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The painter Will Yackulic went to school at SUNY Purchase and now lives and works in an upstairs flat at Haight and Fillmore in San Francisco, big, crammed, sunny, and a little seedy. Not every one of Yackulic’ s pictures hits its mark, but the best of them are disturbing reminders of the impenetrability of the image and the radical instability of the painted sign. In December 2000 the artist Darrell Alvarez and I went to visit him in his "studio," with its sharp angled drafting table and its litter of cut-out materials ready for decoupage. Yackulic greets us from on top of the stairs. He looks tall and angular, very skinny, with an adam’s apple bigger than most people’s hearts. "Pleased to meet you."
In his new series, Yackulic plays numerous variations on a single iconic image, the goofy, menacing Wookie from the Star Wars films called "Chewbacca." This hideous head is deployed in often ludicrous contexts: as the "Man with No Name" in a western Howard-Hawks pastiche of Mexican melodrama, the word "Fabuloso" poured across the drawing like tequila; as the "boy in the plastic bubble" kept alive through sci-fi breathing tubes, ready for Dr. Kevorkian. Poor Chewy, detached from the artificial Lucasfilm spacescapes that have made him a beloved mascot, especially for kids, here assuming the suffering of the world like a great beleaguered Samson.
In some drawings Yackulic has arranged a quiet splendor for this Wookie’s demise. In one striking picture a dignified Chewy wears a medieval crown, foregrounded before an alphabet from which all meaning has been scooped out, denoting a powerful sovereignty. More often than not, however, the icon is seen at the mercy of words. Huge, dysfunctional words knock him over on his side in one picture. In another he becomes an unwitting advertising emblem for "Old Gold"—very 40s retro, very Stuart Davis, clean, cool and marvellously articulated. In Yackulic’s Wookie world, overdrawn words hover and rumble, portents seen in an angry dream, suspended in an ominous foreground of pure space. Cumbersome as office machines on wheels, these words form layers of occluded meaning, their signs sublimated to the function of marketing tools as they peek around the Ape-Man’s head in luscious bouquets of sick color. Black and white predominate, but Yackulic is a canny colorist and his use of grays, reds and blues is never wrong. Obviously Yackulic has seen a lot of Philip Guston’s later work! But he has extended Guston’s persistent focus on subject with the simple, if odd twist of employing the leached, reduced colors of a Helen Frankenthaler—a recuperation of a pale palette.
In some of these pictures Chewbacca is confronted with his alter ego, the equally familiar photo of the young Rimbaud, here distorted and even more fey and breezy. Ape-man versus Wild Boy. They make an almost religious pair, a diptych of Darwinian selection poked through the tight gaze of funk culture. Who’s doing the selection in Will Yackulic’s fantasy of history, poetry, interspecies warfare? We never see Chewy’s whole body—only a bust version, like the king on the playing card: is this another tweak on "pathetic masculinity," the castrated ape, the man without genitals, only a kind of genital power? He’s more vulnerable in a certain sense, but having only a head, shoulders and chest has its advantages too. Like Raymond Pettibon, Yackulic knows the raw power of the flat, comic book image, and the internecine enmity between language and image. Like Pettibon, Yackulic plays beautifully along the thin line that stretches between irony and "true feeling," how one is often the obverse of the other, the moebius strip inside modernism’s motor apparatus.
One version of Chewy is so painted over nothing remains but a black blob on a beige background—occluded by design, the mysterious ape-man retreating to the bush. I ask Darrell, "Do you think this is all about post Colonialism?" Darrell recalls how Rimbaud survived a precocious homosexuality of genius to become a slave trader in Northern Africa. And Will Yackulic’s sitting there, wool hat thrust down over his blond hair, the whitest white boy in town, and there’s Chewy with "OG" ("original gangsta") painted across his hairy chest. I flip through picture after picture, poke them out across the rug: an obsessive rendering, a trip-hop world of displacement and deracination good to go. Will Yackulic isn’t the first artist to find beauty in Freud’s "uncanny," nor the first to locate the uncanny, the unheimlich squarely in the detritus of today’s commercial culture. A purposive, non-"painterly" flatness of paint underlines his determination, his steadiness of eye. What emerges is touching, almost saintly. Humanity makes consumerism palatable by our insistence on customization—adapting, subverting our icons, to one’s own homey use. It’s this impulse—gears shifting downward from public to private—that Yackulic understands and illuminates beautifully. He extends this generosity to his own art, which seems unfinished, left to complete by the viewer. Thus there’s an empty, spooky sigh at the heart of this work.
In Will Yackulic’s world, being is problematic. Everything and everyone’s available or accessible, but alterity makes one strange again, new again. Chewy and Rimbaud belong to everyone in a sense, we "know" them, but we can’t really "know" them. Iconic objects take on eerie lives of their own and no one knows their business, not even the moguls at Skywalker Ranch.
Many of Yackulic’s pictures draw on narratology: there’s a jungle narrative here, white space, black vines, bullet holes and dark, inky whirlpools. The final pictures he shows me are of Chewy and Rimbaud facing the viewer with ominous "signs" clouding their visages—lightning or crown, cartoon balloon or cloud, it’s hard to make out. Cold hard tears seep from this work, tears shed for an implacable universe of wanting and wishing and denial.
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