Phantasmania at the Kemper

**From late Friday afternoon: The St. Louis Art Museum's (only) deaccessioning mistake: A fine Jean Metzinger.**

In the second and third parts of my Q&A with MoMA curator Ann Temkin about 9/11-impacted/influenced art, Temkin and I talked about how there has been a recent profusion of art about degeneration and decay. I've written about this topic dozens of times before here, including to say that I was surprised that there hadn't been a museum-level group show about it.

This past summer there was: Phantasmania, curated by Elizabeth Dunbar at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City. It was a good show made up mostly of work by barely-30something artists with only a solo show or two under their belts. As a result the show feels a little too 25th Street, a bit like processing-in-progress. There were no elegant, mature considerations of fear a la Pittman or anguish a la Neshat, but there was plenty of confused angst. That matches what I've seen from young artists in, say, their second Chinatown or Chelsea shows, but it seems a little underambitious. Too often in Phantasmania, say in the work of James Benjamin Franklin or Anna Conway, the artists seem to still be figuring out what to say or how to make a tight painting. Jon Pylypchuk's self-consciously slapdash installations are termite art 'supersized' for terriers. And Jules de Balincourt may someday become more than an American Neo Rauch, but not yet.

Still, within a narrow slice of a narrow slice, Phantasmania presented a coherent look at a generation of late 20something/early 30something artists who have grown into artistic, er, early-age during two American wars, unprecedented global climate change, and persistent (if occasionally both exaggerated and ignored) terrorist threats and how they've responded.

And perhaps I quibble. True: Dunbar tapped into something that's going on artists' studios. Her catalogue essay is unusually readable. Her wall-text was clear and coherent. (Given most of what I'm forced to read from curators, these things surprise me.) Among the shows' highlights:

John White Cerasulo's dark, romantic, mysterious, uncomfortable paintings of implied grotesquerie. They hint that something's not quite right and provide the viewer with a clue or two as to what it might be: In Untitled, Essex Island a man wearing a cape stands on an iceberg. The moon shines through clouds or fog. His right arm seems deformed in some why. Why is he there, how did he get there... In Untitled, Middlesex County, but from Waterbury (above), a man seems to be resting his head on a table, between two glasses with flowers in them. He stares vacantly into the distance. It is vaguely uncomfortable to look at him in what is a difficult, personal moment. Something's wrong, but what? Cerasulo's scenes are creepy enough to rise above his clunky brushwork, but in time... (Both of these images are from Sandroni Rey and both are substantially, annoyingly lighter than the actual paintings.)

Angela Fraleigh's big paintings of vacant lust and decay. (That's all consequence as soon forgotten above.) Fraleigh is one of plenty of painters who appear to be fascinated with the Hummerized decadence of American society. Like Ken Weaver, Fraleigh channels her observations into big, debauched paintings that combine the excesses of the Roccoco with Tiepolo-esque cheesecake and big, wet, lush swaths of abstract painting. (Weaver does it with orgies, cleavage and Caligula-esque sex scenes.) Like Cecily Brown had to early in her career, Fraleigh is still reclaiming the sexualized female figure from de Kooning's objectification of her, but that's OK. She's worth watching (so too her website).