Funny and Terrifying: Robyn O’Neil’s Apocalyptic, Dystopian Humor
Robyn O’Neil: WE, THE MASSES
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth presents a 20-year survey of the work of Robyn O’Neil (American, born 1977).
Fires are burning, flus are spreading, and Robyn O’Neil’s drawings aren’t going to make you feel any better about it. They sizzle with a manic, compulsive energy that she matches with ominous scenes. Thankfully, she renders the apocalyptic and dystopian with just enough humor. WE, THE MASSES, at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, features all of her drawings, which range from figurative to landscapes, selected pages from her sketchbooks, and her animated film, created out of Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School.
As a resident at ArtPace in San Antonio, O’Neil made the large-scale, three-paneled drawing, Everything that stands will be at odds with its neighbor, and everything that falls will perish without grace. (2003). The narrative falls somewhere between a Quentin Tarantino movie and a Saturday Night Live skit, demonstrating how drawing can be expansive, and also surprising, smart, funny and terrifying. Men in black sweat suits populate the snowy, tree-studded foreground of an elaborate mountainous landscape. With their dad-bods and tennis shoes, they are comedic but they’re not up to any good, which makes them extra creepy. Some are on their knees, some are standing around with sinister expressions, looking at deer lying dead in the snow. Things seem to have gone off the deep end, as in Tarantino’s movies when things go haywire and violence becomes gratuitous.
O ’Neil has three everymen characters, who appear in her work until 2008, when she kills them all off. This story can be seen in her 13-minute stop-motion animation, also titled WE, THE MASSES (2011), and also in the drawing, These final hours embrace at last; this our ending, this is our past. (2007) which depicts what seems like the last human left alive, on a raft afloat in an ocean with raging waves. O’Neil was inspired by Winslow Homer’s The Life Line (1884) which depicts a rescue from a shipwreck, except in O’Neil’s drawing, there’s no rescue in sight. The waves don’t move like water; their forms differ just enough that they appear sculpted into menacing tentacles. This adds an extra element of horror, as if the water itself is conspiring against this last man, relishing his imminent disappearance into its abyss.
Inspired by pre-Renaisance altarpieces, O’Neil often makes work in multi-panel arrangements. Instead of angels, saints and biblical characters, she draws her everymen as misanthropes in action—backstabbing, betraying, and raping. As Darkness falls on the heartless land, my brother holds tight my feeble hand (2005) features three panels with her signature winter landscape and everymen. In the middle, the men stand in the formation of a large heart, which seems hopeful, but there are also couples grouped together on the fringes. This creates a sense of foreboding, as if, even though something good might be happening, something bad is about to overtake it. There’s a story hidden in the fury of her details, haunting the landscapes, that suggests what’s ugly about human nature but also makes the viewer complicit for thinking this.
Through her podcast, Me Reading Stuff, O’Neil shares her unstuffy, refreshing love of poetry and literature. Their influence is visible in her art not just through the details and close observations of life, but the open-ended nature of her narratives. O’Neil arranges the perspective so that the viewer is at a distance and slightly higher than her scenes, which makes it hard to discern what exactly her everymen are doing. This creates a sense of opacity and also shock, once you think you figure it out. The experience reminds me of reading short stories by writers like Raymond Carver, Donald Barthelme, and Shirley Jackson. Hidden cruelty is found in stories such as Jackson’s “The Lottery,” which describes a brutal ritual enacted by a small town on one of its inhabitants. As in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the cruelty seems especially sinister because it is nearly invisible to its enactors.
In her older drawings, O’Neil allows for negative space, allowing the blank paper to form vast expanses of snow. But in her latest work, such as An Unkindness (2019)—a flock of ravens is actually called “an unkindness”— the images completely overwhelm the paper, leaving no breathing space whatsoever. Using colored pencil and acrylic on paper on multiple panels, O’Neil creates Escher-like compositions of wolves and ravens alongside a pointillist-inspired sunset. The content, color and details saturate the space and evoking a din of howling and yipping, cawing and flapping wings. The extreme stylization of O’Neil’s landscape, a hot sun near the horizon, renders nature into an equally burning, vivid presence.
In O’Neil’s drawings, nature plays a frighteningly anthropomorphic, antagonistic role—similarly to Richard Powers’ The Overstory, which implies that trees know what is happening and they may have their revenge, but on a timeline much grander than our own. Maybe the planet itself has a similar plan, and though things may never be the same again, in the very distant future a new kind of Eden will emerge. This is the place O’Neil seems to have transported to for the moment. It is like the surreal, dislocated realms imagined by Haruki Murakami—a world with two moons, or the bottom of a well. Despite all the darkness and horror, these visions perform a spell-like magic on the viewer, not unlike the effect of one of her favorite quotes by Anton Chekhov, which she repeats often on her podcast: “We shall hear the angels. We shall see heaven all shining with diamonds.”
