Of all the artists of New York’s East Village in the 1980s—that almost folkloric bunch once dubbed the New Irascibles—none seem to have had the effervescence of Arch Connelly (1950–1993). His mixed-media assemblages and collages have an embellished craftedness, like a Joyce Leslie dress rhinestoned into a suburban queen’s idea of opulence. His work hearkens back to the period in the 1970s when he lived in San Francisco and designed sets for local drag-theater troupes the Cockettes and the Angels of Light. In its scavenged materials—glitter, costume jewelry, pennies—and its travesties of good taste, his art embodies the two hallmarks of camp à la Susan Sontag: “artifice and exaggeration.”
In “The Future Reflected, Wallworks 1981–1991,” one of the few gallery presentations of Connelly’s work since his AIDS-related death, excess was an expression of queerness. In the sixteen pieces on view here, Connelly refuted the straight world’s prissiness, epitomized in art by Minimalism or in fashion by Coco Chanel’s oft-quoted maxim, “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.” Connelly described his own approach in a barrage of adjectives that most (lackluster) artists would disavow: “My work is mannered, is homosexual, is effete, is base, is snobish [sic], is selfish, is self contained, is self righteous.” What he didn’t claim for himself are the stale old verities of beauty or truth.
One of the flummoxing questions this show posed was, When does kitsch transmogrify from accident or affectation into a genuine style? In a trio of unusually monochromatic pieces made between 1989 and 1991, the artist appliquèd broken eggshells onto canvas or hardboard, creating densely textured mosaics that read like DIY Anni Albers. (Connelly saved eggshells from his shifts as a short-order cook, a testament to his ingenuity—or his thrift.) Prosaic from across the room, the works startled up close once I clocked the shells, leaving me with an aftertaste of exotic formalism. A quartet of paintings from 1991, three of them tondos, featured glittery smiley faces. The works initially seemed kind of stupid, but then the glitter shimmied and beguiled, and finally the thematic sucker punch landed. After all, Connelly’s grinning idiots seemed more Munchian or nauseated or lobotomized than happy, their cheery expressions faked from deep within the Reagan/Bush cavalcade of death.
Fakery is a piquant subtext of Connelly’s art. His faux pearls and gems, often heavily barnacled onto works’ surfaces, evoke an ersatz glamour, a coerced melodrama that’s a symptom of kitsch. The central image in Light in Other Light, 1982, is a painted lamp: The shade is hospital-sheet white, but its amorphously gestural base is multicolored. The canvas is encrusted edge to edge with phony pearls and rhinestones, so what you’re left with is a chimera. Is it alluring? Tacky? It’s both.
Connelly’s work exploits the misreadings of intemperance. The title of The More, 1985, is an American bowdlerization of moiré, the iridescent silk that serves here as a substrate. The artist is likely riffing on the textile’s historical connotations of luxury and decadence, although it is also just a hypnotic material, a fata morgana as chromatically alive as spilled motor oil. On a circle of blue moiré silk, Connelly has painted black branchlike forms that writhe upward alongside other boughs, fashioned from sham pearls. The piece struck me as the fine-art equivalent of drag—an otherwise ordinary scene zhuzhed up with fabric and gimcrack jewels.
Of course, more baubles cropped up in the show’s three collages, where they accreted around Adonises clipped from porn magazines. In Local Boy,1990, a collage that appeared on the November 1991 cover of Artforum, a beefcake in an overstuffed jockstrap poses against a vomitous assortment of doodads and Joe Brainard–esque pansies. Similar imagery suffuses (Icon) Perfect Curve,1984, and Clothing Optional, 1990. Embalmed in inadvertent nostalgia, the works now feel like gay ex-votos, tokens from a queer yonder in which sex and beauty were still inextricable—and still con jobs.
For the uninitiated, this show was a handy primer on Connelly’s glitzy simulacra. For those who survived the ’80s, it likely elicited memories both fond and devastating, much like the show’s namesake, The Future Reflected, 1984. In this piece, an airplane built of plastic gems glides above a sinister black fin, an allegory of its age: something wondrous stalked by doom.
