Joe Waks: “Modern Living”

An alternately loving and scathing look at our national pastime: consumption.

An American study in beer, soda, newspapers, and disinfectant spray, entitled "Why?"

Beer is bad for you. Alcohol is fattening, addictive, and relentlessly marketed. Nobody needs to be reminded about the gulf between the world promised to us by beer commercials and the one that drinkers actually experience. All you’ve got to do is walk into a bar and look around.

Yet North Jersey entrepreneurs have been brewing since the seventeenth century. The iconography associated with their product surrounds us and has become part of our environment. Anyone who has driven on Route 1-9 near the airport has been wrapped in the neon wings of the Anheuser-Busch eagle. The Ballantine & Sons brewery was big business in Newark in the twentieth century, and it’s still remembered with a sense of nostalgia by many people in the Garden State, including those whose lips never touch alcohol. The three-ring Ballantine logo represented purity, body, and flavor — high-minded concepts to attach to beer, but ones the brewers believed in. Ballantine is no longer bottled in Essex County, but the rings are still with us, there in the human-sized metal sculptures attached to the sidewalk in front of the Ironbound apartment complex that stands where the brewery used to be.

It’s also all over “Modern Living,” the new show in the rotunda of the Brennan Courthouse (583 Newark Ave.) from the prolific Bayonne painter Joe Waks. He affixes those three interlocking circles to several of his canvases, alongside other venerable symbols of consumerism and mass-marketing: Ronald McDonald, the Colt .45 horseshoe, the Magnavox dog peering into the bell of the phonograph, the Arby's ten-gallon hat, the Oldsmobile station wagon. These icons are rendered in thick, uniform black lines — ad man’s lines — on canvases the color of yellowed newsprint. They share space in a neighborly fashion, just as logos did in crammed, quick-printed coupon circulars from vintage periodicals.  

Old-school, but perpetually relevant.

Not content with old brands, Waks tips his cap to old design aesthetics, too, including plaid patterns and pastel polka dots borrowed straight from the early 1960s. Many of the pieces in “Modern Living” evoke the color circulars crammed into copies of the mid-century Star-Ledger. These paintings bark in the voice of the radio announcer: clear and loud, but even, friendly and well-modulated, cajoling you to buy, buy, buy, but also to participate in collective societal practices organized around mass-produced and mass-marketed commodities.

Is this satire? Well, sure. Joe Waks doesn’t want you to leave “Modern Living” hungry for cheap burgers and fries. He’s got points to make about the velocity of advertisement, logo overload, and the amazing, irritating persistence through time of hawkers and their strategies. At times, Waks behaves like the newsboy in “Why?,” wagging a placard that bears an unanswerable question. Is there a reason for all the sodas, the junk food, the e-waste, and the beer? Are we just addicted to convenience, clean lines and clear orders, the familiar, delivered as brightly and expediently as possible?  

Child's play: the "Parade of Values"

At the same time, “Modern Living” betrays unmistakable affection for the advertising (and the ad aesthetic) that the paintings lampoon. “Bowling Party With Pizza,” for instance, is sheer space-age kineticism and enthusiasm for the world of American abundance that always seems possible, dangling, tantalizing, a few policy corrections out of reach. A smiling waitress with rubbery limbs curved like longbows carries a heavy ball in one hand and a colossal pie in the other. Behind her, an exuberant family waits to be served; beside her, a stereotypical Italian chef in toque makes an equally stereotypical gesture of approval. She looks poised to throw a strike and deliver a slice at the same time. Here is an embodiment of an American dream in the streamlined language of advertising — fun, and food, and excitement, brought straight to you, all at once.

Can't you hear the balls rumble?

Waks knows that in the airless realm of the advert, Santa Claus does not hawk cigarettes for destructive reasons. Both St. Nick and the smokes he’s peddling are expressions of the same desire for immediate gratification. It's a prepubescent desire, and no matter how grown-up the substance he’s shilling for, it’s linked to early childhood, satiation through convenience, and pacification of the roaring senses. Thus there is no contradiction between Santa’s jollity and the dangerous product he pushes. The logo is always innocent. The artist (or the ad man) can lay one on top of the other, gasoline, credit cards, cocktails, all meaning the same thing: what you want, baby, we’ve got it.

The purity of the consumerist message is echoed by the straightforward, black-lined design of Waks’s pieces. It’s a style developed by those who mean to sell to the broadest audience possible. As suspicious as he is of commerce, Waks seems to see sales as an enterprise close to the heart of human experience. The salesman matches a product to an appetite, and regardless of whether that product is pernicious or beneficial, he’s making a connection.

From Monsanto with love.

One of the show’s most alarming paintings is also one of its most exciting: a great, tottering heap of sale signs, pinched from the windows of discount stores, liquor marts, and the most disreputable aisles of the supermarket, all in the loudest fonts the graphic designers could manage, all bearing going-out-of-business desperation and go-go capitalist hyper-optimism. A few stand atop the pyramid while others slide toward the bottom. It’s a testament to excess, of course, but also to the raucousness of the marketplace — raucousness that mimics the attention-seeking hunger of the human soul.

Even the Golden Arches, spreading across the countryside like an invasive species, feels benign under Waks’s paintbrush. He’s added the famous McDonald’s sign — complete with its boast of billions and billions served — to old wilderness landscape paintings he unearthed from yard sales. His arches are neither bossy nor aggressive; instead, they’re slender, unassuming, and about as graceful as a fast food enticement can be. With their arcs of electric yellow and swatches of red against the verdant background, they feel autumnal. Seen from one perspective, the "McLandscape" series is a complaint about the inescapability of commercial advertising and mass consumption. From another, they’re just a part of an outdoor scene, a focus of nostalgia for family drives, a familiar fingerprint on an otherwise unfamiliar map.

Everybody down at McDonnelzz: find the logo in the "McLandscape."

Waks saves his real broadsides for an image of a different chain restaurant. “Waffel Haus” is all starkness: the Scrabble-tile sign seen all over the South underneath a fluttering Old Glory with black stripes and a black field bearing white stars. The flagpole is slightly bent, the standard is sagging, and the impression is mournful. Waks’s decision to Germanize the spelling of the restaurant’s name drags Waffle uncomfortably close to the Waffen of Waffen-SS. Waffen is the German word for weapons, and there is an intimation of violence hidden behind this expression of American weariness. A malign influence has taken advantage of our exhaustion.

Notably, “Waffel House” is one of the few pieces in “Modern Living” where the artist has altered the lettering of a well-known logo. Unlike the adamantine McDonald’s sign, which retains its integrity and its message even when it’s plunked down in the middle of the woods, the Waffle House emblem has succumbed to forces more pernicious than consumer capitalism. Something downright un-American has seized the source code.

And Waks is, ultimately, protective of that code. As “Modern Living” shows, Waks doesn’t like to monkey around too much with the logos he’s reanimating, even when he’s stacking them up and setting them in cheeky dialogue. Even as he’s making fun of them, and us, he’s got reserves of respect for what they represent. They’re a kind of parallel language, a consumer hieroglyphics, and once seen, these symbols slip into the misty depths of our early memories and quietly resonate.

Waks believes in the three rings of Ballantine, even if he’s never been interested in a cold brew. He believes in the black lines of the hasty newspaper illustration, and the Midwestern whimsy of the polka dot, he believes in America; he even believes, grudgingly, in McDonald’s. He is, in other words, genuinely patriotic, and like all real patriots, he’s realistic about his society’s follies, and he stands ready to confront them in whatever language he’s got.    

(The Rotunda Gallery of the Brennan Courthouse is open every weekday during working hours. You’ll have to go through a metal detector to enter the building, but they’re very nice about it. They’re proud of their marble building, and for good reason: it’s the most handsome edifice in town.)