Justin Lieberman, Kurt Russell : RE-GENESIS A Topographic Exhibition Exploring The Mechanics of Cult Iconology: Kavi Gupta | 835 W. Washington Blvd. Chicago, IL, 60607

29 June - 11 August 2007
Overview

Kurt Russell: RE-GENESIS A Topographic Exhibition Exploring The Mechanics of Cult Iconology i began the first of the works in the exhibition KURT RUSSELL: REGENESIS well before his re-genesis actually occurred in Quentin Tarantino's filmDeath Proof. Up to that point Kurt Russell as an actor and a public persona was in a sort of limbo. The roles he was best noted for were best remembered by a select few video store clerks with an ironic appreciation for iron-jawed icons of American manhood. Russell played wise-cracking action heroes like Snake Pliskin in Escape From New York, Jack Burton in BigTrouble in Little China, and Gabriel Cash in Tango and Cash, the cop team-up movie that quite possibly defined the genre. But those roles came and went and Kurt Russell's place in film-land was taken over by younger actors like The Rock, Vin Diesel, and Brendan Fraser. He never quite attained the status of his contemporaries, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, having never had a movie as successful and career-defining as Rocky or The Terminator. Never having played a defining role in a series of successful films, Russell was kept from parlaying his on-camera identity into an iconic public image, in the way that William Shatner or John Travolta has managed. I am deliberately omitting actors more commonly referred to as cult icons here, such as Cary Grant or Marilyn Monroe. In general, the phenomena of the cult icon is one that stems primarily from gay culture and it's tradition of camp. A cult iconology off the ultra-masculine has something perverse about it to begin with, because the very notion of the cult icon is inherently tied to the aesthetics of camp,and its subtle reversals of gender-roles. In a way, the idea of the cult icon has its roots in the idea of the gay icon, a role for which Kurt Russell seems to be ill-suited. To my knowledge, it would seem that Quentin Tarantino alone practices this sort of cult-revivalin mainstream film, although a similar casting occurred in Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3 where the sculptor Richard Serra is treated as a sort of hyper-masculine cult icon.The exhibition itself is composed of 10 "paintings" and one sculpture. In the paintings, I took movie posters from various Kurt Russell films as a starting point and added to and elaborated upon them, using what I knew of the films for the ones I had seen and the information and visual motifs of the posters themselves for the ones I had not. The installation of the works creates a kind of three-dimensional bar graph, with the paintings most closely related to Russell's newly established status as a cult icon projecting the furthest out from the wall towards the central sculpture. The sculpture consists of a pair of model cars which I have customized to match those in the movie Death-Proof, as well as a collection of commercial and promotional items related to the movie. This sculpture represents Russell's "re-genesis" : his re-birth as a cult icon, and the paintings depict thewinding celluloid road that lead him there.

 

Justin Lieberman, Artist

Works
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