Oh pop art. What have you done to us? What have we done to you? We were thrilled when the popular and the common was displayed without the hokiness of regional art, but with the cool imprimatur of downtown intellectual chic. But as time passed, the simple soup can became insufficient. If mythology and history were the fodder for an elite of painters long past, then television and cinema have long taken their place. Robert Williams and his minions took pop (and surrealism, perhaps the first pop art in Dali’s palms) to a level of literality, so that now, whenever I see pop as a subject, I start to cringe. But that is not to say that after the first wave of disgust passes I don’t find, with some artists, something worthwhile hiding beneath the aesthetic of popular culture because I occasionally do. Sean Landers and Larry Johnson use pop, but with such wry and deadpan humor that they successfully take apart its layers, analyzing it sometimes in Warholian adoration and sometimes in Pictures generation criticality, and always with enough distance to be thoughtful even if they’re still, at heart, fans.

Luke Butler displays the coolness of Landers and Johnson, but with just enough heat to take it perilously close to kitsch. What keeps it from going over the edge is, oddly, the tenderness with which he gives his subjects. In a series of portraits, he paints members of the original cast of Star Trek in awkward poses and humbling moments captured from the series. Each of the Trekkies are caught in human gestures, breaking down whatever mythologized presence might have crusted over them from the fanaticism of the legion of Star Trek followers.

In another series, Gerry Ford makes an appearance, his head grafted on to any number of beefcake men culled from the pages of old sex magazines. Butler, with some scissors and glue, makes Gerry Ford (however unlikely it might sound) into a kind of gay sex icon, a pin up pinned with all the sublimated desires of gay men, desires that were getting distinctly less sublimated as the ’70s (and the Ford administration) wore on.

Pop is our shared consciousness, though its obviousness is off-putting.  Now, after almost a half-century of post-Warhol work, pop lacks subtlety as subject for art to say the least. But as talented artists in Christian Europe during the long slog before the Enlightenment must have felt a bit bored with yet another Christ painting, they at least at their best covered that well worn subject with an artistry that transcended the familiarity of the image. Pop, though perhaps too common and easy a subject for art, can still be done well. And Butler, whatever his faults, does succeed at doing it well. Though his work veers a little too close to the literal, there’s a sweet and subtle subversion making these otherwise easy pieces deeper and stranger than the immediacy of their subjects may imply.

--Andrew Berardini

(Images courtesy Silverman Gallery and the artist: Luke Butler, Captain XIII, 2009, Acrylic on canvas, 16 x 19; Luke Butler, Leader of Men 38: Number One Man, 2009, Collage, 8.5 x 11 inches)