Maybe because I have not spent enough time on the West Coast, William Wiley’s work just looks tiresome to me. I know it is supposed to be funny, but it demands so much work that all the fun is gone by the time you get to the punchline. You have to look at a lot of stuff, decipher a lot of scribbling, and the returns just are not all that rewarding. We are supposed to think kindly of Wiley’s productions, taking them as down-home shaggy dog stories which deflate high-art pretensions. But their dogged quaintness is a pretension, and a sentimental one, for these works seem relentlessly coy in their rugged folksiness.
The work in this show is mostly huge charcoal drawings on canvas, intricate webs of line which depict a nightmarish coalescing of landscape, figure, and language. Information pops out of the dense, over-populated space only to be swallowed up again before becoming fully present. A few elements do surface and stay on the surface, mostly abstract shapes colored in with paint, but also slogans/titles like Acid Rain.
That title, of course, pinpoints the trouble, for Wiley has adopted as persona the laughing idiot who lurches by mistake against the “truth,” too stoned to know better. This is a persona whose convulsive humor passed for cool in the good old days of the counterculture, but now looks suspiciously like a cover for less benign, good of boy attitudes. There once was a time when certain kinds of conservatism could appear charming; now they seem simply dangerous.
One of the drawings includes a brief self-interview. It reads as follows: “You can’t keep coming up with the same dopey pictures and repeated information.” “So far I can.” It is true that Wiley can keep coming up with it if he likes. But we can stop paying attention.
—Thomas Lawson
