Steven Parrino

Most are afraid of total freedom, of nothingness, of life. You try to control everything, but nature is uncontrollable. It doesn’t matter how you express yourself (words, image, electric guitar), what matters is that you have something to express. —Steven Parrino Steven Parrino (1958–2005) is best known for his signature “misshaped” monochromes with slashed, torn, or twisted canvases. A pioneer in performance and video art, he approached all of his work with a radicalism born out of a deep understanding of the history of painting and the avant-garde. Parrino was born in New York and grew up on Long Island. He earned an Associate in Applied Science degree from the State University of New York at Farmingdale in 1979 and a BFA from the New School, New York, in 1982. In the late 1970s Parrino began staging impromptu performances, including: Fire Door (1979), wherein he set off the fire alarm of a building and escaped via the fire exit; Electric Guitar (1979), fifteen minutes of feedback played at high volume; and Disruption (1981), in which he smashed a TV set with a sledgehammer. Because they were improvised, most of these were not well-documented, yet their anarchic energy was made palpable in Parrino’s later paintings and three-dimensional works. In 1984 Parrino’s paintings were shown at Gallery Nature Morte in New York’s East Village, increasing his visibility in the art world. Due to his nihilistic approach to painting, he was considered by some to be part of a strain of postmodern art called Neo-Geo, or neo-geometric conceptualism. Neo-Geo artists, such as Peter Halley, Jeff Koons, and Olivier Mosset, criticized the mechanization and commercialism of the modern world. Bob Nickas included Parrino’s work and that of several Neo-Geo artists in a group exhibition titled The Art of the Real , at Galerie Pierre Huber, Geneva, in 1987. The title was borrowed from the landmark 1968 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which featured works by Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Smithson, and Frank Stella, among others. MoMA’s exhibition gathered artists whose work expressed the “real” as a set of facts rather than symbols. Nickas, with his show, posited that the Neo-Geo artists were expanding this project twenty years later. Never completely comfortable with the “Neo-Geo” label, Parrino derived his work from his deep art-historical engagement and love of Pop iconography, and from the subversive counterculture of the Hell’s Angels, the occult, and the No Wave and punk rock movements. Hells Angels (1985) is a literal application of the formalist push-pull theory, wherein Parrino physically exercised violence upon the canvas. Frank Stella’s Cat (1992) plays with the technique Stella used in his black paintings, with their unpainted stripes, by letting the unprimed canvas intrude within the picture plane as a network of folds. And Death in America #2 (2003) echoes Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster series (1962–63), providing a glimpse of the dark and nightmarish underbelly of the American Dream. Parrino’s last solo exhibition during his lifetime took place at Team Gallery, New York, in 2004. It was titled Plan 9 after Ed Wood’s 1959 film Plan 9 from Outer Space , a story of the living dead. Included in the exhibition was The Chaotic Painting (2004), in which space seems to push outward, to come from elsewhere, echoing Robert Smithson’s conflation of pictorial and cosmic space. Questioning the painted canvas through piercing, tearing, and twisting it off the stretcher, Parrino redefined pictorial possibilities by blurring boundaries between formalism and counterculture.