Any time an artist can invoke Michelangelo and Steve Ditko in the same work, he deserves considerable respect. At least that is the feeling one gets from the impressive show of work by Jim Shaw recently on view at Blum & Poe. As expected, Shaw’s work is erudite and off-the-wall, deeply rooted in both art history and pop culture, profane yet mystical. It betrays Shaw’s ties to Cal-Arts and the work of his friend, the late Mike Kelley. Yet, thanks largely to the unique “theology” articulated in Shaw’s erstwhile new religion Oism, it evokes a world that is obviously Shaw’s own. 

The exhibition is organized around two large and encyclopedic works, the acrylic on muslin Seven Deadly Sins and Mississippi River Mural (all works 2013). Mississippi River Mural provides a systematic catalog of Shaw’s ability to appropriate, juxtapose, even physically recombine figures from the western visual tradition with figures and personae likewise “borrowed” from the world of contemporary comics, which themselves constitute a kind of weirdly historiated visual counter-tradition. 

Seven Deadly Sins is more compelling visually and more challenging intellectually; and provided with a richer visual context. The third major work in the show, the Oist Timeline, is clever—for example in its juxtaposition of Lake Victoria and Veronica Lake as “watery” emblems of the British and American Empires—and fascinating for viewers who love those old fold-out diagrams of the history of the world. Shaw has also produced a number of beautiful one-off drawings: for example, the text-heavy and marvelously bizarre Anatomical Weird-Ohs (Boustrophedon) and a final word in irreconcilable visual culture clash: Bruegel versus the machines in Mad Meg + Hoover.

But some of the strongest works in the show are the pencil studies for Seven Deadly Sins. These distill the marvelous imagination and sheer perversity (the dead Marat in his tub as emblematic of “Sloth”) of Shaw’s trans-visionist iconography. Perhaps the most deliciously pointed was the study for “Gluttony,” which presented a macabre reworking of Norman Rockwell’s traditional Thanksgiving Scene, where the turkey and trimmings were replaced by the partially anatomized corpse from Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Deyman (1656).

The Seven Deadly Sins works as a whole in a similar way. Each of the sins is exemplified by a group of figures that generally combines two or more easy to recognize art-historical references, the individual pictures forced into uneasy integration or juxtaposition, with originally intended meanings at times twisted or corrupted by the violence of the combinations. Not surprisingly, the uneasiness of the thematic re-imagination is matched by a similar uneasiness on the part of the viewer, whose culture of stable meaning embodied by visual touchstones is obviously under attack. An attack reinforced by two very interesting visual footnotes.

The first harks back to an ancient trope, ars simia natura, or “Art the ape of Nature,” illustrated especially in the 18th century with the image of a finely-dressed monkey at work on an unfinished canvas. Here, Shaw repeats that motif almost verbatim, but with a twist. The faux painting on which the monkey is shown assiduously working is clearly pastiched from Goya’s famous Third of May, 1808, (1814) but with one major “correction.” Goya’s composition has been truncated so that the French executioners are virtually eliminated (a very close look reveals a line of miniscule marks that must be the points of their bayonets) thus undercutting Goya’s original meaning and his picture’s mimetic function.

The second “footnote” plays off the first by invoking one of the most well known of the cartoons by the abstract expressionist Ad Reinhardt published primarily in Art News. In Reinhardt’s sketch (part of a much larger composition titled “How to Look at Modern Art in America”) a philistine viewer is confronted by an animated abstract painting who demands of his interlocutor, “What do you represent?” What indeed? 

Shaw has an affinity with Reinhardt, although they appear to be passing here while heading in opposite directions. Reinhardt, in his relentlessly reductionist drive, arrives eventually at the incredible series of black-on-black canvases, where he seems intent on establishing a set of boundary conditions for abstract painting: how close to an uninflected black canvas can one come and still have something recognizably a painting? Shaw, on the other hand, asks the boundary question in a different way: how disruptive of historical expectations can one be and still be a part of history, of visual tradition? Or how violently can one defile traditional visual meanings and still produce images that are inherently meaningful?