MEAT PHYSICS/ Metaphysical L.A.

Irvin’s paintings, while often excessive, are undercut by the “low-seriousness” of his hairy, brushy style. His psychedelic treatises join dozens of works which seem less invested in inward exploration, and more interested in minting hip-nouveau amalgams of druggy images and text. Efforts like Irvin’s Hoop Dawgz (2013)—a painting of naked yogis and a golden retriever dunking a glowing basketball—or a group of canvases with the phrase WOMB KIDZ implanted in colored bands, seem more calculated, more referential, than the washier styles of past painter-shamans. Yet, despite this meme-like simplicity, Irvin is doubtless invested in metaphysical visions—born in the brain, yet visions, more often than not, of meat. At the Armory, Irvin’s work hung alongside Shaw’s Initiation Ritual of the 360 Degrees (2002) (which title reads like a goofy post-y2k redux of Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome), a video where a procession of cultists enter an empty silo playing grotesque instruments shaped like body parts; a leg trombone; a hand bass guitar. The exhibition opened by pairing Irvin’s 2014 Figure in Landscape, and Arledge’s 1953 Angry Man: two grotesquely rendered, reddish lumps of glands and eyeballs. No accident that Irvin’s quick patterns resemble organs—edible and suckable—intestinal mandalas extruded in sudden mystic fits.