The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art's exhibition "A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation" is the first significant overview of the strain of 1980s art derived style and substance of the media and popular culture. Focusing as it did, the show provided a counterbalance to the Neo-Expressionism that gained so much attention earlier in this decade–and it also provided a very particular kind of art world revue, replaying what happened to the '80s as the decade comes to its close. While the exhibition's 30 artists range from the mediocre to the exceptional, all either question or reject such modernist ideals as the transcendent possibility of art and even the idea of originality.
Modernism's utopian longings apparently don't provide answers for these artists, whose work response to the decaying conditions, as they see them, of a postmodern world. Thomas Lawson, who was represented in the show by his 1980 paintings of victims of violence in newspaper photographs, coudl be speaking for many of the artists when he says: "Our daily encounters with one another, and with nature, our gestures, our speech are so thoroughly impregnated with rhetoric absorbed through the airwaves that we have no certain claim to the originality of any of our actions. Every cigarette, every drink, every love affair echoes down a never-ending passageway of references–to advertisements, to television shows, to movies–to the point where we no longer know if we mimic or are mimicked."