{"id":29189,"date":"2015-07-08T13:02:29","date_gmt":"2015-07-08T19:02:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=29189"},"modified":"2020-02-15T11:03:23","modified_gmt":"2020-02-15T17:03:23","slug":"jann-haworth-at-modern-west-fine-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/jann-haworth-at-modern-west-fine-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Jann Haworth at Modern West Fine Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"bracelet\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Any random person asked to name the most successful artwork of all time might be expected to answer the \u201cMonaLisa.\u201d She\u2019s instantly recognized by a huge population that sees her often on advertisements, illustrations, posters, postcards, and a vast array of accessories. More to the point, her image has become an icon that instantly says \u201cART\u201d in virtually all contexts. Wouldn\u2019t it be hard to find another serious painting that has achieved greater familiarity? But does such commercial success really equate with success? In fact, what if anything does \u201cMona Lisa\u201d really say to her audience? No one knows what her maker, Leonardo da Vinci, meant her to say. In fact, we don\u2019t even know for sure whose portrait she is, if she is a portrait. Also, her great fame is largely confined to one broad social class, which we might identify as the cultural and visual literati. For comparison, consider the truly worldwide success of American pop music, which is heard everywhere, in all economic strata, on cassette tapes, CDs, and even on old vinyl records. When John Lennon said the Beatles were \u201dmore popular than Jesus,\u201c he included Leonardo and \u201cMona Lisa\u201d in his boast. And he was right.<\/p>\n

So as well-known as \u201cMona Lisa\u201d is among celebrity-aware, irony-saturated Westerners, we might venture to guess that taking the entire world into account, more people would recognize, say, the cover of \u201cSgt. Pepper\u2019s Lonely Hearts Club Band,\u201d and add to it that they would know a great deal more about it, variously including who is on it and why they\u2019re there. Furthermore, at its first appearance, in 1966, Time magazine called the entire album, including its visual component, \u201ca historic departure in the progress of music,\u201d while the New Statesman said it elevated pop music to the level of fine art. These comments suggest it should be regarded at least as seriously as Leonardo\u2019s girl. Jann Haworth, the creative director at The Leonardo showing some of her more recent works this month at Modern West Gallery, co-created that cover with her husband at the time, and like a musician who can\u2019t get offstage without playing her big hit, it has been her fate ever since to be half the team that made what may be the most popular image of all time.<\/p>\n

As a work of art, the cover of \u201dSgt. Pepper\u2019s\u201d falls neatly into the movement that came to be called Pop Art, of which the leading artists and canonical works\u2014say, Andy Warhol\u2019s soup cans (1964) or Roy Lichtenstein\u2019s comic strip parodies (1963)\u2014were Sgt. Pepper\u2019s contemporaries. How this came about is no mystery. Unknown to many Americans, Pop Art took form in London, where its first examples were shown as early as 1947. The movement, with its close links to Dada, and its characteristic inclusion of mass culture viewed with irony, couldn\u2019t have originated here, but eventually American artists responded to this critique from their own perspective: consumer culture as seen by those who dwelled within it. In the process, they revived the popularity of painting in America, where it had been widely thought a dead art.<\/p>\n

The official story of Pop Art can be found in art history texts, but evidence of direct cross-fertilization between British and American Pop is harder to find. Jann Haworth was, and remains, an important exception: an artist who continues to use the Pop perspective to examine private life and social institutions. Growing up with an Academy Award-winning set designer for a father and an artist mother who taught her to sew as a child, Haworth developed an unusually integrated artistic vision that she honed at UCLA before moving to London at the beginning of the \u201860s. Her pioneering invention, soft sculpture, involved sewing and stuffing instead of carving or casting. Even as Carnaby Street was providing the fashions that clothed the \u201860s, Haworth was winning awards for using needle and thread in place of chisel and brush.<\/p>\n

In the nearly half-century since, Haworth has proved herself more prolific than her better-known contemporaries. Of the 15-odd works at Modern West (a couple are discretely kept back in another space), only one was shown in an earlier show at the Rio, and she remains someone who can fill a gallery, frequently without repeating herself. Of course, she can never entirely escape \u201cSgt. Pepper,\u201d and indeed she has tucked that familiar cover image, like a visual signature, into both autobiographical and original works (as has her collaborator, Peter Blake). But if she resembles a musician in all this, it might be Bob Dylan she most closely emulates; like him, she invokes \u201cSgt. Pepper\u2019s\u201d only to comment on it. Or, as she puts it, the cover is \u201can icon ready for the iconoclast.\u201d<\/p>\n

An example can be seen in \u201cCharm Bracelet,\u201d one of two enlarged, soft sculptures of charm bracelets, each stretched across an entire wall. It may help to compare these very personal works with the much larger and cooler, more distanced objects of Claes Oldenburg, whose gigantic scale always refers back to his satiric view of what a monument should be: large and in the way. Haworth\u2019s large charms are not outsized like his objects; rather, their size expresses the importance of these mementos to she whose life\u2019s events they memorialize. Haworth has developed a highly original device, wherein she sews a pocket into a work, in which she can place something temporarily: a newspaper or photo making an even more current reference. Such a reference to \u201cSgt. Pepper\u2019s\u201dappears here, in a large, fabric envelope. But closer inspection reveals it to be a photo of SLC PEPPER, the localized and gender-corrected version painted as a mural in downtown Salt Lake City. The cover has become only more famous over the years, but its appearance in her work could be used to make the argument that while today\u2019s postmodern artists notoriously appropriate images, no one has a greater right to appropriate an image than the artist who made it.<\/p>\n

The gallery titles this show Round Trip<\/em>, a reference to life\u2019s having taken Haworth from western America to Britain and back. Aside from the two bracelets and \u201cJewels and Ring,\u201d a freestanding set of fabric jewels, Haworth, if she chose to follow Cindy Sherman\u2019s example, might well call most of the works \u201cfilm stills.\u201d They are framed like paintings for hanging on walls, but consist of compound layers of fabric, among them clear vinyl that causes them to resemble stained-glass window panels, or the animation cels widely reproduced and sold as souvenirs. They are, of course, neither, but are compositions in depth that activate viewers to move around, the change in the angle of view altering the composition. \u201cShe was not There\u201d consists of three levels: a line drawing on top; zones of color similar to, but not quite matching the lines; and a background of bright geometric shapes that includes her far arm. A target\u2014an image used by Jasper Johns in part to flatten the surface of a painting\u2014floats freely here and underscores the point: just as the woman who appears in an advertisement or movie poster often isn\u2019t named, so women receive far more attention for being the subject of art than for being its maker.<\/p>\n