether, as a kid, you dug punk or Kansas.

Virgil Marti’s exhibit/installation runs June 15-September 2, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 118 N. Broad St., 215-972-7600. Marti gives an Art-at-Lunch talk about his work in the Academy’s Hamilton Auditorium Wed., June 20, at 12:15 p.m.