WITHOUT HERMENEUTICS

Since standing before that picture, I have reconsidered the types of bodies that populate Shearer's work. For all the cultural anthropology embedded in his project, what often gets overlooked is the artist's interest in bodily presence. Dieter Roelstraete puts it aptly when he surmises, "Whereas the guitar and metal archives obviously purport to stage (and thus also reinforce) the clear-cut, anxiously patrolled gender lines that apparently come custom-made with American lumpen culture, [Shearer's] Cassidy & Garrett archival works paradoxically seem intent on breaking down those very same barriers, most notably by bringing into play the slippery, positively threatening notion of 'male beauty'--the great Unspoken of Western art history." The unspoken quality of the bodies Shearer presents, or their beauty, can be partly identified with the blank, stoic (or stoned) attitude of icons, though not in any conventional religious sense. The satanic overtones and cultish figures signal an upended devotion. But what is retained from the religious context is a yearning for a world where images play a more powerful role.

Shearer's art, I think, draws its greatest strength from its keen ability to intersect with the body. At times, his images seem to be all body. Faces are often at least partially obscured or look so relaxed in depiction that they provide no key to the subject, giving the rest of the body a greater role in the construct. If in this respect Shearer has left behind the enigmatic tradition of medieval icons marked by the face-forward stares of Jesus, Mary and the saints, the enigma of the icon remains--as the image that is a body as much as it depicts one. It is this notion of presence that allows a picture to come alive.

Having proposed that Shearer's work carves out a physical course for the encountering of images in our rapidly dematerializing culture, I'd like to leave this religiously tinged interpretation behind and, by way of conclusion, engage differently with the bodies that I continue to encounter throughout the artist's work. In other words, I have no intent here to follow the path of religious scholars and many an art historian in insisting on a hermetically sealed explanation for Shearer's "iconic imperatives:' In her seminal essay "Against Interpretation" Susan Sontag concludes, "In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art." No neat, well-rounded hermeneutic circle can reconcile girly boys like Leif Garrett with the all-male guitar aficionados and long-haired androgyny pictured in Larry in Germany (2004). To do so would be to leave behind the erotics of these bodies and of the images created for us to encounter them in.

VI. AFTER LIFE

As Shearer's project continues to take different forms, I tend to think that this is how the artist keeps us aware of the various embodiments of images available in our culture. If he is increasingly devoted to painting, it is perhaps because paint's variable consistency affords the most varied of all imaging techniques. The intensifying dialectic of the image and the body in african wall art and decor (in particular) reminds us that if images have a variety of embodiments available to them, so do people. If there is a god to invoke here, then it should be Eros (the god of life). The enumerable references to death and "the unholy" will dissuade only a literal viewer of Shearer's work. To propose an erotic encounter with his art in place of a hermeneutics is to engage in the life of his images, and it is also to consider how people can feel alive when they engage with them.