Duelling Reviews
DUELING REVIEWS: ALAKE SHILLING Two takes on Alake Shilling’s Buggy Bear at the Hammer Museum
Buggy Bear Crashes Made in L.A. (2025), the two-story inflatable sculpture seated in the shaded Wilshire and Glendon armpit of the Hammer Museum just beyond constant bumper-to-bumper traffic and a short, useless barricade, encapsulates everything that I have come to hate in recent contemporary art.
Buggy Bear Crashes Made in L.A. depicts artist Alake Shilling’s signature character, a pink bear in a fedora, driving a pink smiling car over what seems to be a giant strawberry that is sprinkled with sad-faced inflated daisies.
Let’s begin with the low-hanging fruit: it’s machine-made and, despite attempting to catch the pedestrian-level eye with Hockney-esque painterly flourishes—those flourishes are printed. It was constructed by un-credited fabricators, and the artist was not one of them. It is temporary and its temporariness seems to inform the ethic of its fabrication: this is a passing novelty, made to last neither philosophically nor physically, and you’re a stick-in-the-mud not to enjoy it.
A plaque nearby mentions that the soft air sculpture is a play on 1960s–70s California funk and the Chicago Imagist’s focus on cartoons, bold colors, and playfulness and that Shilling intends for the sculpture to be a container for “humor, ambivalence, and estranged joy.” Sure.
These Pop-informed movements were zany and absurd on purpose, and emerged as a response (or at least an alternative) to the dry seriousness of conceptualism, minimalism and what was left of Abstract Expressionism—in other words, it was created to be the antithesis to various artforms that attempted to create a new version of “Rarified Taste.” This made it vulnerable: At its worst, these populist movements could end up looking like a bad summer camp project—the kind of contained acid trip your parents keep on the kitchen counter to remind them of how cute you used to be.
The dog—sorry, the bear—is cute. The car is cute, the giant mushroom strawberry it sits on is cute as are the inflated frowney-faced crying daisies that are attached to it. But here’s the thing: that car is nearly a straight rip from the Pixar movie Cars, the bear could be anybody’s bear (I have a ceramic Christmas ornament from the mid-‘80s that could be its bluer cousin) and the frowning daisies are a gritty American reboot of Murakami’s smiling ones.
And this is perhaps no coincidence: thirty years after Murakami proved that Japanese anime aesthetics could occupy fine art spaces so long as they were dumbed-down and de-skilled enough to be mistaken for cultural commentary, Shilling is proving the same is equally true of American cartoons. There will be people who hate this sculpture because they hate cartoons and see nothing beautiful in such gaudy and juvenile imagery. I posit here that the option to hate on this sculpture is also open to those who love cartoons and respect those who make them. The only thing Shilling’s piece offers a true aficionado of pop culture is the opportunity to see a Macy’s Parade-style balloon done smaller and worse.
Will Shilling be successful for it? All signs point to yes. The art world is notorious for rewarding artists for offering collectors the exact same imagery everyone else wants without the terrifying stigma of affordability. Although Buggy Bear will be deflated come spring, experience suggests Shilling’s star will rise for years to come.
I recently watched Ingmar Bergman’s Persona for the first time, despite my longstanding appreciation for films in the same tradition: Perfect Blue, Black Swan, etc My immediate reaction, frantically typed into Letterboxd: “Sure, all of the reinterpretations have a certain sensationalism factor to them, but what is intrasexual competition if not sensational?” I’d be a fool not to appreciate Bergman’s subtlety, but the lurid gestures of his successors registered as more honest to me. This sums up how I feel about Buggy Bear Crashes Made in LA (Alake Shilling, 2025), the fluorescent two-story inflatable welcoming visitors to the Hammer’s biennial.
There is nothing subtle about this piece. The exhibition’s copy describes the sculpture as “A stern-eyed bear in a hot pink convertible,” and you would be hard pressed to mistake it for anything else. The vague aura of “branding” surrounds it, especially when you know that Buggy Bear is a recurring face in Shilling’s oeuvre: the artist’s manipulation of such a simple design evokes the many permutations of BE@RBRICKs and Labubus, while the car’s bright hue calls to mind California icons Barbie and Angelyne. Of course, there’s a twist: the anthropomorphic flowers at the sculpture’s base are sobbing rather than smiling. It is ironic that the subversion of cutesy, popular aesthetics has become popular in itself; yet I believe this phenomenon only reinforces the conceit rather than undermining it. The ability of simple dots and curves to connote the simplest and most universal human emotions is something to marvel at wherever and whenever it appears. Frustration often feels frustratingly uncomplicated; sometimes it’s best expressed through uncomplicated imagery.
I imagine certain naysayers will take issue with the sculpture’s grandiosity and glaring colors, perhaps going so far as to call it an “eyesore.” Well, guess what? This is Los Angeles, baby— we adore eyesores here! LA is built upon the veneration of sentimental, yet grotesque objects, from the billboards that give Sunset Boulevard its character to the roller coasters that rise above Studio City to the uncanny sets erected by the studios themselves to that monument of all monuments, the Hollywood sign (which originally served as an advertisement for a real estate development). Stuck in Westwood traffic, we should be so lucky to have a beacon like Buggy Bear upon which we can hang our hopes. In moments of exhaustion, the flowers’ tears mirror our own, coaxing us toward catharsis. In moments of hopeful anticipation, we trust that our ursine friend might sail off his earthen mound into the clouds, flying above the skyscrapers and smog—and that we may someday experience the same abandon.
Richard Hell in Godlike: “Cartoons as paradise. Wistful yearning for cartoons. Cartoons as eternity… Oh, I will diffuse exquisitely in a mist of brave surrender to desire for entrance into great cartoons… Can I not be rewarded for this? If I think of a sunset landscape panorama for Porky Pig beckoning to me on my deathbed, can’t I get some points? …The orchestra swells ‘ping boing wee wee’ as cross-eyed satyrs whose furry ears are really more like bunnies’ than goats’ poop two-dimensional stars… Are the cartoons really appealing because they’re safe and have the proportions of children? But I love them, I love them so much.” Even before staring into Buggy Bear’s stern eyes, I felt the urge to dog-ear (or should I say bunny-ear?) this passage. A good cartoon activates the id; a great cartoon engages the superego.
I love alliteration. I want Buggy Bear to usher me into heaven. Crash into me, BB; the soft animal of my body awaits you with open arms.
