Magazine Derek Boshier October 4 - Nov 14, 2007 Both the media and the medium are the message in Derek Boshier's new show, Magazine, at Steven Wolf Fine Arts. Boshier paints the covers of magazines, real and imaginary, in monumental scale using graphics and headlines to attack the traditional objects of his ire: hyper consumerism, racial prejudice and celebrity worship, among others. At first glance, all one sees in these giant watery tableaux titled Time, Vogue and Media News Daily are Boshier's hamfisted political critiques. But these only stay afloat long enough for the viewer to connect with the spiritual anarchy of Boshier's doodles and the juicy pictorial space fashioned from his gestural line and acidic palette. Then the work's more serious investigation emerges, a dialogue between painting and the mass media, represented by magazines. Why magazines? Their shape makes them ideal for appropriation by painting. And their function as corporate disseminators of cultural propaganda gives this old-school Portsmouth-born progressive the opportunity for reasserting the role of artist as pamphleteer, zine maker, political nuisance and truth-teller of last resort in a public discourse that has difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction. The conversation Boshier gets going is one of tableau to tablet, two technologies for communication, both portable but from different ages, with different pedagogies, culminating in different types of wisdom. Boshier stands them up next to one another and measures them like distant relations, with painting the wiser old-world cousin stalking and mocking the younger upstart. The magazine also has special significance for the art world and Boshier in particular. It is still the place where artists' reputations can get made and it was Boshier's 1962 write-up in Time as a young British artist that briefly made him famous in America. Consequently we read with fascination the slurs that decorate the Time cover in this show he devoted to another cold war outsider in America, Lee Harvey Oswald. The duality Boshier sets up gives him the chance to complicate another debate from his youth. He began making paintings with social content at a time when Clement Greenberg's call for painting to pursue its formal essence, flatness, through reductive abstraction and reject all other pursuits was at its height. Here the intellectual flatness of the mass magazine is juxtaposed with the philosophical depth of the easel painting tradition but the three-dimensional objecthood of the magazine is contrasted with the flatness of the painting as object. Managing the collision of aesthetic paradoxes like those has been at the heart of Boshier's painting practice since he burst on the scene as a young British pop artist. It is embodied here by the imaginary publication Pataphysics Weekly, a small study for a painting not included in the show. Named after Alfredy Jarry's absurd invented science, this publication would contain the kinds of poetical detours, visual puns, philosphical non-sequitours, and political non-truths that no mass culture product could ever report on and stay in business. That would be a job best left for painting.