Nostalgia for the colorful psychedelia of the ’60s counterculture has become a well-worn art-world theme, but Steve Powers’s brand of nostalgia reaches back a decade further, conjuring the billboards and magazine advertisements of ’50s Americana. His current show, “My List of Demands,” includes several cartoony “Emotional Response Icons”—visual one-liners depicting a range of timeless human sentiments (insecurity, jealousy, etc.) that are executed with a graphic élan recalling Warhol’s early drawings for magazine ads. Not to be missed is the video starring Jeffrey Deitch as a hilariously thugged-out intermediary between the real Jeffrey Deitch and Powers, who plays himself as a procrastinating artist preparing (but more often, not) for his upcoming show. The real highlight, though, is the thirty-three-panel Waylon Saul Series, 2004, a narrative tableau of variously shaped aluminum signs. This homage to the underdog ends with the playground bully Waylon beating up the wimpy, corrective shoe–wearing Saul, who laughs in his face and taunts, YOU CAN’T WIN IF I DON’T LOSE. “My List of Demands” links the advertising culture of a former era to the spectacular excesses of the contemporary one in refreshingly unmoralistic fashion. Powers simply points out our susceptibility to uncomplicated content that tugs the heartstrings, and executes his works with the legible simplicity of (in the artist’s own words) a “cave painter of human emotion.”
