Life is a cabaret

GOLDFARB’S “DANCING WITH THE TIGERS III”

It’s been a while since Long Beach had Serious Art around, being grand and weighty and muy importante—and honestly, I don’t think I’ve missed it. Here, even our most successful artists leaven their weightiness with some tasty irony—usually in the immortal form of the spork—and I may be out of intellectual shape to huff and puff my way through earnestness. Perhaps earnestness is more fitting in those cultures that still have futures to envision, rather than the ashes of an empire to fiddle upon. For us, we must laugh and be merry for tomorrow. . . . Just think of us as Germany between the wars. You will lose your house; I will lose my job. Life is a cabaret.

It’s not that Brazilian artist Walter Goldfarb’s lovely works at the Museum of Latin American Art aren’t lovely—they are, which you would already know if you’d been paying attention to the first clause in this very sentence. They are lovely, and they are Serious—they’re so Serious, in fact, that he sometimes makes them in German. They are big—epic!—and lovely, and serious, and fucking weighty, in addition to evoking the Finish Fetish we suffered through in the mid-’90s. I mean, they’re lovely and all—have I said that yet?—but it’s the wrong time in these parts to have to think. Especially auf Deutsch.

And what would Goldfarb have us think upon in MoLAA’s exhibit of his “D+Lirium”? Religion, and Wagner, and shadows and surface. He takes a note from Kara Walker’s silhouettes, borrowing from Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding in the process. He etches orgies and plump, Manetian asses, and crucified Christs. He gives us maps of Europe with the sites of concentration camps stitched upon them. He gives us Golems—are they coming for the Brandenburg Gate?

He populates his canvases with figures as cloudy as ghosts or only stitched in outline. It’s all death, death, death and Wagner. He makes his art with acid and with thread, sometimes pale smudges on white, like the smog paintings of Kim Abeles, sometimes gold on black like electric sparks, and always all writ large, which I imagine Brazilians appreciate as much as Americans do. Goldfarb’s studio must be a very grand place.

But then Goldfarb takes pity on us—or perhaps after his “White” series and “Black” series he needed a break himself. His recent “Lysergic” series is pure commercial, all fuchsias and roses and bright candy blues. It’s tigers and urban aboriginal thorn tattoos. It’s pretty—gorgeous—and bloody with windswept washes of color, and we can forget, forget, forget, and take refuge in our eyes’ delight. There’s sex, too, a bit of it, with juicy ladies reclining and grabbing themselves like a trio of Schieles. Sex always gets better Between the Wars. In here, life is beautiful, the girls are beautiful, even the orchestra is beautiful. It’s divine decadence, and we need it in our sunset.

WALTER GOLDFARB: “D+LIRIUM” MUSEUM OF LATIN AMERICAN ART | 628 ALAMITOS AVE | LONG BEACH 90802 | MOLAA.ORG | TUES-FRI 11:30AM-7PM; SAT 11AM-7PM; SUN 11AM-6PM | $5-7.50; FREE ON FRI | THROUGH MAY 18

Tags: arnolfini wedding, art, germany, Long Beach, molaa, wagner, walter goldfarb