Having moved to a city where America's past is always present, Undine's been able to surround himself with the kind of atmosphere he sought to create in his paintings, an atmosphere sorely lacking in Seattle. As a result, the hold of the past on his art has loosened, and Undine has taken a new interest in the here and now. This has had little detrimental effect on his work, and has allowed his always-rich ideas to gain immediacy.
Undine's main format, for years, has been a single-image painting with a caption underneath. His text/image juxtapositions have always been clever, seemingly unrelated and yet completely apt, as in a boxer taking a left hook to the head with a caption reading "And now his eyes are opened." Unfortunately, in the past, those captions tended to be written in German, an unexplained quirk that meant non-German-reading gallerygoers had to scrutinize the wall label's translation to understand the juxtaposition. Undine moved away from German in his show at Traver last year, but his format for that show involved "illustrating" Bible verses: The book, chapter, and verse citations appeared at the bottom of the painting, but the text of the verse in question appeared only on the wall label, so comprehension still required the left-right/painting-label head fake of his German-captioned works.
In this show, Undine's jettisoned his reliance on secondary materials. His captions are in English, are on the painting itself, and are now more fully integrated into the composition. Undine has drawn inspiration from the tropes of propaganda posters, and his text/image combinations now boast the grace of a V. V. Mayakovsky poster. Their politics, as you might guess, are a bit more cryptic than Mayakovsky's: A horse, its ass toward us, is captioned "When it paused and turned, we thought that we saw an expression of regret"; a woman whispering in the ear of a boy sitting on a steamer trunk bears the caption "In Praise of Brand X"; a girl riding a hobbyhorse in front of a stage-set Western town that has a saloon and a bank and little else, is captioned "Even the lawless have somewhat limited choices."
Since 1998, Undine has been working on a comprehensive survey of the world's powerful people, under the title Take off the Head. He describes his small paintings -- now numbering 555 separate images -- as portraits of politicians, but his definition is a broad one. The faces include the leaders of any obscure country you might name, along with a broader swath of politicians from North America and Europe; but they also include corporate CEOs, criminals, TV news anchors and pundits, and everyday people who somehow got caught up in political issues -- Paula Corbin Jones, Elian Gonzalez, Jack Kevorkian. These aren't politicians, but Undine's work argues that they are participants in the political world, willingly or otherwise.
The portraits are beautifully observed, carefully capturing Bill Bradley's tumor-like neck, William F. Buckley Jr.'s papery skin, and Hillary Clinton's glaring eyes. But they're not catalogs of physical imperfections. Even as the individual portraits evince a subjective, appraising eye, the 555 portraits taken together acquire the status of an objective catalog.
Undine's survey is fascinating, systematic, unfinished, important, vacant. We meet Nana Kwaku Dua, the cataract-eyed leader of the Ghanain Ashanti; Johnny and Luther Htoo, the 12-year-old leaders of God's Army in Myanmar; Shoko Ashahara of Japan's Aum Shinrikyo cult; and Pnina Rosenblum, the Israeli model who heads a political party named after her -- fascinatingly odd people from around the world. We also re-encounter Kipland Kinkel of Springfield, Oregon, Ted Kaczynski of Montana, and John William King of Texas -- disturbing creations of our own society. In Undine's neatly organized card catalog sitting on a pedestal next to the portraits, these people are coolly appraised, their salient career-features noted on a card and filed away for future reference alongside those of the American presidential candidates. The piece is information-stuffed and yet almost useless; it tries to understand the world in a comprehensive manner and brilliantly documents its inability to do so. It's simply great.
