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Until recently, social class wasn’t something average Americans talked much about. Unlike Great Britain, where class is fundamental to the country’s culture and history, the American idea of class tends to be malleable and independent of economic statistics and family lineage. Here, if you own a car and a house, or are educated, have a decent job, and live in an urban environment, you can “pass” for middle class.
A close friend of mine is coming to terms with the fact that her parents shielded her from her family’s working-class reality by surrounding her with the trappings of a middle-class childhood (the most up-to-date toys, books and electronic gadgets). Many Americans apply this approach on a grander scale, overlooking the poverty that exists in this country. Hurricane Katrina forced us to take off the blinders; images of poor people struggling to survive in “third-world” conditions in the world’s wealthiest country were proof that class disparity is truly alive and well in the U.S.
At a time when poverty is in the forefront of our country’s collective consciousness, it is interesting to view work by an artist who attempts to address the theme, albeit on a more personal level. Stephe DK, whose work is currently on view at Miller-Weitzel Gallery, “wrestles,” as he writes in his artist statement, “with the hypocrisy, violence, and absurdity of modern American life as viewed by someone living below the poverty level.” The archetype of the starving artist is nothing new, but Stephe DK’s exhibition raises questions about our social constructions of poverty. The artist implies that his awareness of the “hypocrisy, violence, and absurdity” of American life is altered because he lives in poverty. Yet his work does not underscore this point; instead, one is left with the feeling that Stephe DK chose a life of creativity, and — like it or not — this choice frequently carries with it periods of paucity. Nonetheless, there is privilege connected to such a lifestyle choice, which is not always acknowledged by the artist in this exhibition.
The large-scale painting Wake and Bake depicts a young white man and woman seated on the floor of a humble, paneled living room sharing a marijuana cigarette next to a bookshelf and a television displaying images of the World Trade Center (one tower is on fire, the other is shown just as the second plane is crashing into it). An American flag is visible through a window near the television screen, and it waves innocuously in the wind amidst a blue sky. The young woman and man appear dazed and unshaken by the day’s horrific events, and they are as disconnected from one another as they are from the tragedy they are witnessing on TV. Perhaps they live below the poverty line, but their tastes in literature are solidly white middle-class, with books such as George Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class on the bookshelves behind them. Wake and Bake best represents Stephe DK’s agenda of exploring the violence and absurdity of American life, and this painting is successful because in it he acknowledges his privilege, his education and, perhaps, his conscious decision to withdraw from the complexities of (post)-modern life.
The artist’s work falters when he attempts to objectively examine ubiquitous symbols of masculinity and misogyny. Disco Magic is a montage painting of football players juxtaposed with naked women in a variety of sexually suggestive poses. The grotesquely painted women are accompanied by a cross with a swastika on it, a dollar bill and a percentage sign, as well as text that reads, “Hot young sluts are waiting for your call.” In the context of other pieces in the show, which include lines of text such as, “It takes so many millions just to get laid” (in a painting referencing lingering art school bills and old-school pedagogy), and “I’m bored and horny” (a disrobed female model from a life drawing class), it is difficult to discern whether or not the artist is celebrating or critiquing the imagery.
And it is never clear whether his current economic status truly informs his perceptions of these cultural images. Ultimately, the women in Disco Magic are victims of a brand of classless misogyny, and Stephe DK’s rendering of them does nothing to quell the viewer’s suspicion that he is in some way complicit in proliferating and consuming the images he seeks to “wrestle” with.