Not that many decades ago high art and kitsch were thought of as irreconcilable opposites. Now, however, it almost seems as if art imitating kitsch were the norm among young artists. The less interesting work in this vein simply replicates the superficial effects of mass-culture objects, but the best of it, dating back at least to pop art but also including the panel paintings of young New Yorker Lisa Krivacka, manages to negotiate a subtle balance between distance and belief. Copying her pictures from yearbook photos, anonymous snapshots, and old postcards, Krivacka makes visible her genuine affection for these samples of kitschy “art.”
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Born in 1963 and raised in rural Tennessee, Krivacka bases her other paintings on snapshots and postcards. For the latter she favors decades-old styles, graphically elegant designs of the 40s and 50s that celebrated newly built highways, buildings, and even motels with a naive optimism not unlike that of the kids in Most Likely to Succeed. Pennsylvania Turnpike shows our country’s first great superhighway from above: it makes a graceful S curve before vanishing behind a hill. No other development is visible, and the road is free of traffic–a path to freedom through a perfect arcadia. Indeed, Krivacka’s highway is painted to blend with the trees and foliage, its gray well integrated with the land. This depiction is in utter contrast with our view of highways today as choked with traffic and surrounded by buildings and parking lots–part of Krivacka’s point. We’re looking at a false dream of the future.
Krivacka emphasizes the objectlike quality of many of these pictures by making old-fashioned “tramp art” three-dimensional frames: the picture then seems one plane among many. That sense of the painting as an object is also foregrounded in some unframed pictures that Krivacka has cut to unusual shapes: one painting is shaped like a plate, and there are four that follow the outlines of the motor vehicle depicted–right down to the wheels. Tina and Lisa in the Smoky Mountains shows a brightly colored car angled aggressively forward and up; inserted in the car’s midsection is a painting of two little girls (copied, Krivacka told me, from a snapshot of her and her sister on a family trip). They look a bit awkward–one girl’s pant leg rides higher than the other–but the picture also suggests a homemade postcard of family members showing off their car. At the same time it’s a bit like a toy car–a cutout substitute for the real thing.
