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BEAUTIFUL LOSERS
Directed by Aaron Rose
Produced by Jon Barlow, Rich Lim, Noah Khoshbin & Chris Green
Released by Sidetrack Films
USA. 90 min. Not Rated
With Barry McGee, Aaron Rose, Chris Johanson, Ed Templeton, Geoff McFetridge, Harmony Korine, Jo Jackson, Margaret Kilgallen, Mike Mills, Stephen Powers, Thomas Campbell & Shepard Fairey

Back in the early 1990s, scholar Fredric Jameson wrote that in the postmodern era, parody and real social critique had been replaced by pastiche—the vapid reproduction and reiteration of commercial culture or older art forms with no critical commentary whatsoever.

I kept thinking about this idea of “pastiche” the whole time I sat through Beautiful Losers, the documentary of a group of early nineties D.I.Y. artists who started out in the skateboard, surfer, and graffiti subcultures and hit it big in the commercial art world. Or, some of them started out in advertising and then hit it big in the commercial art world.

Director Aaron Rose, himself an artist and curator whose current work is in conjunction with Nike, drifts into his subject without offering the viewer any real social context for the artists he’s profiling. That this is a movement of middle-class, largely suburban, white and Asian-American artists who have co-opted art forms pioneered by urban, working-class black and Latino artists in the 1970s and 1980s goes unexamined.

In the inchoate first half, there’s pretty much no social context at all. How did Rose initially get the money to found in 1992 the famous Alleged Gallery on the Lower East Side, where these artists came together? (“I was offered this storefront,” is all he says.) Several of the artists talk about enduring stints of poverty. (“I didn’t work, I only made art for a lot of years,” says Jo Jackson. “I really starved sometimes. I lived on, like, apples.”) But it’s clear that none of them ever had to work three menial jobs to wire money to family in the Dominican Republic or Ecuador.

In the second half, some background is laid out, but there’s something irritating about what the director assumes and what he leaves out. There’s a lot of talk about being “weirdos” or outsiders—but compared to what? Rose offers no sense of exactly which mainstream mores, or any, were being contested by this movement.

The artists, at least, offer a flavor of their orientation, even if the interviews aren’t as challenging as they ought to be. One artist describes Alleged Gallery as finding “a group of other kids who hated life and hated school and hated parents, and these were my real family.” Mike Mills, a filmmaker, curator, and graphic designer educated at Cooper Union, notes that being a “straight, white, male” artist seemed “not punk rock” to him, and says, “I went to art school to learn to just diss art.” In discussing a fan who found religious messages in his work, Cal Arts-educated Geoff McFetridge, who creates graphics for companies like ESPN, says, “The vaguity of what I do…there’s a kind of like positivity to it.”

The artists’ work is interesting in that they regurgitate icons of pop art, alternative urban movements, advertising, classic billboards, graffiti, and the iconography of each other’s work with no self-censure. Many of them combine their love of unsung Americana with a kind of slacker nihilism and false modesty. Human history, says Jo Jackson, “is just nothing.” When talking about success, Thomas Campbell says, “We’re all just gonna be f****** dust, anyway.”

In some ways, the Alleged Gallery scenesters are the quintessential post-pop artists, characterized by “vaguity,” lackadaisical commercialism, and a sort of hapless ennui. Beautiful Losers is so far inside the scene that it’s infected with meaninglessness. It will make a great document for some filmmaker of the future, who wants to take a deeper look at the ways that middle-class nineties youth culture merged with commercialism to create a parody-free art world. Elizabeth Bachner
August 8, 2008