At thirty three feet long, Brad Slaugh’s Feast just barely fits into his studio.
It may be the most monumental mural drawing created in Utah in recent years
(1998). Pieced together from 48 pastel drawings, it is difficult to achieve
optimal viewing distance - even in the artist’s sizable studio. But size isn’t
everything. Other aspects of this work speak to its ambition – and genuine
grandeur.
Displayed last month at Poor Yorick’s biannual open house, Feast is not just the artist’s
masterpiece. It is a paean to epicurism, and also to Utah. Assembling twelve
supersized dinner guests along a makeshift table, the lateral composition and
its proximity to the picture plane begs comparison with that other dinner party
we all know so well. In contrast to Leonardo’s illusionistic room, Slaugh’s
guests are cramped up against a wall, the knots in the veneer screaming of
basement rec rooms. Along the left edge, a partial figure in the form of a hand
surrepticiously holds out a ham and cheese sandwich. Reminiscent of the Sistine
Chapel’s famous ‘Hand of God’ – or perhaps Monty Python’s, it tantalizingly
suggests a thirteenth sitter, and flirts with Leonardo’s numerology.
Beyond this, Feast
diverges from The Last Supper in
important ways. Slaugh’s dinner guests, for instance, are Everyman. They lack
the decorum of the apostles and could be anybody’s uncles and aunts,
half-brothers and stepmoms. Clearly, time has not been kind to them. Their
flesh hangs from their bones, perhaps in a nod to Lucien Freud or Eric Fishl.
Suggesting the sloth that comes from a lifetime of television viewing, they are
signifiers of the downtrodden, the aged and the infirm, and every bit as
proletariat as Courbet’s peasants.
Wearing stylistically obsolete clothes, a sense of nostalgia
for seventies fashion and furniture emerges. As such, Slaugh pays homage to a
generation of folks just ‘making do’ on the fringes of society, trapped in that
time machine called Utah. He also toys with their proportions, dwarfing some
and enlarging others; creating giants only a Trollhunter could love.
Appropriately, they are faced with the greatest of
consolations: a large meal, and the gastronomic
catastrophe laid out in front of them adds an element of jouissance to the
composition. The table, propped up like the one in the Merode Altarpiece, displays a cornucopia of processed foods, along
with an unconscionable amount of mustard. The gooey and acrid splendor of
American condiments flows to but one thing: indigestion. An anathema to Mormon
retraint and sensibility, we are but a small step away from Francis Bacon’s
open carcasses. And then there’s the ham and cheese sandwich, hardly the stuff
of Passover meals.
Surprisingly, Slaugh informs me that the sitters would
self-identify as Mormon. And yet, they challenge the more conventional model,
of mission suits and bleached out smiles. This begs the question: are they
heirs to the apostles, or perhaps usurpers? As Latter Day Saints, the gospel
has fallen to this motley crew to disseminate. Should we be comforted?
Concerned? There may be no greater question facing Utahns today.
While situating this dilemma in modern day Utah, and
infusing it with a more universal, tragicomic humanism, Feast becomes
Leonardo’s legacy. Unlike the Last Supper,
which has been a stable fixture in Milan for half a millenia, Feast is still in search of a home,
itself a drifter in the land of Zion.
Feast can be
viewed at a fraction of its real size, at www.bradslaugh.com
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