One factor distinguishing modernism from postmodernism, one might argue, is the artist's relationship to mainstream society. The modernists who flourished from about 1880 to 1980--from Post-Impressionism through Conceptualism--opposed the general trend of materialist, bourgeois capitalism, and posited various personal mythologies as esthetic substitutes. The postmodernists--who began to predominate in the 1980s--borrowed from the Pop artists of the 1960s a more ambiguous, skeptical view of contemporary society and the artist's role in it, one that was partly satiric and partly accepting (think of Lichtenstein and Warhol). Moral ambiguity and esthetic hybridity continue to characterize most contemporary artwork, with young artists not so much denouncing the postmodern media glut as perhaps coming to uneasy terms with its symbols (and symbolic-analyst workers at their keyboards).

Basic Details, 2009; pen and ink on paper; 8.5 x 11 in.

Veronica De Jesus, an Oakland artist concerned with conservation, ecology, and "class systems and money distribution," incorporates these social issues into her slyly subversive works, but with a light touch.[1] 1950s sociologists and novelists such as Vance Packard and Philip Wylie may have censoriously labeled Americans as status-seeking conformists. In De Jesus's overtly humorous drawings, they become masses of overlapping outlined figures engaged in obsessive or irrational behaviors: Léger's heavy, noble, and simplified communitarian workers reconfigured by graffiti artist Keith Haring into consumer bots. Her drawings are part diaristic notes to self and part semi-covert social exhortations, a tonal mixture sometimes seen in folk or outsider art.

Exxon Loves Fools, 2009; pen and ink on paper; 8.5 x 11 in.

The artist's social activism cohabits with delight in the silly stuff of pop culture. As Patricia Maloney noted, of de Jesus's 2007 exhibition, "transience seems to pervade... as she fastens her attention on everything from sports figures to 1970s-era plastic Coca-Cola Cups."[2] The tripedal football player in Bread Winner seems equally derived from Dubuffet's outsider art tradition as from the cool satire of Richard Lindner. The stuttering, repeated oil-company logos in Shell and Exxon Loves Fools remind us of their omnipresence on our highways (especially when the dash light starts blinking ominously). In All Business, a nude figure stands amid other corporate insignia: Fortune, HDTV and Business Week. In Basic Details, two heads in profile spew caption balloons at each other like bullets, each bearing the imperative "TALK." In Active Minds, six people stand together, their heads bearing huge circular holes or lobotomies.

The painter Squeak Carnwath describes De Jesus as a "handed-down artist," someone who recycles and reuses the stuff of the "handed-down world (to quote Wittgenstein)."[3] Such artists demonstrate that a world we only inherited is not one that we need to accept uncritically.

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[1] http://www.sprayblog.net/spraygraphic-interview-with-artist-veronica-de-jesus/
[2] Access and Excess: Veronica De Jesus. San Francisco: Eleanor Harwood Gallery, Sept. 2007.
[3]The Handed-Down Artist. http://www.cueartfoundation.org/veronica-de-jesus.html

Veronica De Jesus: Do the Waive is on view at Michael Rosenthal Gallery through June 16, 2009.