Griffin Goodman: Don't Eat the Glue at Andrew Rafacz

The last time I went to Andrew Rafacz, it was to see Soumia Netrabile’s tenebrous landscapes. So it isn’t an understatement to say I experienced some degree of aesthetic whiplash visiting their current exhibition, Griffin Goodman’s Don’t Eat the Glue. Three vandalized school desks, an apt coterie of silly glue bottles, and several vacuous paintings later, I left the exhibition wondering if Goodman’s sophomoric strategies were meant to explore tween angst ironically or in earnest. Regression felt confused for radicalism, crassness for criticality, and product placement for popular consciousness. If Goodman has succeeded in capturing any of adolescence’s defining phenomena, it would be the outbursts of a would-be class clown.

Perhaps the trouble is best summed up by the chattering-teeth toys that threaten to overrun many of the tableaux: they have no bite. If the exhibition were as transgressive as the work aims to be, it might be forgivable, but beyond the three desks (which hit their marks well), nothing else steps within shooting distance of real trouble-making. Goodman doubtlessly renders the madcap objects of his fascination with judicious fidelity, but I don’t think I am alone in believing art should aspire beyond quirked-up similitude and relatability. I wanted to write this whole show off as something preoccupied with the logocentric backwash of suburbia, but Goodman’s merits as a painter deserve to be taken seriously. So, I decided to investigate where, art historically, I could find the real reason for my hostility.

Paul McCarthy’s perverted cartoons, Peter Saul’s bawdy animated hellscapes, and John Currin’s boomer breast fetish all feel superficially progenitive here. Yet, at heart, Don’t Eat the Glue feels more like a belated reaction against the way post-internet art from the decade prior groundlessly fucked with many of the same ideas that Goodman treats here with reverence. Art Class (Chalkboard) even features a drawing of the Kool-Aid Man, last launched into art world superstardom by John Rafman’s Kool-Aid Man in Second Life (2008-2011).

Whereas the internet—namely, Tumblr and other image boards from 2008 to 2018—completely evacuates meaning from the images it metabolizes, Goodman seems insistent on rescuing the social significance of the characters and forms he samples so freely. Even though figures like the Kool-Aid Man, Darth Vader, Underdog, etc., might be painted as behaving a bit badly, they’re still treated with an almost moral longing. That’s when it hit me: the decadent layering, the drama, the ornamentation, the dominance of line over color, ham-fisted allegory, and a burning need to broadcast clear, digestible meanings—Poussin! Bouguereau! This is academic painting for Millennials. I found the reason for my contentions.

While I could certainly argue that much of what is shown in Chicago is plagued by rote convention, the paintings of Don’t Eat the Glue feel recuperative of their influences in a similar fashion to how a Cabanel painting is just an attenuation of Delacroix’s insouciance. Much like how the French Academy catered to the conservative tastes of newly ascendent bourgeois classes, these paintings provide a familiar aesthetic constitution for a rising collector base obsessed with action figures, sneakers, and skateboards.

Millennials wanting to reconcile the aesthetics of their Pop-Tart-addled suburban upbringing with the cultural cachet offered by contemporary art can enjoy these without having to sacrifice too much of what’s familiar. Cherubim have been replaced by chattering teeth, recumbent odalisques by naked cartoon babes, and figures of myth by figures with copyrights. Much like their predecessors displayed in aristocratic drawing rooms over tufted settees, After School Special or Rainbow Scratch #1, 2, or 3 might adorn a wall above the beige sofa in a newly constructed West Loop condominium.

This is my beef with the paintings. It’s not that they are so decadently commercial (get your money making the work you believe in), but it’s that they seem awfully content to do little more than confirm what their target audience already wants to see. Why not challenge that same audience with something that might problematize or complicate the fantasy? Why turn away from the world?

I will say the desks (Rotten to the Core, I Feel Punk Today, and I’m Cool, But I Cry A Lot) come close to success with the same earnestness Goodman seems abundantly gifted with. By embracing the poetic impulse of vandalism, they elucidate an impish desire to make a mark in the world that will remain viable for its lack of context and therefore has latitude to be related to, bootlegged, and adored for itself instead of coming with a pre-packaged meaning. If only the paintings treated their subjects with the same lack of preciousness or were less concerned with trying to please.

Goodman and I were both born in 1995, and judging by all the recognizable signifiers in the paintings, we enjoyed a similar cultural diet of retro-cartoons and the crazy things the FCC let slip during the Clinton and Bush years. The show’s obvious appeal is its pretense of universality, which it fulfills by obliterating all of the particularities of growing-up that make it sweet. In being eminently likable by all, it is truly lovable by none; we even lose sight of the possibility that Goodman might reveal what he himself loved most about adolescence. The juvenile paraphernalia that the artist is so hell-bent on resurrecting speaks to a dead era, as quaint to a contemporary audience as reruns of Andy Griffith are to the kids raised on Beevis and Butthead or Bikini Kill. Despite the exhibition’s titular imperative, I have a feeling some glue was eaten or at least spilled. How else can one account for this overbearing feeling of being stuck?