Hollywood

Meyer Vaisman is a 28-year-old Wunderkind from Venezuela who played a central role in making Simulationism (also known as Smart Art and Neo-Geo), the dominant trend on the New York art scene. As director of the taste making International With Monument Gallery, Vaisman proved himself a master promotion man and launched his own art career to boot. Like the rest of the Simulationist crowd, Vaisman concerns himself with ideas associated with Semiology; the underlying implications of cultural transactions, the fascism of advertising, the evolution of symbols, and consumer fetishism.

Citing Warhol and Duchamp as central influences, Vaisman is more interested in strategy than object making, and is one of the peel-me-a-grape breed of artists who never soil their hands on their own work. Born to give orders, Vaisman oversees the creation of objects that bear a striking resemblance to the ‘60s sets for the Jack Paar Show. Favoring the gaseous color scheme associated with Pop art, the four large works on view here reprise the motifs common to Vaisman’s art; overall patterning created from a photographically enlarged swatch of cloth (which lends the work a certain faux rustic quality), cartoon caricatures, and the repeated use of cameo shapes. Vaisman ties all this cultural flotsam together with a noncommittal neutrality that verges on savage indifference.

This particular series explores the relationship between portraiture and death. For Vaisman, the fact that most world currency is emblazoned with images of dead people and obsolete symbols makes portraiture a form of embalming. Vaisman juggles that, among other sophisticated ideas, in these pieces, but disguises the rarefied content of his work by giving it a cheap quality of burlesque. Traditional concepts of comedy are central to Vaisman’s work and he’s come to seem like the Harpo Marx of his scene; relentlessly mischievous and mute as a cigar store Indian, his work speaks not a word as it leers in a vaguely Freudian way and mugs wildly for the camera.

Vaisman is the toast of the town for now, but his work seems destined to play to an insiders audience due to the fact that his central subject is art itself. (He makes much of the fact that art equals money but that hardly comes as earthshaking news; at this point, who harbors any illusions about the purity of art world transactions?) Subverting values long considered essential to good art--authenticity, originality, sincerity--Vaisman deflates the hot air balloon of spirituality that’s kept painting aloft for much of this century. He proves that there’s a peculiar vitality in vacancy, and that it’s possible to make resolved work that’s almost entirely drained of meaning. These paintings feel like substitutes or body doubles, objects merely filling a space until the real thing arrives. That seems to be exactly the effect he’s after. (Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, to Dec 10.)